Friday morning, in the basement of the synagogue at 86 Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, there was excitement: around fifty French, Israeli, Anglo-Saxon volunteers, children and adults were making chargers for the soldiers of IDF who are fighting at the front. 

Installed around several tables, at different positions, the volunteers distribute the tasks and carry out real factory work, while the soldiers themselves come to collect the precious object, which for some, will “save their lives”. says Shaked, at the origin of the project.

In a studious and warm atmosphere, the volunteers carefully create portable chargers which are used by soldiers stationed both on the country's borders and in Gaza itself, to recharge not only smartphones but also the army's encrypted phones, GoPro cameras, iPads for medical teams, and even flashlights. 

No DIY experience is required, volunteers learn on the job. When they arrive on site, we ask them what they prefer to do, then depending on their profile and their abilities, they are assigned a role: cutting copper, drilling, bending copper, assembling the parts, gluing the barcode and final testing.

"I heard about this volunteering on the networks, and I signed up directly. It's easy to do and above all it's very important. It's very nice and we can combine usefulness with practicality. pleasant. We need to get our hands dirty, what we can do for the soldiers and the families is a drop in the bucket, but we do it with a lot of love," says Yaël Amanou, originally from Paris, who has now lived in Israel for 25 years.

This initiative, essential to the proper functioning of the army, was launched a week after the start of the war by Shaked, an Israeli engineer by profession. He in fact has exploited a real request from his soldier friends on the ground, who informed him of the impossibility of recharging the devices in the army's tanks, jeeps and bulldozers. 

Shaked therefore developed a connector between the commercial charger and military vehicles and thanks to the immense participation of volunteers, more than 23,000 chargers have already been made. This weekend, 4,000 more will be added to the list, in record time.

“I developed a simple system that allows us to quickly produce chargers, and we started by 3D printing 120 plastics, then we got to 1000 and the project expanded because the soldiers told us that ' it significantly improves combat conditions on the ground.’ Since we realized the impact on the IDF, we are developing thousands of them,” Shaked tells i24NEWS.

"The soldiers tell me 'you saved us,' just that sentence convinces me that we can't stop there. If we save a life, that already fully satisfies us," says Shaked, adding that French volunteers “make the difference”. “They are very meticulous and work with love and dedication, they do exceptional, high quality work.”

Source - i24news - Image - Caroline Haïat