I visited our youngest son in Israel in December and, since I wasn’t bound to a yeshiva break schedule and didn’t have little kids waiting for me at home, I decided to make it a longer trip than usual: 12 whole days!! Now of course everything is relative; my husband said I should have gone for three weeks. But since I visited our older children for only five days each during their gap years, except the child before this one, who was there during the COVID year and didn’t get a visit at all, 12 days seemed luxurious to me.
Since I was going at a perfect time for our middle son to use the last of his 2024 vacation days, he joined me, which was great because he helped with both our itinerary and navigation during the trip (also a lot of translation for my Hebrew-impaired self). I will save for another time the story of our amazing and impactful trip to the South, and I’m sure no one cares about Israel Food Tour 2.0 (that’s for those of you who remember the first food tour back in 2019), although it was delicious and quite an upgrade from almost six years ago. And guess what? Israel now has flavored coffee, or at least lattes!
But I digress. What I’d like to tell you about was an experience that I would never, and I mean never, have had in America.
I believe in the Second Amendment, just like I believe in the rest of the Constitution. But let’s just say that I am not a gun person. I have never been to a shooting range, in the United States that is. (The only time I had ever shot a gun previously was when I was in Israel on a six-week teen tour the summer I turned 16, and it was part of our program.) So I guess it was a case, now, as then, of “when in Rome (or Israel).”
My son and I were looking for an all-day activity for one of the days that his younger brother would not be spending with us. “Mom, check this out.” He did not think, in a million years, that I would be interested. He showed me this website: www.caliber3range.com.
Yes, Caliber 3, billed on their website as “The Premier Academy for Counter Terror, Security & Defense Training.” This is followed by “To teach the sons of Judah the art of the bow and arrow.” (Samuel II: 18). We may not have learned the art of the bow and arrow, but by the end of our two-hour program, we had learned the “basics” of holding and shooting a rifle, and both of us had successfully hit our targets multiple times and popped both of our balloon targets! Pretty cool for total beginners.
But it’s not like you get there and they hand you a gun and say, “Shoot.” First you get an orientation to the base itself; while we were there, just on the other side of the “rock wall,” there were actual IDF soldiers doing actual training exercises with, you know, actual guns. No big deal. Business as usual.
We learned that not only soldiers train at Caliber 3: police officers, security officers, maritime officers, rapid response teams, SWAT teams and more all receive weapons and tactical training at the same facility where we were spending a couple of hours of our vacation.
Before we started, our instructor explained the origin of the name of the facility. Caliber 3 is named after Captain Hagai Haim Lev, HY”D. Lev dedicated his life to protecting the people of Israel. Two weeks before he was killed in 2002 on a routine mission to search for smuggling tunnels in Rafah, he traveled as part of a military delegation on a tour of the concentration camps in Poland. When asked why he was going there, he said, “It is my job as a commander in the IDF to remember our history and teach the soldiers why we are fighting here and who we are defending.”
That powerful introduction set us up for the rest of the program. We practiced with wood cutout guns first, learning the importance of following your superior’s instructions at all times. For those who had a little trouble in that area, they got up to speed pretty quickly after some running back and forth and pushups as “punishment.” We learned when to put our finger on the trigger and, more importantly, when to remove it. All for safety. Kudos to me for being the best listener in my group. (Maybe because I’m terrible at pushups? Definitely not showing you the video my son took. Or maybe because I’ve always been a rule follower.)
Once we got the hang of it we moved on to the real guns. As I said above, really cool.
But to be honest, I think the best parts of the experience were the demonstrations that came after. My son was the “innocent bystander” in one of them, with our instructor the soldier who protected him from the “terrorist.” The rest of us were just shoppers in the marketplace. But afterward, our instructor asked each of us what we saw and experienced, and everyone said something different. That was an interesting lesson on the unreliability of spectators’ reports.
The next demonstration really hit home for me as a journalist. A “terrorist” was taken down by a trained dog and his IDF handler. Our instructor posed a question: What headline would the world media give the photo of the soldier holding a gun on the terrorist (with the dog standing by), who was on the ground with his hands zip-tied behind his back? We realized that headline would not be favorable to Israel, even though we all knew what had really happened, and the instructor asked us all to go home and remember this, and advocate for Israel and the IDF whenever and wherever we can, reminding us that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world.”
After this we all received certificates of completion, and I was given the honor of reading a poem about Captain Lev that his sister had written about him. Then we took some pictures with our instructor and left a “thank you” message in the Caliber 3 sign-in book. And went back to our driver — right, because we hired a driver to take us back and forth and wait for us, because it is not so easy to get to — and headed back to Jerusalem, definitely more inspired than when we arrived.
Caliber 3 is located in an industrial park in Gush Etzion. I highly recommend you visit on your next trip to Israel. You need reservations, and it’s cheaper if you join or go with a group. Also, children 4 and older are welcome, but participants under age 18 use paintball guns, not real weapons. Again, for safety.
Contact them at www.caliber3range.com/. It’s a pretty long trip, so if you need a driver, I have a really nice, honest guy who can even show you some sites along the way. Just email me at [email protected].
Jill Kirsch is the senior editor at The Jewish Link. At press time she was praying for all the hostages to come home.
