Longing

Can you long for a place you’ve never been? Can you long for people you don’t even know?

From her birthplace 100 kilometers away, Baqa al-Gharbiya, Haneen yearned for Jerusalem, a place she’d barely seen and filled with complexitities she barely understood. Jerusalem, she says, winked at her from afar and so started the love story between Haneen Sameer Mgadlh and Jerusalem. It was quite fortuitous for Haneen’s name is Arabic means longing.

She came here at 17 to attend Hebrew University and in the 15 years since, she acquired a Bachelors, Masters, and a Doctorate in social work. But Haneen’s academic prowess is not what defines her. She made a conscious decision to regularly hold down two part-time jobs, not because she was unable to find full time work but because she longs to experience many worlds at once. If one job didn’t fulfill her aspirations, there was another to balance it out.

It was at Alyn Hospital (בית חולים אלי”ן), her first job, where Haneen says she learned what it means to be human. Alyn is a rehabilitative hospital for physically challenged and disabled children, adolescents and young adults. It’s a classic example of shared living, a place where your race, color, or ethnicity matters not at all as your family suffers the worst kind of personal pain. “Children’s cries of pain are the same, parent’s cries of anguish are the same,” said Haneen. Jews and Arabs shared rooms, parents learned to comfort one another, and stresses and strains abate often by just listening.

Haneen moved onto A’tta, an east Jerusalem rights-based advocacy group and then to the Jerusalem Foundation, managing educational, social welfare, and cultural projects in east Jerusalem. All the while, Haneen soaks up Jerusalem’s diversity every chance she gets, going to Christmas celebrations in equal measure with Selichot prayers before Rosh Hashana and finding the quiet alleys to decompress without leaving the city.

But longing is part of her name and Haneen was drawn to another challenge, and this week, she started a two-year fellowship at the Mandel Institute for Leadership in Jerusalem. For the first time, she can’t explore two worlds at once and is focused instead on building a better world through education, civil activism and social work.

Haneen sees Jerusalem as a beautiful mosaic of faiths and faces who accept one another without fear. She finds comfort in and is enriched by multiple worlds, and for that, Haneen is #MyJLMHeroes this week. She answered Jerusalem’s call, and each and every one of us are better for it.