Hudis Heads Home

By Zoe Crain
It had been six years since Loel Hudis sat in Princeton High School’s Middle East course, but the 2005 PHS graduate still looked like he could fit in with the students sitting around him.
Hudis spoke to thirty different students taking the course, which focuses on the geography of the Middle East, and the history and components of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Having had served in the Israeli Defense Forces for three years, Hudis offered the students a comical and at moments, sobering, narration of what life is like for those closest to the action.
A 2004 summer program for high school students gave Hudis his first taste of Israel. From then on, he said, he was hooked.
“It was so…exciting… and fun and like they say, I got ‘the bug’ and wanted to return there as soon as possible,” he said.
Before graduating from PHS, Hudis said he first approached his parents about joining the Israeli Defense Forces post-high school. According to him, they weren’t as gung-ho about the idea as he was.
“They were sort of like ‘uh, no, you’re going to college first,’ and you know, college is college, but once I graduated, I knew this was still exactly what I wanted to do.”
His degrees from Syracuse University in international relations and Middle Eastern studies might prove to be useful when he started with the army, but claiming Israeli citizenship, and getting enlisted into the IDF is typically a very difficult process. By Israeli law, Jews from any part of the world can become Israeli citizens. However, proving your religion can be much more difficult than it sounds. Judaism is passed through the maternal line, so in order to claim your Judaism; you must also claim your mother’s, her mother’s and all the women before them. Luckily for Hudis, the process was relatively painless.
“ I had my rabbi from Princeton write a letter saying that I’m a Jewish member of the congregation, and I showed them my birth certificate, which says that I was born in New York, to these parents, and they were able to put it all together.”
But although Hudis had to go to significant lengths to prove his religion, he claims that he doesn’t consider himself a practicing Jew.
“Before I left, I considered myself pretty secular, but after coming back, I really consider myself to be an atheist. There aren’t many really religious guys in the IDF, because most of the Orthodox Jews are able to bow out of the army commitment because of their religion.”
The training period following his enlistment also brought struggles for Hudis.
“The training of combat soldiers is a process that stresses cohesion within a group, no matter how big or small,” he described.
Creating that cohesion is especially difficult with a group from many different cultures and countries. In Hudis’s group, there were soldiers from England, France, Kazakhstan, India and China, among others. To help bring all of the soldiers onto the same page, battalion leaders used interesting techniques, especially those used to train soldiers to speak only Hebrew.
“I remember talking to a friend of mine, another American, speaking English, obviously,” Hudis recollected. “I saw…my commander…counting something on his hands. I thought nothing of it and continued my conversation. I later found out he was counting every word I used in English and that each word would cost me ten pushups… this continued every day for four months of basic training and four months of advanced rifleman’s training. I’m pretty good at pushups now.”
Though a large group of foreigners began training alongside Hudis, only a small group made it through all of the training. On day 1, his battalion contained twelve Americans. By the conclusion, only four remained.
To make it through that training, and the months of hard combat that followed, required an intense amount of dedication—dedication that Hudis says is life changing.
“In my life, I’ve been fortunate enough to find something I’m truly passionate about…To have the opportunity to defend what you believe in is a feeling I hope everyone may experience in their own lifetime.”
His experiences in Israel have also changed his views of Princeton, his hometown.
“No matter where I am in the world or what I’m doing, Princeton will always be where I grew up and where my home is. That is unchangeable. The difference for me really is that I can appreciate more fully what an incredible place this was to grow up in.”
Now that his active duty period with the IDF is finished, Hudis will have to remain in the reserves until he reaches the age of 40. This entails meeting up with his battalion for short periods of time every few months for continued training.
Following his talk, Hudis fielded questions from the class. When asked about his opinions regarding the current state of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, he said that he remains hopeful, but doubtful that a solution will be reached with the current Israeli leadership.
“I can’t see it happening under Netanyahu’s administration. I’m hopeful that a two-state solution will happen eventually, but right now, I don’t think the Palestinians have the leadership.” He described the upcoming UN vote as “the deciding factor. We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess.”
Though Hudis’s story may be different from a path that many PHS students will take in the future, it speaks to the variety of opportunities and responsibilities taken on post-graduation. At the end of the day, what you choose to do seems to matter less than being able to return after six years and tell your story with pride and conviction.