“I feel that unless there are people who really care about society, who are going to press to make a difference, it’s just not going to happen.”

Chicago-born and Cleveland-bred Channah Appel has lived by this credo, from her high school days as national president of NCSY (formerly known as the National Conference of Synagogue Youth) to her current position as program director at Neve Yerushalayim seminary and as a part-time medical clown, whereby she provides emotional support and boosts the morale of patients and families. 

The irrepressible and energetic Appel seems to be constantly in motion, as she describes her first aliyah in 1981 and her return to Israel some 30 years later. She maintains an enthusiastic, stream-of-consciousness conversation, merrily flitting from one subject to the next, with a playful smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. 

“I came to study in seminary in 1979,” she recalls, “and by the time I hit Sukkot, I was keeping one day of chag [as a permanent resident of Israel], and I only dated guys who wanted to stay in Israel.”

She met her husband, Rabbi Yehuda Appel, in 1980, and they married in July 1981 in Cleveland, making aliyah later that year.

Appel attributes a certain amount of her interest in aliyah to the Cleveland Jewish community and its positive orientation toward living in Israel.

“Cleveland has a very high aliyah rate,” she says. “Everywhere I go, everything I do, there’s always a Cleveland connection. But as much as Cleveland’s a nice community, I just felt very at home here. I felt this was where I belonged from the moment I got here.”

The feeling of being home was undoubtedly enhanced by the large number of former Clevelanders living in Israel.

“When I came in 1979 for school, there was a list of 400 Cleveland families living in Israel whom I could call to stay for Shabbat. Every Shabbat, I was in a different place,” she chuckles.

IN THE couple’s first years living in Israel after their marriage, Appel worked at the OU Center and later at the Daniel Haas Center, which assisted new olim from Cleveland. In 1990, Appel and her husband returned to the US, believing they could make a greater impact on Jewish education outside Israel. “My husband said there was a glut of rabbis in Israel. He said that if we wanted to grow and not stagnate, we needed to move. People become very complacent where they are, but if they have to have some change in their life, it makes them grow spiritually.”

Aish, the Jerusalem-based Jewish outreach organization where her husband had been working, offered them positions in several US cities, and they chose to return to Cleveland with their family, which numbered five children at the time.

“I figured I should let my parents have some naches, and the kids would have grandparents, because the one thing that’s so hard here is not having grandparents.” After pausing for a beat, she adds, “I mean, there are a lot of things [about living in Israel] that are hard. I’m just saying grandparents is a big one.”

During the Appels’ 30-year sojourn in Cleveland, Appel headed the local NCSY branch in Cleveland, and taught at Hebrew schools and day schools, while her husband headed Aish in Cleveland, providing educational programs for college students and adults, women’s education, leading Israel missions, and sending hundreds of students to study there. She herself participated in eight missions to Israel with Momentum, a Jewish women’s organization.

By 2021, Appel felt that she had done enough in Cleveland and was ready to return to Israel. “After COVID, I wanted to be back where I belonged.”

When Appel and her husband returned to Israel for a second time, they brought her parents – both in their late eighties at the time – to make aliyah.

Appel moved to the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ma’alot Dafna and became program director of Neve Yerushalayim seminary, where she plans extracurricular programming, special seminars (yemai iyun), and school trips. “It’s like being a concierge,” she quips. “I sew the girls’ clothing when they rip, I help them buy their bus tickets, and I help them make doctor’s appointments. It’s like working for NCSY, but for adults.”

Husband Yehuda commuted between Cleveland and Jerusalem for almost a year before deciding to stay in Israel. He now teaches at the Ohr Somayach yeshiva in Jerusalem.

IN 2022, Appel trained to become a medical clown under the name of Channa Banana. She says she was inspired to become a medical clown after watching Patch Adams, the 1998 film starring Robin Williams, in which he played a medical student who frequently entertained his patients.

While some medical clowns prefer to work with children, Appel says that she prefers to work with adults. “I want to do what nobody else wants to do. I go into the most depressing wards where nobody’s smiled for a week, and they can’t believe a medical clown is walking into their room.”

Appel acknowledges that sometimes her clowning is more for the family than for the patient. “Sometimes you’re visiting the family that’s all depressed because the patient is unresponsive. Sometimes you’re visiting the person, and sometimes you don’t know who you’re visiting, and sometimes it’s the nurses.”

She likens her clown performances to comedy improv. “You walk in, and you don’t know what you’re going to do. I’ll do it in Hebrew or English, and I’ve learned a little Arabic, but the fact that my Arabic is so lousy is funny, too. Anything you do when you’re a clown is funny, even if you didn’t mean it to be funny.”

Appel mentions a less humorous but no less meaningful visit she made to a wounded soldier at Sheba Medical Center during Operation Swords of Iron. “I couldn’t get anything. I couldn’t get a smile or a conversation. He was so down, and it was so sad, and his mother was with him.”

She pulled out a toy ring that simulated a perpetual motion machine. When she mentioned the Hebrew term for perpetual motion, the soldier immediately reacted and told her that it was not really a perpetual motion device but was merely creating an optical illusion using sleight of hand. “He was a scientist, and he gave me a 15-minute lecture about a particular principle in science, of what this really was. I didn’t really care, but I was interested because I got him talking, and his mother was floored.

“When they trained us as clowns, they said, ‘You don’t know if you’re visiting the patient or if you’re visiting the parents. You’re walking in there, and it’s totally improv – you don’t know what you’re doing.’”

WHILE APPEL typically focuses on adults in her clown work, she has found herself often entertaining children during wartime.

After Oct. 7, she visited refugees from Israel’s South, who had been sent to stay in Jerusalem hotels. It was there that she encountered something she had never before experienced as a medical clown – silence. Appel approached several 18-month-old children sitting in strollers and received no response to her clowning hijinks.

Their parents explained their children’s silence. On Oct. 7, when the terrorists had attacked the kibbutzim, the parents had held them closely and forced them to be quiet so as not to give away their locations. “The kids learned that if they wanted to survive, they had to shut up. They were in trauma, and I was ready to cry. I was never trained for trauma, and I was ready to hang up my hat.”

Appel consulted with a social worker, who told her that the children probably needed EMDR therapy, used in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. “He suggested that I should tell the children in a soft voice, ‘It’s fine now. We’re safe now,’ and to tap them on the shoulders, one-two, one-two, similar to what they do in EMDR. He also told me to buy finger puppets for the children.” Appel posted a request on Facebook, and a reader of her post purchased 700 finger puppets for her to use with the children.

After spending time with other clowns entertaining 2,000 evacuees from the South in three Jerusalem hotels, Appel realized they had little usable clothing. Much of what they had received was in poor condition.

“I had owned a store in Cleveland, which was a thrift shop that served as a fundraiser for Aish,” she says, “and I had been working with gemachs [community-run centers that lend or provide goods free of charge] in the early 1980s when I lived in Israel the first time.”

Appel began contacting friends in the US, and with El Al’s transportation assistance, a steady stream of new, usable clothing began arriving at the center she opened in the basement of the Olive Tree Hotel. Initially, they were giving away items at no cost, but people were taking entire tables of clothing.

“Eventually, we started selling everything for a shekel per item, and that limited it to what people really needed.”

With the assistance of neighbors and friends, Appel and her crew set up an entire gemach and clothed 2,000 evacuees from Sderot. “When we realized that everyone had enough clothing, we took the money that we had brought in, and we used the funds to set up a teen center because the teenagers were not coping well with being in Jerusalem.”

TWO OF Appel’s eight children made aliyah, and the others live in Lakewood, New Jersey. Her oldest daughter, Devorah, who lived in Tel Mond with her husband and four children, tragically died in the summer of 2024, after a long battle with cancer. Appel has two brothers who live in Israel, one in Telz-Stone, and the other in Ma’aleh Michmas.

Appel says that when she first came to Israel in 1981, children of olim learned to speak Hebrew in gan. Now, she laments, there’s English everywhere. “No one is motivated to become Israeli,” she comments. Her husband jokes that she is the only person living in Ma’alot Dafna who is fully fluent in Hebrew.

When asked what she likes most about living in Israel, Appel says, “I always feel at home here. I feel like these are my people. It means that I yell at the kids on the bus to pick up their garbage and not to use e-cigarettes.”

What she likes least is Israeli bureaucracy, adding that “there is a very strong opposition to any change.”

BOTH OF these points are best epitomized by an encounter between Appel and a ticket collector on a Jerusalem bus several years ago. At the end of her workday at Neve Yerushalayim, Appel stopped in the shuk to shop for fruits and vegetables and placed them in her basket.

She boarded a bus that was headed toward Ma’alot Dafna, but before she had a chance to pay her fare, the bus swerved, launching her into the fare collection apparatus, which left her doubled over and struggling to catch her breath. The produce in her basket fell out and scattered on the floor. The passengers on the bus helped Appel, returning the fruits and vegetables to her basket. Shaken, she sat down in her seat.

When the fare collector arrived to check her Rav-Kav electronic ticketing card, he told her that she hadn’t paid her fare. Appel responded that she had fallen on the bus and hadn’t yet had an opportunity to pay. Recalls Appel, “He said, ‘I don’t care. I’m giving you a ticket.’” Despite her vociferous protests, he refused to cancel the fine.

“Unbeknownst to me,” she continues, “because the right hand doesn’t talk to the left hand in this country, even though I bought a house here and I pay arnona, the bus company sent the ticket to the home where I lived 40 years ago.”

Appel never received the bill in the mail, and the bus company added significant interest, which totaled thousands of shekels.

She finally learned about the bill several months later, when her neighbor from her original apartment notified Appel that she had received it and signed for it. Appel was forced to go to the Talpiot offices of Hotza’ah Lapo’al, the official government court collection agency authorized to recover outstanding monies and possession of assets.

When she went to the counter, she was told she had to pay, and she refused, citing that she had been unable to pay immediately because she had fallen when the bus swerved. At the time, Appel was working for the city’s welfare department as a liaison between social workers and clients and was shocked to learn that the bus company garnished a portion of her municipal salary to pay the contested bus fine.

Appel refused to give up. She persisted, returning several times to the Hotza’ah Lapo’al offices to contest the charges and the amount taken from her salary. Finally, she received a check from the bus company refunding the money that they had taken.

“Look,” she says with a twinkle in her eye, “it looks like I’m a nudnik of the first order, but I’m not. No one else has the patience to go to Hotza’ah Lapo’al and go after these people, but I feel like it’s an obligation because if we don’t do it, who’s going to do it? Maybe that’s my NCSY leadership, like I’m going to go and change the world. I can’t get it out of my system. But I feel like if we can’t improve this country, as an olah that’s part of my obligation. Unless there are Americans or people who really care about society who are going to press to make a difference, it’s just not going to happen.”

Channah Appel is making a difference.