Squirrel Hill native prepares to go to war alongside Israel Defense Forces

As a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas entered its seventh day Thursday, Isaac Nadoff waited.

The fourth-generation Pittsburgher said Wednesday he was prepared to march with the Israel Defense Forces into the war-torn Gaza Strip whenever the cease-fire ended.

“I’m just in a steady state of readiness,” said Nadoff, 30, who grew up an Orthodox Jew in Squirrel Hill.

The weeklong truce ended Friday as Israel launched airstrikes that struck targets in the Gaza Strip.

Nadoff, a former Pittsburgh paramedic, was visiting Israel for the Jewish harvest festival Sukkot before Hamas militants smashed through Gaza’s border wall and poured into Israel’s southern half Oct. 7.

Hamas killed and injured thousands and took more than 200 people hostage. An estimated 15,000 Palestinians died in the weeks that followed as the IDF launched a bombing campaign and, later, a ground invasion.

In the early days of the war, Nadoff volunteered where he could.

He stayed with Israeli families and helped them with day-to-day tasks. He helped lug truckloads of military gear donated overseas to new homes on Israeli military bases.

When the Israeli government called up more than 300,000 IDF reservists, ranchers near the Palestinian-controlled West Bank lost their armed guards. So Nadoff started patrolling fortified Israeli farmlands from dusk until dawn. Most nights, he remembers the hills around those ranches ringing with gunfire.

In late October, he canceled his return ticket home.

Then, two weeks ago, Nadoff, who is applying for joint American-Israeli citizenship, enlisted in the IDF and began training as a combat medic in an embedded infantry unit.

Is he nervous?

“It’s my job. I’m a medical professional,” Nadoff told TribLive. “I’m not thinking about anything else. It’s the truth. Whether or not I’m ready doesn’t matter anymore. This isn’t about me. It’s about my company.”

This is not Nadoff’s first tour of duty in Israel.

The great-great-grandnephew of a Jew killed fighting for Israel’s independence in 1948, Nadoff served in the IDF in 2012 and 2013, months after graduating from a yeshiva, or Jewish religious school.

During Nadoff’s first tour, tensions intensified between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Nadoff, then 18, rushed to serve as a combat medic near the Syrian border. He never saw fighting.

Now, he’s on a new mission and feels Oct. 7 was the equivalent of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor: a call to arms.

While Nadoff said he couldn’t provide specifics about his unit for security reasons, he said he’s spent the past two weeks running medic drills and honing his skills with an automatic weapon during target practice at an IDF base.

“I’m not thinking of anything outside of the mission. That time has passed. I thought of it and moved on two weeks ago. I’m calm,” he said.

David Nadoff said, since his son, one of 10 children, decided to stay in Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks, he’s made a concentrated effort to avoid videos posted online of Hamas militants attacking civilians. But, every day, he visits news websites to read the names of soldiers killed in the line of duty.

“(Isaac) has our support,” said David Nadoff, 65, a contractor from Squirrel Hill. “We’re proud of him. I wish I was younger so I could do something more concrete to help.

“We pray for him and all his friends.”

The younger Nadoff said his parents influenced his resolve.

“I have a mission to do, and I’m going to do it to the best of my ability,” he said. “I grew up in a house where I saw how my parents put their lives on hold to help others, and still do. It’s what I learned from them, and this is the way I chose for myself to help.”

Nadoff isn’t the only Pittsburgh first responder volunteering in Israel.

Seth Margolis, a young EMT who Nadoff has mentored, landed in Israel on Oct. 15 after taking an unmarked plane full of volunteers from the United States into Cyprus, then to Tel Aviv.

He said his motives were simple.

“I just planned on going and helping,” said Margolis, 21, who grew up Jewish in Squirrel Hill.

Margolis stayed in Ashdod — a coastal city halfway between Tel Aviv and Gaza — with Rabbi Daniel Wasserman, who served the Squirrel Hill Orthodox congregation Shaare Torah for a quarter-century before emigrating to Israel last year.

Knowing how to respond to the wailing sirens in Ashdod took some adjustment, Margolis said. They drove Israelis into safe rooms and bunkers two to three times a day, and four or more times a day on Shabbat.

“I don’t often get scared by external stuff like that,” Margolis said. “To be honest, I was more scared I wouldn’t be able to help.”

Barzilai Medical Center, a 600-bed hospital, told Margolis they would be calling him up to serve at a moment’s notice. He also connected with ZAKA, an emergency response team whose paramedics collect the remains of the dead, including their blood, so they may be buried in accordance with Jewish religious law.

Neither panned out. Margolis returned to Pittsburgh in mid-November. He’s already back at work for Priority One EMS, which serves Braddock, East Pittsburgh, North Braddock and Rankin.

Margolis said he doesn’t regret the circumstances that led to his first trip to Israel. He said it feels like it lit a fire inside him.

He saw the Western Wall, Judaism’s most revered religious site. He also honored his great-grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, by spending a day at Yad Vashem, a Jerusalem museum that bills itself as “the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.”

Margolis said he saw lingering narratives about antisemitism in Hamas’ attacks Oct. 7, the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust.

“To me, that’s one of the biggest reasons I went over there,” he said. “It’s one thing for innocent people to be attacked. But for those people to be close to who you are, who you were raised to be, for them to be attacked?

“It felt like I had to go there.”