Our time at Yemin Orde

On Tuesday, December 28th, we had the opportunity to tour Yemin Orde with our Haifa Fellows (thanks Sergey, Eden, Ohr, and Avraham), learn about youth village, and see the fire damage up close and personal.  On one hand it was pretty devastating to see the damage and think about all the students who already had to go through a lot in their lives having to go through a trauma such as this, but on the other hand there seemed to be such optimism in the village, a sense that this destruction was just temporary.  Our friends kept saying you should have seen how beautiful this once was followed very quickly with how beautiful it will be again.  We will be in touch with Yemin Orde over the next few months to find out if there will be supplies we can arrange to collect and send back with the Haifa Fellows when they are here in April.

Check out this article about our groups published in The Jerusalem Post on Friday the 31st.
Article about our time at Yemin Orde

Opening our Ears, Hearts, and Minds

This is going to be a long blog post, so grab a cup of coffee and set aside some time to sit down and read this one J

Over the last couple of days in Haifa we heard from people representing different parts of Israeli society (Russian, Palestinian, Ethiopian, Muslim), many of the encounters provoking thoughts about what it means to be the “other” and to be a minority in a Jewish state (and of course what it means for us as American Jews to a be a minority in America).

Our first speaker, Ella, discussed the connections the Former Soviet Union Jewish community had with Israel prior to being allowed to leave Russia and the challenges that awaited them here.  She described a community that in theory was very much welcomed but in actuality dealt with discrimination once they got here, stereotypes about Russian prostitutes and mafia, and the challenges of any tiny state to absorb a million people in a very short period of time.  Ella told us that for the most part the Russian community has done well here, becoming doctors and members of Knesset, but that the community still remains somewhat separate from larger Israeli society and prefers to speak in Russian as opposed to Hebrew.  She asked the group to be honest when we had pre-conceived notions or racist thoughts and to talk about them as opposed to whitewash them.   Some of her comments inspired strong feelings in the fellows (we suspect it had a lot more to do with her delivery as opposed to the content) and provoked an intense discussion about the reality of Israeli society.

We also met with two women, Robbie and Moira, who lost loved ones in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or as Yehuda Amichai once wrote – people who got caught up in the “terrible chad gadya machine” (see below for full poem).   Robbie & Moira are part of an organization named the Parent’s Circle and their mission is to let people know that both sides are suffering and there are people looking for a peaceful resolution – basically they don’t want other families to have to go through what they went through.  Robbie’s son was killed by a sniper while he was manning a checkpoint and Moira’s husband was killed by the Israeli police during a protest.  We sat and just listened to their stories.  They asked us to think about what the true meaning of forgiveness is and what we, as human beings, owe each other.  The group decided that the bottom line was to allow for encounters and on the most basic level just to listen to people’s stories.  After they left one of the members of our group said it was the first time he actually thought about the other side, that it might not be about right or wrong all the time, but about acknowledging that there is tremendous suffering on both sides of the conflict.

When we met with Uvie, an Ethiopia olah (immigrant) who has been in Israel for 20 years we were shocked (both Israelis and Americans) at how little we actually knew about Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Jewish community’s recent history.  Uvie showed us a slide show of pictures from Ethiopia and we were shocked to see green fertile land, plenty of water, and a thriving Jewish community that supported itself through farming and selling handmade wares.  Uvie told us about her community’s religious affiliations and fervent desire to leave and live in the’ land of milk and honey’ (we thought that the community had to leave because they were starving).   She told us about trekking through Ethiopia and parts of Sudan to meet up with El Al planes as part of Operation Moses.  She described the horrible toll the trek took on the people making it (4,000 people died on route), seeing a plane for the first time, and touching Israeli soil for the first time.  We also heard about living in absorption centers for a long time, having her Jewish identity seriously questioned, and having Israeli social workers question whether or not her mother was fit to raise a child in Israel.  Her story resonated with the Ethiopian Fellows from Haifa and they began to tell us about their own immigrant stories, including being forced to change their Ethiopian names because they didn’t sound Jewish enough. 

Our last visit was with Muaz at an Ahmadiyya Mosque.  For many of us it was the first time we actually stepped foot (technically sock as we removed our shoes and kept our socks on) in a mosque.  We heard about the Ahmadiyya community’s struggle both as minority in the Muslim world and being the target of Muslim terrorism (because of their fairly open interpretation of the Koran) and a minority in the State of Israel.  We identified commonalities between this sect and our Jewish world.  We talked about the shame and dangers of religious extremism.  We learned about Muslim customs and prayers.  We left the mosque thinking about the fact that the ideological conflicts between the Western world and the Muslim world should not be summed up as black and white and that there are people interested in exploring and living in grey areas.

Throughout all these encounters we’ve begun to understand tikkun olam (repairing the world) not as an overwhelming global mission but instead happening on a personal and small communal level.   It starts with a tiny shift in our own perceptions, a willingness to contemplate differences and listen to other perspectives.  If we can then somehow create opportunities for others to shift then we’ve made the world a better place.

An Arab Shepherd is Searching for his Goat on Mount Zion

An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion

and on the opposite mountain I am searchingfor my little boy.

An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father both in their temporary failure.

Our voices meet above the Sultan's Pool in the valley between us.

Neither of us wants the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels of the terrible Had Gadya* machine.

Afterward we found them among the bushes and our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.

Searching for a goat or a son has always been the beginning of a new religion in these mountains.

* Lit. "Only one kid." A song chanted at the close of the Passover seder service, seen by some commentators as an allegory for the Jewish people.

The Challenges of Community Service

We are waking up super early this morning to head down to the desert, to a town named Arad to finish up our Winter Seminar in a congress with other Diller partnerships.  The last couple of days in Haifa have been jam packed with community service, encounters with different groups of people who live here, and time to reflect and grow as a Diller community.

This post reflects specifically on our community service experiences (other stuff to come later).  We can definitely say community service was quite a challenge for all of us – the work was demanding, exhausting, and rewarding at times.   

Those of us teaching English at the Gabrieli School (Erica, Carly, Caleb, Liat, and Liza) struggled with creating appropriate lesson plans for young children who spoke little English.  We also had to deal with students who didn’t want to listen (who knew it was so hard to work with children????)  We ended up teaching English through song, physical games, and word games.  Often times we got the sense that the students were upset with us for attempting to teach them but on our last day we received many letters (written in English) from the students telling us how much they were going to miss us and how much fun they had with us. 

Those of us who volunteered at the Ofakim School (Brynn, Daniel, Noah S., Hannah L., Ryan), a school for mentally and/or physically handicapped children, had a mentally exhausting week.  We struggled with remaining positive throughout the experience and we questioned some of the educational methodologies of the teachers - but our reward came in the connections we made with the students (when they were excited to see us the next day) and the smiles we provoked from them.

 Those of us volunteering at the Senior Day Care Center (Noah S., Halle, Benyamin, and Tova) learned how to play rummy cub and card games in a different language and perfected our bingo skills.  We also listened to the personal stories (in Hebrew, Russian, and Arabic) of the participants even when we didn’t quite understand them and learned some new ballroom dancing moves.  And last, but not least, those of us who went to the Meyer Children’s Hospital at the Rambam medical facility (Alyssa, Gregory, Lizi, and Hannah F.) visited with sick children in their hospital rooms and in special classrooms.  We painted and glued and created puppet shows and played memory with the patients and tried to give their parents a little bit of a break.

It was interesting that none of us felt that we had amazingly fun experience doing community service- weren’t we supposed to have fun while doing this?  Isn’t that important for us?  Isn’t that what keeps us coming back for more and encourages us to continue doing it?  Someone in the group suggested perhaps if we would have built something we would have felt more accomplished and we wouldn’t have had to struggle with the language and cultural barriers.  But, on the other hand, maybe community service is not about us having a good time, perhaps it’s about responding to a void or a need in our community?  Maybe building things without human interaction is an easy way out, of not dealing with tachlit (actual) realities of the needs of the community?  

We’ve just started to think about what we’ve learned about ourselves through the community service experiences – how did we deal with our frustrations?  Did we find positives as well as negatives?  What would we do differently if this was our project?  What was the impact of our behavior on the rest of the group?  What are we taking away from this experience?  Can we use these experiences to help us grow?  We are looking forward to starting to craft our own projects for next year with all these questions in mind.

A Closer Examination of Haifa Society

This morning we began our community service in Haifa.  We split up into four groups – one going to the Rambam hospital to work in the children’s ward, one going to Ofakim to work with children with disabilities, one going to a senior residence, and one group teaching English to a predominantly Ethiopian school.  Overall, we were all very challenged during the community service, as it turned out none of them were easy tasks.  We struggled with the language barrier and the disorganization of some of the service sites.  In the end the hard work we put into the community service paid off and everyone felt that they had done a good thing.  Greg played checkers with a 17 year old Israeli Arab patient in Rambam without quite understanding that apparently there are different rules here, Noah S. slow danced with a woman at the senior residence, and Liat good heartedly accepted the gentle ribbing of the young Israeli children making fun of her American accent while speaking Hebrew.  We are all looking forward to returning and conquering the sites tomorrow.

After lunch we began our examination of the diversity of the culture of Israel through the micro chasm that is the city of Haifa.  We learned about the Bahai religion and people as we toured their beautiful gardens (lots and lots and lots of pictures), although even after watching the promotional video we had zero converts… From the gardens we headed to Carmel, a Druze village where we learned about the interesting history of their people. Many of us were surprised to learn about an Arab minority which is so loyal to Israel that they send their own people to the IDF. They served us an authentic, plateless, almost cutlery less meal. Many of us enjoyed the fig leaves, the cabbage, and the bowl of fat, while others of us stuck to the pitas, rice, and humus. And as is the Diller way, we ended the evening with a movie about the emigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel and the challenges they faced along the way. All three encounters provoked our thoughts on Israel’s Declaration of Independence and the diverse treatment of minority groups in the Jewish state.

Reunion at Beit Rutenberg

We’re back from our home stays and more challenged than ever!  Our weekends were quite similar in many ways and quite different in others.  The overwhelming experience was a great one.  Our adoptive families picked us up, brought us home, and made us feel that we were part of their families. There was a lot of hugging and cheek kissing and tons of food!  We discovered that we have to turn the opposite direction for hot water in the shower, if we ask for toast we get a grilled cheese sandwich,  and Israeli Jewish mothers like to feed their children as much as Jewish American mothers.   Oy gevalt!

Some of us spent our weekends at Shabbat tables with huge Shabbat meals and attending synagogues and some of us spent our weekends visiting and shopping at Druze villages.  We went to malls, movies, and ate out at sidewalk cafes.  Although there was no Chinese food consumed this Christmas, there was a small Christmas exchange between Ari, Carly, Alyssa, and Brynn and, even though it was different to be in Israel for the holiday the girls decided it was a holiday full of love from their new best friends, and it was amazing to be in such a beautiful place full of new “havayahot” or experiences.

We experienced several challenges as well.   It was hard for many of us to communicate with our extended families when conversations lapsed into Hebrew.  There was a lot of hand gesticulation we just didn’t get… We also began to notice many cultural differences – many of our host families spoke about the Arab population in very black and white terms while we are constantly being pushed on this program to explore the grey.  There was also much more smoking and cuss words than we were used to, and we were practically shell shocked during our time at Israeli high schools.  Teachers having a hard time teaching the 40 students in their classes, students being asked to leave class, and student cigarette breaks between classes were among the differences.  In addition, most of us were asked if we were even Jewish.  We were challenged to think about what accounts for these cultural differences (we have several theories at the moment) and why we would even be asked if we were Jewish or not?  Is it because we don’t live in Israel and speak Hebrew?  Is it because we look so different from Israelis?  Why don’t we fit into Israeli perceptions of what Jewish is?  These conversations are only beginning to be had with our Israeli counterparts and we look forward to continuing them throughout the year, especially when they have a chance to experience American Jewry.