Orit Shaer, 19, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a fourth- to seventh-grade Hebrew teacher at Congregation Beth Israel, was born in Acre, Israel’s ancient port city north of Haifa.
As an individual, she said she normally does not listen to the news about the Middle East “because it is pointless to hear about people getting killed.” But as a Jewish educator, she knows it is important to be able to convey the complexities of the conflict to her students. So she decided to participate in a National Educators’ Solidarity Mission to Israel July 8-12 along with seven of her area colleagues.
The program, under the auspices of the Jewish Agency for Israel, had a special urgency. Ever since violence began in the West Bank and Gaza last September, not only has tourism from the U.S. to Israel plummeted, but many programs and trips for teens have been canceled.
Pro-Israel activists have found a way to compensate for this and to bring Israel to the teens.
“At the end of May, the Jewish Agency for Israel realized that the number of teens going to Israel was reduced significantly,” explained Nir Barkin, community shaliach and director of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Israel Resource Center, who traveled with the group.
“[Agency officials] came up with an idea to bring [Jewish] educators from around the world to Israel in order to equip [them] with educational materials about the current situation in Israel.”
The mission was divided into two parts. From July 8-12, 45 participants from the U.S. and South Africa stayed in Jerusalem and attended programs about the Arab-Israel conflict.
For the second part, six of the Milwaukeeans and others traveled to the north of Israel to spend three days with educators in the Sovev Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) region, the Partnership 2000 region Milwaukee shares with Tulsa, Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The trip was subsidized by JAFI with some Jewish federations, like Milwaukee’s, helping local educators pay for airfare.
During the segment in Jerusalem, the educators learned about the spectrum of political thought in Israel, including Arab perspectives. They also met members of the Knesset, visited the mixed Arab-Jewish pre-school at Jerusalem’s YMCA and met Chaim Avraham, father of one of the Israeli soldiers kidnapped in Lebanon.
Marge Eiseman, a fourth grade Hebrew school teacher for Congregation Sinai, said that after a tour of Kibbutz Ramat Rachel in southern Jerusalem and “seeing how close the Arab villages are … the physical [proximity] makes you realize, ‘Oh my God, they have got to live together, there is no other choice.’”
Rosalind Barland, who teaches Jewish studies and Hebrew at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, lived in Israel for 20 years, and three of her four children reside there.
She was particularly impressed with David Oleskar, who is considered a pioneer in teaching education techniques for pro-Israel advocates. Oleskar showed “how the Palestinians manipulate the press to their point of view,” Barland said, adding that “the Israeli government has not done enough to promote our side. I find it extremely disturbing.”
Mifgash
The trip to the Kinneret region was the second for a local group. Last summer, five Milwaukee educators traveled to compare curricula, plan joint interactive projects and build professional and social bonds with their colleagues in the region.
Dr. Steven Baruch, director of the Coalition for Jewish Learning, MJF’s education program, who co-directed this year’s group with Barkin, said that there are now 20 joint educational projects in the Sovev Kinneret region, five in the Milwaukee area. He believes that there will be 30 joint projects by this time next year.
This year, said Baruch, the educators met with their Israeli counterparts “to work on a planned reciprocal visit with educators from the region who will come during Chanukah, and to review ongoing projects and plan several new ones, such as a dance project between CJL’s Machon program for teens and one of the schools in the region that could involve a visit next summer.”
The five ongoing local projects, set up by participants on last year’s mifgash, are conducted through a combination of e-mail, regular mail, videos and exchange of letters and artifacts. Their initiators and schools are:
• Leah Robbins of Children’s Lubavitch Living and Learning Center, whose students exchanged a “duck” with kindergartners at Ashdot Yaacov that flew back and forth and reported on life in the two areas.
• Joyce Gutzke of Congregation Shalom, whose students focused on holidays and blessings with those in Givat Avni.
• Yechiel Pinsky, whose Yeshiva Elementary School students shared their learning and daily lives with students at Kibbutz Lavi.
• Carol Levison, whose students at Congregation Sinai shared visions of Jerusalem through poems and pictures with students in the Kaduri Elementary School.
• Suzanne Weinstein, whose Hebrew students at Nicolet High School focused on environmental and water concerns with students at Beit Yerach High School.
The projects can be viewed at http://www.yarden.ac.il/bloss/pro2000/p2kfront.htm. Baruch said that they are “everything we hoped that P2K would be. The teachers are becoming real partners on a professional and personal level and the students really got to know each other. This is an ongoing relationship that is developing and flourishing.”
The educators, he said, hope to expand their work to involve videoconferencing and distance learning techniques.
Eiseman said her spirits were lifted by the visit to the region, where she built important connections with Israeli educators.
“Now I have some people [in Israel] that I care about in a new way. I am excited about this, and I couldn’t have gone without the financial support from the federation. These kinds of investments have great value; now I will turn around and teach hundreds of children.”
Local participants, who came from the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox denominations, also felt that much-needed bridges were forged among themselves.
“I think [that] was one of the most valuable outcomes of the trip,” said Rabbi Pinchas Avruch, executive director of the Milwaukee Kollel Center for Jewish Studies. “There was a free exchange of ideas and I learned a lot about the outlook and perspectives of people from the Reform and Conservative communities. People came to me at the end of the trip to thank me for teaching them … to appreciate a new perspective…. I gained the same [from them].”
Other local participants were Shahanna McKinney, director of Machon, and Jim Brennan, a member of CJL’s executive committee, chair of Machon and a ninth and tenth grade Sunday school teacher at Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue.
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