By Shaul Yannai
Special to The Chronicle
Jordan Valley, Israel — Our soul lives everywhere, but it is never more at home than when among friends. To pass on this truth to our children we need to plow the fields of the imagination and turn good will into hard work. Pregnant visions want to give birth within life.
And so it happened that a project known as Education Bridge came into being a few years ago to enable teachers and students from the Jewish communities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, Milwaukee and Tulsa to cultivate joint studies with teachers and students from the Sea of Galilee region in Israel. As part of the Partnership 2000 project, the Education Bridge focuses on sharing our heritage and future as they spring from our common Jewish roots.
Involved schools range from kindergarten to high school, with 80 teachers and approximately 1,800 students from both sides of the ocean during the past school year.
This past July, a group of 11 Education Bridge Israeli teachers visited for five days with their partners within the Jewish communities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Twelve other Israeli teachers from the Sovev Kinneret Region traveled to Milwaukee for the same time period.
Then all Education Bridge teachers, Israelis and Americans, traveled to Tulsa for an additional five-day conference in which the coming year’s partnership programs between the various schools were worked out. Eleven Milwaukee teachers attended that meeting.
In each community we were hosted in your homes. The love we experienced transformed our inner identity. We visited your Jewish institutions, synagogues and schools. Every day we talked with your families, rabbis, educators and teachers.
It is a virtue to examine one’s life. What we as Israelis take for granted in our own Jewish identity, you as American Jews carve out with your blood and soul. The visit brought us out of our routine into a space where we realized that we are more alike on the inside than on the outside.
This inner space is where the heart keeps its secrets and shares it only with friends. But it would be wrong to say that we shared this space for only 10 days. Although separated by the Atlantic Ocean, we share it all year long by being involved in the Education Bridge project.
But the real face-to-face, heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul encounter between us, changed the structure of our memories, similar to what happens to those who live by a lake all of their lives and for the first time witness the glory of the ocean.
Being back in Israel we see how our memories look to the future, too, and not only to the past, creating expectations which we are resolved to bring to life through Education Bridge.
The heart says “thank you” and the will says “more to come” as we continue to nourish our partnership and friendship, transforming our joint dreams into a shared reality.
Shaul Yannai is Education Bridge director for the Partnership 2000 cluster of communities (Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Tulsa) linked to the Sovev Kinneret region of Israel. You can learn more about the Education Bridge at www.yarden.a c.il/p2keb.
Partnership 2000 is a program of the Jewish Agency for Israel and is supported by funds from the annual community campaign of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and other federations across the United States.
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