“It was like whoa, if anybody came to Green Bay dressed like that, they would be considered a rabbi,” said Spencer Smyser, 14, of DePere, in reaction to the Orthodox youth he saw in Flatbush, Brooklyn, wearing long black coats and black hats.
Smyser, an eighth-grader at West DePere Middle School, was one of four Green Bay teens who traveled to New York City on a four-day jaunt last month, sponsored by the Jewish Student Union, a public high school outreach organization partially funded by the Orthodox Union.
The four are members of Congregation Cnesses Israel in Green Bay, and all attend its religious school, which has “a strong [youth] program through senior year,” according to the synagogue’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Shaina Bacharach.
But all four of them don’t have Jewish friends outside of religious school. So the experience of traveling with some 30 Jewish teens — boys and girls from Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City — was thrilling in itself.
Jacob Moga, 16, of Green Bay, who is home-schooled, said he was “kind of excited about going” but “was deathly afraid of flying.” Still, he said, the trip was definitely worth it. “I liked the city but it was the people [on the trip] that I enjoyed the most.”
“People in Green Bay are not really that friendly,” but his Jewish travel companions were very friendly and easy to get to know, Moga said, and he is already communicating with his new friends online. “If this trip goes again next year, I will probably go back. I really enjoyed it. It was not only entertaining, I also learned a lot,” he added.
Matt Morris, 14, of Denmark, Wis., who is also home-schooled, echoed Moga’s enthusiasm. “You feel like you fit in a lot better, talking to people about stuff that it’s hard to talk about with people who aren’t Jewish — holidays and Torah. You didn’t have to tell them what it was you were talking about,” he said.
“I’m thinking about joining the National Conference of Synagogue Youth and going on more of these trips,” he added. NCSY is the Orthodox Union’s youth group.
For three of the four, it was their first visit to New York City. While there, the group visited a yeshiva in Flatbush, attended Shabbat services and stayed in private homes on Friday night and Saturday. They stopped off at Ground Zero, the Empire State Building and Times Square as well.
Though Ryan Greenfield, a senior at Southwest High School in Green Bay, had been to New York City before and had visited the Orthodox neighborhood of Crown Heights, this trip was memorable.
“At the yeshiva we watched people in the big study room and talked to a really important rabbi. We knew he was really important because we had to stand up when he entered the room. It didn’t really make me want to run out and live that life, but it was definitely interesting,” Greenfield said.
For Greenfield, this trip was just a nibble of what may be a much larger experience. He has applied to Columbia University in New York for the next academic year.
The Jewish Student Union was founded by Rabbi Steven Burg, of Los Angeles, who is now national director of NCSY.
JSU clubs have been formed around the country, at which public school students socialize and receive informal education about their Jewish heritage over pizza lunches.
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