As the group of some 30 Wisconsinites walked into the Yad Sasson regional religious school at Kibbutz Lavi a few miles west of Lake Kinneret, some of them gasped. On the wall were pictures of children that many of the adults knew from home.
The wall was a patchwork of familiar faces on “individual” passports that included photos, drawings and written information about students from the Milwaukee Jewish Day School.
Excited Israeli students surrounded the visitors from Wisconsin. There was only one problem, one blond-haired girl confided, “We thought the children from Milwaukee were coming.”
The Wisconsin group visited the school as part of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation Partnership Mission to Israel, Nov. 11-20. The mission included two days in Milwaukee’s Partnership 2000 region of Sovev Kinneret, which stretches from Tiberias to the Lower Galilee and the Jordan Valley.
The group entered three of the five classrooms involved in P2K’s Education Bridge program, which pairs classes in Israel and North America for joint projects and correspondence.
In each classroom, students spoke to their visitors and presented them with letters and posters for the MJDS students. The third-graders sang songs that were familiar to many of the mission participants, who clapped and sang with the children.
In the seventh-grade boys’ class, students asked, “How do you feel when you come to our school?”
“I would have answered but I would have burst out crying,” said Whitefish Bay resident Barbara Tabak, a former MJDS parent.
When teacher Yosi Katz distributed letters that had been delivered from MJDS, the eighth-graders scrambled for the papers and pored over them. One letter, written in Hebrew, drew the excitement of five boys, who hunched over it trying to read together.
Whole school focus
Though Education Bridge is beginning its seventh year, the relationship between MJDS and Yad Sasson is in its third year, said Shaul Yannai, Education Bridge coordinator in Israel. Many local synagogues, Jewish schools and Nicolet High School also participate in Education Bridge through their correspondence and projects with other regional schools.
Until now, the MJDS-Yad Sasson relationship has been through the teachers, who engage their students by corresponding via letters and e-mail, explained school principal Zehava Mualem.
“The heart of this program is the teachers,” said Yannai. “They lead the way here. It’s very important to cultivate our teachers on both sides.”
On Nov. 26, teachers from both schools “met” and talked during a video conference call, using equipment purchased by the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the federation’s education program. This was their first collective meeting.
Last summer, Mualem met Rabbi Philip Nadel, MJDS co-director and principal of Jewish Studies at a Principals’ Mifgash for school principals from the Sovev Kinneret region and its North American cluster — Milwaukee, Tulsa, Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Those meetings, explained Yannai, transformed the relationships from individual teachers and students to whole school relationships.
“Bringing the principals into it really concretized the idea that this is a school connection,” Nadel said, noting that it allowed teachers and principals to look at the relationship in a broader way that could carry children from third grade through eighth grade and beyond.
“I can’t underestimate the importance of developing these relationships at this time…. On the most basic level as a Jew, I want there to be no equivocating on the issue that as Jews we are bound to one another and to the Land of Israel. That, to me, is at the core of this,” he said.
The program is also valuable for the 641 students at Yad Sasson, said Mualem. “We educate our children to be open to the different cultures in Israel and outside…. We think it’s very important for our children to know the world they live in and not be closed.”
“Even when we’re separated in miles, we’re close in heart,” said school rabbi, Yaakov Ellish, a California native. “We hope this will be a sign for the future, that Israel itself will be the place that Am Yisrael will join together.”
As the Wisconsin group left the school, students prepared for the end of the school day and the beginning of Shabbat. Boarding the bus, many of the visitors expressed their deep emotions at seeing the children and their ties to their Milwaukee peers.
“”The first group of children gave up their recess; they wanted to see us and feel us…. It was so moving that these kids feel such a relationship with us and the warmth they have for us,” said Sheri Levin.
“My feeling is that we have to have relationships with people here, and that’s what this does. It’s not really enough to just come to Israel. It’s people; that’s what it’s all about.”
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