On Jan. 17, the seemingly unending Palestinian violence claimed more Israeli victims, most notably six innocent Jews celebrating a bat mitzvah in Hadera.
But there were other victims that day whose losses did not make headlines. I found out recently that one of them was my former teacher in Israel, Dov Vogel.
Dov, thank G-d, is alive and healthy. He was not the victim of a shooting or bombing — at least not directly — but he is still a victim.
Dov became one of the 250,000 Israelis currently unemployed. However, unlike some of the dot-com’ers in the Israeli high-tech industry — whose bubbles would have burst regardless of the “al-Aksa Intifada” — Dov lost his job as a direct result of the past 15 months of violence instigated by Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat.
Owing to the nightly images of violence in Israel, tourists, most notably American Jews, have been scared away, and Israel’s tourism industry has been decimated. Thousands of Jewish students who normally come to Israel to study every year are not coming.
For the Alexander Muss High School in Israel program, where Dov taught for 21 years, and for other programs like it, student enrollment has been drastically reduced for some time.
And so, despite years of dedicated work at AMHSI, Dov was, in his own words, “fired … as of Jan. 17.”
Everybody loses
Dov has suffered a tremendous personal loss, but so too have untold thousands of Jewish teens who may never have the pleasure of being his students.
I attended AMHSI during the fall semester of 1991, when I was a senior. Dov was the best teacher I ever had. His style of teaching was, at least for one coming from Milwaukee public schools, unique.
Dov didn’t go by the name “Mr. Vogel”; he was just Dov. Calling him by his first name did not lessen our reverence for him as an authority figure — which he had to be at times — but rather made him more approachable.
The main reason Dov was such a fantastic teacher — besides his vast knowledge about his subjects, history of the Jewish people and of Israel — was the obvious satisfaction he gained from his work, which came through in his teaching each and every day.
Dov made learning fun. His passion was infectious. He made ancient Jewish history come alive in an unparalleled way for modern American Jewish teens. Dov was scholar/teacher/rabbi/friend/tour guide and role-model all in one.
During our first tiyul (field trip) to Tel Gezer, an archeological site, he asked me to sit in a ditch. Once inside, Dov informed the class that I was sitting in an ancient sewage drainage ditch. The momentary feeling of revulsion I had was quickly calmed by the knowledge that any ancient sewage would have been long gone by now.
A tiyul with Dov was like a trip in a time machine. In such ways, Dov made history come alive in scores of different historic sites in the land of Israel.
Dov did not just teach our history, he also encouraged students to relive it. I recall a long, halachic/philosophical discussion Dov held atop Masada in what was once the fortress’ ancient synagogue — facing west, toward Jerusalem — about whether it was preferable to commit suicide with the Zealots or to live as a slave to Rome. Students were encouraged to decide what course of action they would have taken and to explain their reasoning.
Despite teaching hundreds of students over his two-decades-long career, Dov maintained contact with all who wrote him. Any of us who returned to Israel knew that his home was open to us.
In an e-mail letter to his former students informing them of his firing, Dov wrote, “For the past few years I have told my students that I had the privilege of teaching three generations in one family. Only recently a former student had a baby girl, and she wrote to me in hopes that I would teach her daughter in 16 years. Unfortunately, I will not be able to fulfill her request.”
Unfortunately for Dov, and for all the American Jews who no longer fill his classrooms.
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