Elsie Crawford watched as Maor Edri struggled to move. Milwaukee Jewish Day School students were frolicking around him, with a child hanging onto one leg and another unwilling to let go of the other leg.
“They are treated here like rock stars,” Crawford said of Edri and the other teenagers who leave Israel in pairs each July to spend a year making a connection, building a relationship between the Milwaukee Jewish community and a tiny country more than 6,000 miles away.
“Rock stars” have been sent here for the past 14 years by the Jewish Agency for Israel through the Partnership 2Gether’s shin shin program. The program features a rigorous search for the best candidates, lots of work when they get here and memories for a lifetime.
Crawford is the Partnership 2Gether coordinator for the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, managing the relationship and programming with Sovev Kinneret, the Federation’s partner region in Israel. The Federation-funded community shlichah, currently Amit Yaniv-Zehavi, co-supervises the shin shinim. Having a fellow Israeli help with program content and overall support helps the shin shinim feel more at home in Milwaukee.
Shin shin is short for shnat sherut shlishit, or third year of service. Teens can become a shin shin immediately after high school, before their two-year military service for women or three year-military service for men. Shin shinim who come to Milwaukee work with children and young adults across the community including at Milwaukee Jewish Day School, the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, synagogue religious schools, Hillel Milwaukee and BBYO. They have taken an active part with Jewish festivals, and they are counselors during the summer at the Steve and Shari Sadek Family Camp Interlaken JCC.
The journey to Milwaukee begins in Israel, where almost 2,000 candidates applied for the program this year. “The screening process centers on the candidates’ suitability to the job description, their level of English and their overall ability to be quality young Jewish educators,” said Michal Makov-Peled, the training coordinator for the shin shin program in Israel.
It’s a six-month application process. Makov-Peled said there is a full-day assessment workshop that examines such things as the candidates’ level of proficiency and experience working with children in informal settings; their interpersonal relationship skills; personality; the ability to work within a team, and to work under pressure and under different authorities; and fluency in English. How candidates will cope with different situations also is evaluated.
Candidates then attend a 14-hour preparation seminar during which the kind of Israel story the group wants to tell abroad is emphasized.
“We try to find the best and most prepared shin shins,” said Makov-Peled, who with her husband were Israel emissaries to Milwaukee from 2012-14.
The Milwaukee Jewish Federation is given a list of five or six candidates, from which they choose two after holding interviews. Crawford said the candidates’ personalities and how they might relate to kids are among the most important attributes the Milwaukee committee seeks. “And they will be going to an unknown place and speaking in front of adults and kids, so we try to determine how they handle that,” Crawford added.
There’s also a search for host families, each of which house one shin shin for six months. “It can be a hard decision, having a strange teenager in your house for six months,” Crawford said.
The shin shinim sent to Milwaukee were all young women until Edri came along in 2007-08. Next year, for the first time, both Milwaukee shin shinim will be young men.
Pnina Goldfarb, Partnership 2Gether’s volunteer chairperson in Milwaukee, has hosted for the program. Goldfarb’s family, which included a ninth-grade daughter at the time, hosted both women during the first six months of the program because “we wanted to do it, and because nobody else volunteered.”
The Goldfarb family hosted two more women a few years later, but since then, she said, there has been a “dynamic surge” of families wanting to host, and the shin shinim now live in two separate homes for six months at a time. “That allows them (the shin shinim) to have their own identity, and it allows more families to be able to host,” Goldfarb said. “It’s an amazing experience for families.”
Shin shinim have their expenses paid, Crawford said. Shin shinim also get a stipend, go on shopping trips for winter clothes, share a car and get a few driving lessons in Milwaukee, especially when snow and ice hit. While the bulk of financial support for the shin shinim program comes from Milwaukee Jewish Federation, an anonymous donor also covers some expenses.
Crawford said the shin shinim “really work themselves to the bone. In one way, that makes me feel bad, but on the other hand, they don’t have much time to feel so lonely or miss friends and families from back home, especially around the High Holidays.”
Current shin shinim Omer Saida and Orni Bavli are on a tight schedule that has them visiting religious schools at local synagogues on Sundays and at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and the Milwaukee Jewish Day School on other days, among other activities.
Edri worked at Milwaukee Jewish Day School, five days a week, “teaching all different grades about Israel and Judaism,” he said. Although shin shinim have supervisors in Milwaukee, Edri said, “I got a lot of freedom to teach what I wanted and what I believe in.”
Edri now is 27 years old, single, living in Beer-Sheva and studying industrial engineering and management at Ben Gurion University. He considers his shin shin year one of the most important experiences of his life, and he stays in touch with many Milwaukeeans.
Einav Nahum, Maor Edri’s shin shin partner, worked primarily at the JCC teaching Hebrew through songs, movement and art to 3- and 4-year-old children.
“The best thing that came out of my experience has to be the people I met and relationships I created with the members of this amazing community,” Nahum said.
Nahum is now 26 years old and lives in Boulder, Coloorado, with her fiance, Ben Golopol, who grew up in the Milwaukee Jewish community. She attends a small liberal arts school in Boulder, finishing a degree in psychology.
“I feel like Maor and I were able to bring diversity of thoughts and culture into the community in Milwaukee, and touch students and others,” Nahum said.
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