Meet Sarrica, our new video blogger, and follow her Masa Israel program adventures over the next few weeks! We’ll be posting a new episode here every week.
Posts I like
-
THOUGHTS ON SHAVUOT
-
Dead Sea, Israel, 2013
-
Dead Sea, Israel, 2013
Job: Education & Marketing Coordinator, Israel Government Fellows
The educational component of Israel Government Fellows is a central part of the program and reflects its overarching outlook – promoting Jewish leadership, Zionism and a deep and sophisticated understanding of the modern State of Israel. The Education Coordinator is responsible, together with the Program Director, for developing educational content, and for the logistical planning of seminar days, tiyulim and other educational activities. The position also includes main responsibility for marketing and promoting the program.
ZoomInfo
|
Camera Canon PowerShot SX30 IS |
|
|
ISO 200 |
Aperture f/4 |
|
Exposure 1/8th |
Focal Length 68mm |
Rachel Greenspan is a participant in Israel Government Fellows, which is a ten month Masa Israel program that offers young leaders the opportunity to work in and learn about the Israeli political environment. Through IGF, she is a research assistant at the Shalom Hartman Institute. She graduated from Cornell University in 2012 with a degree in Government and Near Eastern Studies, where she was a Jewish student leader, serving as President of Tzedek and as a gabbai of an independent minyan.
Internship: Summer Intern, Reboot
Reboot (http://www.rebooters.net) is seeking a summer intern to assist on multiple projects in their New York office. This person will work closely with and report to the Marketing and Outreach Coordinator.
A huge mazaltov to President of Israel Shimon Peres on his 90th birthday! Click here to join us for a live broadcast of the birthday celebrations, at 9pm Israel time tomorrow (18 June)
Summer LEADS for Masa Alumni in Chicago f
The Summer LEADS Program offers an exploration of the Jewish Community and contemporary issues in a relaxed social setting. NEW for this summer: A Masa Alumni track! The summer LEADS programs will run simultaneously and will meet on July 17, July 24, July 31, August 7 and August 16. Groups will be formed in several areas of Chicago and will join together for a bar event following most sessions. **To join the Masa Alumni track, email yld@juf.org indicating your preference while also registering on the LEADS registration website, at Summer 2013 LEADS**
![The Journey from Stats to StoriesBy Jonathan StoneIn Israel, a Holocaust survivor dies every hour. That means that one year from when you read this, at least 8,766 Holocaust survivors will have died in Israel alone. That’s 8,766 fewer stories you will be able to hear. That’s 8,766 fewer first-hand accounts the world will have of what happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II. Worldwide, there are 500,000 survivors, but the average age of a Holocaust survivor is seventy-nine, and a quarter of survivors are older than eighty-five. That’s why it is crucial, now more than ever, to meet these people, to talk with them, and listen to their stories. Not just listen, but record and share as well.
[[MORE]]
I am currently on Young Judaea’s Year Course in Israel program. I chose to do Year Course’s Kuma Poland Journey this past March. One of the most meaningful parts of this trip was exploring the Jewish history in Poland before the Holocaust. Coming from an Ashkenazi family, I grew up on many stories that took place in Eastern Europe – the “Old Country.” There is a famous story about a man by the name of Ayzik Jakubowicz. Throughout the years with my family, at my synagogue, and at Jewish sleep-away summer camp I have heard many variations of this story, often changing names as well as the location of the story. Because of this, I appreciated it as a story, but certainly nothing more. However, when I went to Poland, and heard the “real” story, and went to the actual grave of the man himself, I gained a lot more appreciation for this legend. Ayzik was a pious but poor Jew, and one day, he dreamed that there was treasure hidden under the old bridge in Prague. Without delay, he made his way there. On arrival, it turned out the bridge was guarded by a squad of soldiers and that digging was out of the question. Ayzik told the officer about his dream, promising him half of the booty. The officer retorted, “Only fools like Polish Jews can possibly believe in dreams. For several nights now I have been dreaming that in the Jewish town of Kazimierz there is hidden treasure in the oven of the home of the poor Jew Ayzik Jakubowicz. Do you think I am so stupid as to go all the way to Krakow and look for the house of this Isaac the son of Jacob?” Ayzik returned home immediately, took the oven apart, found the treasure and became rich. After this it was said: ’There are some things which you can look for the world over, only to find them in your own home. Before you realize this, however, you very often have to go on a long journey and search far and wide.In Krakow, we went to synagogue that Ayzik built with the money he acquired in this tale, and ate a lovely Shabbat dinner as we listened to his story. (Talk about giving life to the legends!)It is important to give life to history, as well. Though not necessarily as exciting as the legends, it is certainly as meaningful. We visited the Sobibor death camp, what was left of it. On the bus-ride there from Vlodova, we watched Jack Gold’s 1987 “Escape from Sobibor.” It is one thing to know that the movie is very historically accurate - based on a few, very detailed testimonies by Sobibor survivors. It is another thing to watch over three-hundred prisoners escape through the barbed-wire fence into the tall, thin pine forests on the television screen, and then look at the window of the bus as we came to a stop, and see those very same pine trees. The filmmakers made a point of showing the old wooden barrier at the end of the train tracks as a train pulled in with new “deportees.” The train tracks are one of the only things left of Sobibor, because after the prisoner escape, a forest was planted on the grounds of the camp in an attempt by the Nazis to erase history. The first thing we saw when we got off the bus and stood there in the freezing Polish winter were the train tracks, complete with the exact same wooden barrier at the end. Even seeing an inanimate object like that was powerful. I was not listening to a museum tour-guide anymore. There was a three-dimensional object right in front of me. After walking through and learning about the story of Sobibor, I realized just how fortunate I was. Those pine trees on the other side of the barbed-wire were freedom from slavery. The cold, dark, Polish pine forest meant life. These prisoners could not even fathom the place from which I came to visit Poland, let alone the life I live there. They did not dream of living in a modern State of Israel, volunteering at schools, learning in a Hebrew Ulpan, or relaxing on the beautiful beaches in Bat Yam. That is my life. For them, life meant the cold woods on the other side of a barbed wire fence. It is amazing to think about the opportunities I have as an American Jew. There are far fewer limitations on how successful I can be, and the type of person I would like to be, than there were on European Jews. Unfortunately there are many stories with sad endings – more than we like to remember, though it is important that we share. Of the six-hundred prisoners in the small labor camp section of Sobibor, three-hundred managed to escape on October 14, 1943, only fifty of whom actually survived the war. Leon Feldhendler was one of the leaders of the rebellion and group escape. He was one of these fifty, hiding in the Polish city of Lublin until the end of the war. In April 1945, he was killed by an angry, anti-Semitic Polish mob. I was completely shocked when I heard this. We always hear the survivors’ stories – those who made it through the difficult times of the Holocaust and struggled to live a normal life afterwards. We rarely hear about those who did not survive, or about the in-between situations like that of Leon. Hearing his story drove the pain of the Holocaust down deeper and stronger. The Poles also suffered immensely during WWII, yet they were so angry at the Jews, that the Holocaust seemed to have fostered their anti-Semitism. Learning about the formal and informal struggles with anti-Semitism that European Jews had to face like this story, made me appreciate only having to deal with the occasional public-school-locker-room-Jew-joke. The victims of the Holocaust were brought to life even more at Majdanek. The shoes. Seeing the shoes always had an impact on me, which was far greater at the Majdanek. I have been to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, several times. At Yad Vashem, they have some of the shoes that were confiscated at death camps and concentration camps in a pile inserted in the floor beneath glass. It is an interesting idea, and an effective concept. You are learning about the Holocaust as you walk through the museum and all of a sudden you look down and you see your shoes standing on top of their shoes. I get it. But you are still in a museum – there is still extremely thick glass and seventy years separating you from them. In Majdanek, which housed a big storage facility of confiscated property from the Operation Reinhard death camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka), there is an entire barracks devoted to housing the shoes. Of course I found out later when I visited Auschwitz, that those were only some of the shoes. Inside, you are not surrounded by educational print on the walls, you are surrounded by darkness; you are not inside a museum that is hundreds of kilometers/miles away, you are standing on the very ground where people suffered; and the shoes are not behind glass, they are in a metal cage. You can stick your finger right through those seventy years and touch them.Before I left for Poland, I was concerned that it would be difficult for me to connect to the journey because practically no one in my family was affected by the Holocaust. Many of my peers, however, have close relatives who were either in hiding, in concentration camps, or even part of the resistance. I did not cry when I walked down the infamous centered train tracks of Birkenau, and I did not cry when I passed through the old gas chambers. I did not cry when I read a survivor’s account of the camps in my sourcebook, and I did not cry when I saw all the hair in the Auschwitz museum shaven off the heads of Jewish women. I did not even cry when I heard my friend tell the story of how her grandfather survived and moved to America to make a better life for himself. I cried when she cried. She said that he died when she was five years old and she does not really remember him, but she pulled out her iPhone and showed us a picture of the two of them gardening in his last years. That is when I cried, and that is when I could connect. Seventy years later, there is still so much pain. As I sit on the plane-ride back to the Holy Land at the end of my trip, and I think about all the things I have learnt, there is one thing that has become clear to me. I may not know what I will study in college, where I will live in the world or whom I will marry, but I do know this: my children will know the story of Ayzik Jakubowicz.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/f838eff6d01cb5ada017de8cbaa89ea3/tumblr_mo6pntm3OG1s5qvjdo1_500.jpg)
ZoomInfo
|
Camera Canon PowerShot A470 |
|
|
ISO 80 |
Aperture f/4.5 |
|
Exposure 1/200th |
Focal Length 91mm |
The Journey from Stats to Stories
By Jonathan Stone
In Israel, a Holocaust survivor dies every hour. That means that one year from when you read this, at least 8,766 Holocaust survivors will have died in Israel alone. That’s 8,766 fewer stories you will be able to hear. That’s 8,766 fewer first-hand accounts the world will have of what happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II. Worldwide, there are 500,000 survivors, but the average age of a Holocaust survivor is seventy-nine, and a quarter of survivors are older than eighty-five. That’s why it is crucial, now more than ever, to meet these people, to talk with them, and listen to their stories. Not just listen, but record and share as well.
All Good Things Must Come to an End - Liz f
All good things must come to an end is a saying I have heard for years. I do not really like this saying. You hope they will not, but usually they do. January 26th, 2013 I left my home, my family, …
ZoomInfo
|
Camera Nikon D3100 |
|
|
ISO 100 |
Aperture f/8 |
|
Exposure 1/250th |
Focal Length 55mm |
By Rachel Smith, Tikkun Olam in Tel Aviv-Jaffa
After graduating and feeling like I’d overdosed on anthropological theory but was lacking in real world experiences, I knew I wanted to travel. I moved to Abu Dhabi to work for a year as a Teaching Assistant at NYU Abu Dhabi, where I was also involved in building Jewish community and the NYUAD Writing Center.
This experience brought my Jewish identity to the fore. To explore it further, I moved to Jaffa, Israel for a study and volunteer fellowship. While spending a year on the Masa program, Tikkun Olam in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, I taught English and volunteered in education reform with HILA for Equality in Education. During this time, I lived with Jews from Colombia, Mexico, France, Hungary, and Israel, and realized that being Jewish meant something different to each of us.
When I came back to New York, I saw this magnified within the scale of a single city, inspiring me to apply for a PresenTense fellowship. My venture, And You Shall Tell, brings together interviews and portrait photography to document Jewish diversity in the city, and gives users the tools to record and share their own stories. Over the past few months, PresenTense has taught me how ideas are grown and how to grow ideas. They’ve helped me launch this venture, which combines my academic training in anthropology, my passion for Jewish diversity, and my love of New York. While New York is an ideal starting point, my goal is for the website to eventually expand to include other Jewish communities from across the country, and ideally from all over the world.
Originally from Philadelphia, Rachel moved to New York when she began studying Anthropology at NYU. After five years of studies, a year workingat NYU in Abu Dhabi, and a year in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, she’s now back in New York and putting her degree to good use. Her new venture, And You Shall Tell, is an online archive of interviews and portraits exploring the Jewish, New Yorkish world.
-
Find me on
heJgMi