Bureau of Jewish Education
and Peninsula Havurah High
Shalhevet - Passing the Torch
from Generation to Generation 2005 click
for current
A
TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEY
to POLAND & ISRAEL
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Dates: March 20 - April 3, 2005
Participation: High School Juniors and Seniors
Program: travel with your peers through Poland, where
Jewish tradition thrived for 1000 years before the Holocaust,
and Israel, where Jewish life blossoms today. The journey
begins with a special course in the spring semester.
Local
teens to tour Auschwitz and Israel on new spring trip
(January 14, 2005, Jewish News Weekly of Northern California)
The overall thrust of the trip to Poland is "the variety
and depth of Jewish lifestyles prior to the Shoah." We
want to understand that pre-War Jews expressed themselves,
their ideologies and their dreams in different ways, such
as: Hassidim, Mitnagdim, Maskilim, Reform, Yiddishists (writers,
playwrights and actors), Hebraists, artists, labor Zionists,
cultural Zionists, Revisionist Zionists, Bundists, Socialists,
Communists, Secularists, Shtetl Jews, City Jews, etc. Of course
we won't be able to study or discuss in depth all of these
approaches. If the students have broadened their understand
of the range of different ways of being Jewish, then we will
have succeeded.
Our emphasis while in Israel is to see how different people
above (and others) attempted to live out their ideologies
and their dreams in the Land of Israel. What were the results?
What has survived? What other ideologies have been manifested
in the State of Israel? What types of settlement structures
were established to help make their dreams come true? (Kibbutz,
religious kibbutz, "first Hebrew City", neighborhoods,
communal settlements, etc.) There will not be a 1:1 correlation
with the list in Poland. We will touch upon some of the Poland
list, but there will be others that are unique to Israel in
the here-and now. And of course there are others which ostensibly
died away with the Shoah. Finally, pure lack of time will
prevent us from covering all the major ideologies.
Following is our suggested itinerary. While some of the elements
can be altered (and there is no end to the possible permutation),
we feel that the itinerary can help achieve these aims of
the preceding paragraph. It is also important to note a few
additional objectives:
- To help transition from Poland (this will go on for weeks
or months; but the staff needs to be sensitive to the fact
the students will have been through a potentially disturbing
experience in Poland).
- In studying the range of Jewish expression in pre-War
Poland and then Israel, we need to make a conscious effort
to help the students in thinking through their OWN sense
of Jewishness; their own Jewish identity. This perhaps is
the most important objective of all.
- To simply have FUN! This can be therapeutic (again see
"a" above), but it is also to show that Israel
is not just a place to be serious and talk about Jewish
identity all day. It's a place where a Jew can feel comfortable
in his/her homeland and just enjoy the beauty, the landscape,
and the very soil of Eretz Yisrael.
- To keep the students wanting more! Let them shout out
with a resounding "This wasn't enough! I want to get
back to Israel soon!"
Following each day of the itinerary are some comments about
how the itinerary reflects the goals above. However, we have
not necessarily given a rationale for every single item on
the schedule.
Items in bold on the itinerary indicate reservations (accommodations
as well as popular sites) that have already been made. We
can try to change them but given the lateness of this process,
we may be limited in flexibility.
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