This was by far the most spiritual moment in my life. I gazed up at the stars as I chanted the V\’Ahavta prayer with amazing new friends, standing around the same rocks that our people had wandered past thousands of years before. My eyes couldn\’t help but tear up as we moved on to the Mi Chamocha, the song of freedom. At that moment I felt as though God truly was with us.
For Rena, missing weeks of dance rehearsal was unthinkable, but so was missing out on the quintessential Jewish youth experience of summer camp.
This summer, Rena hopes to have that conflict resolved for her for at least two weeks when she attends T\’hila, a new program at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley that integrates a Jewish camping experience with an arts experience molded for young, talented artists who are as serious about their craft as Rena.
Since the program began, it has brought some 60,000 Diaspora youth between the ages of 18 and 26 to Israel for free 10-day guided trips of the country. For many, it is their first trip to Israel. Only youth who never before have been on a peer tour of the country are eligible to participate.
Dominik and Reinhard are interns in the Gedenkdienst (commemorative service) program, which sends young volunteers, mostly in their 20s, to Holocaust-related institutions in the United States, Canada and Europe for 14-month long assignments.
The old-time Zionist religion had it that the only good Diaspora Jew was the one who made aliyah and settled in the ancestral land.
There are more than 30,000 Jewish teen-agers in Los Angeles — how do we engage them?
Last weekend, I was at a gathering of maybe 80 people, brought together to listen to a prominent Israeli intellectual who proceeded to dazzle us with his accounts of political, military and religious life in the Mideast. Actually, it was more than dazzling. He was informative; he was insightful; he was witty.
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