A Super Cyberconnection

When Hillary Zana lived in Israel in the late 1970s, her moshav had only one phone line, making communication with her friends and family in the United States extremely limited. Today, however, schoolchildren in Israel and California can become best friends over the Internet.

Zana, along with Judy Taff, now coordinates the pairing of Heschel Day School with Tel Aviv’s A.D. Gordon School through the twin-school program sponsored by The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. Taff and Zana have relied on up-to-the-minute technology to create a link between students at the two schools. When a group of eighth-graders from Heschel recently traveled to Israel to stay with their Gordon counterparts, the bond that had begun in cyberspace developed into strong friendships.

At first, Heschel middle-schoolers communicated with their assigned partners at Gordon via snail-mail and the occasional e-mail message. For some it worked: seventh-grader Rachel Williams developed a close rapport with her Tel Aviv partner, Noa Morag, that will culminate when the girls meet for the first time this summer. But, says Zana, “there were some relationships that never got off the ground. I wanted to open it up, so kids would feel that they’re part of a whole community.”

Zana’s solution was eCircles, an Internet site that provides a framework for chat groups andbulletin boards. Now students from the two schools exchange views about pop music and hobbies, but they also come together in guided discussions orchestrated by Zana, who explains, “I look upon it as a classroom of kids, although they stretch over two continents and two languages.”

In the past year, Heschel and Milken students have logged onto eCircles to create a recipe book and a virtual museum. They have mutually become involved in social action projects, joining Amnesty International’s letter-writing campaign to protest the living conditions of Brazil’s street kids. (This effort took on new urgency when one of theIsraelis, born and raised in Rio, contributed a first-hand description of Brazilian poverty.) They have discussed books that all of them have read as class assignments.

And they have responded with candor to one another’s concerns, as when Ben from Tel Aviv posted a newspaper photo of a wounded young soldier in the arms of his friend. The photo elicited lively comments about the realities of war and the hope for peace. Stacey from Los Angeles suggested, “I think that you sent this picture to show what you will be doing in a couple of years.”

When Heschel students Avi Horn, Joel Kort, Marion Said, and Mollie Vandor gathered to discuss their two-week visit to Tel Aviv, it was clear that the electronic connection between the two schools had greatly enhanced their stay. For one thing, they could connect from Israel with their classmates back home and even participate in a live Internet chat. Said Avi, “I could picture their faces and see how they looked. So I really wasn’t homesick.”

But the issues first broached in cyberspace took on new dimensions when youngsters from two very different cultures met face to face. The eighth graders of both nations all had read Uri Orlev’s “The Sand Game,” in which a young Holocaust survivor joins the fight for Israel’s independence. It wasn’t until they were on Israeli soil that the Americans fully comprehended that the Holocaust has a different meaning for their Tel Aviv partners, who view it as a prelude to the founding of a Jewish state. Issues of personal safety also took on a new reality in Israel. As they walked on the beach late at night, Mollie marveled that her Tel Aviv partner, Anael Berkovitz, had no sense of possible danger. Anael’s response was: “In Israel the problem is bigger, and we fight it as a country. When you’re walking alone, you’re walking with your country.”

In exchange for this new perspective, Mollie was able to bring to her partner a new appreciation for Jewish ritual. She shared her bat mitzvah pictures, inspiring the wholly secular Anael to attend services for the first time. Such instances of Heschel students introducing their brand of religious Judaism to their Tel Aviv counterparts cause Judy Taff to exult, “These are ordinary kids … but they are going to change the face of Israeli culture.”

Now that the twelve Heschel students have returned home, their Internet relationships have become more meaningful than ever. They approach their eCircles with new zest, and at home their electronic mailboxes are always full. Avi has invested in AOL instant messenger software so that he can readily chat with the boy he calls “my new best friend.”

Mollie explains that before she went to Israel, e-mail exchanges with her partner held little interest for her. That was because “you can’t just be friends with a computer. You have to make friends face to face.” Now, however, “there’s a face in the computer.”