Dear WRJ friends,

Greetings from Israel!   We’ve enjoyed two more very busy days meeting many fabulous people, visiting YES Fund recipients and Israeli Reform congregations, noting the marvelous contrasts that make our homeland fascinating and, yes, we’ve even been to the Carmel Forest Spa.  We now call Jerusalem home!

Trip highlights since I last wrote include:

• The Mechina Program - We met the amazing young men and women of the Reform   movement’s Mechina program, a gap year between high school and the army. Articulate, directed, and determined to learn more about Judaism and values, these twenty-three young people we met spend 40% of their week volunteering, and live communally in a four-apartment building.

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• Riva Rubin, a South African poetess who made aliyah, shared her thoughts on women and poetry in Israel. She writes in a minority language, English, and finds being both a woman and English writer challenging here in Israel.

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• Rabbi Meir Azari, Beit Daniel, hosted us at lunch after we visited Meshkanot Ruth  Daniel, the congregation’s new community facility in Jaffa. Rabbi Azari and his staff spoke with us about two programs that have received YES Fund grants: The Bat Mitzvah class program and the Conversion program.
  

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• We toured Tel Aviv’s fashion design center, enjoying time with Sabra designers in their shops.

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• Rabbi Ayala Miron, leader of one of the newest Reform congregations in Israel, Kehilat Beit Ayen, shared dinner with us.  This new congregation is challenged by being both Reform and having a female spiritual leader. Rabbi Miron has the enthusiasm and determination to make this new congregation a huge success.

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• We studied Torah Tuesday morning with Rabbi Golan Ben Chorin at the Carmel Winery. After discussing Biblical text references to wine, we toured the winery and sipped some delicious samples!  We ate lunch with members of his congregation Sulam Ya’acov.

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  Last night, after a wonderful dinner, some massages and other treatments of choice, we followed guided Jewish meditation and were treated to Genine BarEl and her one-woman show “Rebirthing the Divine: A Journey from Me to Myself, from N.Y, N.Y. to Tsfat, Israel”.  She also spoke to us about living through last summer when Tsfat was hit with rockets from Lebanon.

• On the way to Jerusalem, we visited Kehilat Yozma and Rabbi Kinneret Shirion who first founded a gan, a pre-school, in 1997 and then built the congregation around that original school.  She shared the great challenges faced by young girls who choose to become a bat mitzvah. Ridiculed by their peers and often lacking familial support, Rabbi Shirion told us “they are ‘heroes’.” In Israeli society, bat mitzvah is not the norm. It takes years to undo prejudices built against women.”  Rabbi Shirion then demonstrated how to lay tefilin, a lesson that intrigued us and expanded our knowledge of how accepting and varied the practice of Reform Judaism can be.

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• Tonight we shared a special Moroccan dinner with Arabic journalist Ksenia Svetlova.  From a poll reported from Ramala today, she shared that 72% of Palestinians favor a European-style democracy, 54% want security in a constitution, and 69% believe peace is possible.

We are all tasting new sights and sounds on this inspiring Israel adventure. All that we are missing is each of you!  Next time, we hope you come along.  More from Jerusalem in the coming days as join with the World Union Conference.

Love,

Rosanne

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