Brooklyn 8th-graders find connection on ‘super powerful’ solidarity trip to Israel
Students from New York’s Hannah Senesh Community Day School spend a week in the Holy Land in a modified graduation visit, in perhaps the first day school trip since October 7
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
At the back tables of Sima restaurant, a well-known establishment in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda shuk area, a group of American eighth graders were eating their final meal in the country after a week-long visit. The teens were boisterously expressive as they discussed and processed their experiences over a meal of Israeli-style grilled meats, salads and pita.
Outside, night was falling on Shushan Purim, which is both the day after Purim and the day the rowdy, carnivalesque holiday is celebrated in Jerusalem. All afternoon, Agrippas Street, named after Herod Agrippa, the famous king of Judea, had been closed to traffic as thousands of costumed revelers partied, danced and drank.
As the final stragglers staggered about and cleanup crews got to work before the street opened up again, The Times of Israel sat on an outside stoop with Jessica Lissy, a Judaic Studies teacher who was part of the team accompanying the teenagers, who hail from the Hannah Senesh Community Day School in Brooklyn, New York, a non-denominational Jewish school that runs from kindergarten to 8th grade.
The annual Israel trip for the 8th grade graduating class is “a big deal” at the school, Lissy said. It is something “the kids look forward to since kindergarten. Usually, it’s for two weeks after Passover, but this is a totally different trip, focusing on volunteering, being together, helping Israel and feeling a part of the Jewish people during a really tough time.”
It was the parents who pushed for the school to still conduct a modified version of the annual trip, despite the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, while many of the other Jewish schools are redirecting their school trips to Europe or elsewhere, Lissy explained.
The visit, organized through Ramah Israel, appears to be one of the only, if not the first, middle- or high-school trips to Israel since October 7, she added.
“We have been welcomed everywhere we went, people cried and were so grateful that we came. It meant a lot to the kids. I think there is something so important about being together with other people who are feeling the same thing, after you have experienced being a minority in a culture where people don’t see the situation the same as you do,” she said.
Pupils learn it’s ok to feel pain for Oct. 7
Jewish communities in the United States “feel isolated” right now, Lissy explained.
“I am a typical, liberal Brooklyn Jewish person, and the last time I went into my local bookstore, which I love, there was a whole display about Palestine, and settler colonialism, and I suddenly felt that people in this store hated me,” she said.
The students at Hannah Senesh, a school named after the Zionist poet and fighter and national hero in Israel who was executed by firing squad in Budapest, Hungary, after being convicted of treason by the Hungarian Arrow Cross court system, have been dealing with the fallout of the conflict in many different ways, she said. Like a lot of Jews in the States right now, many of the students have felt “invalidated, passive and trapped” by the cultural currents swirling around them.
“There is a sticker at the subway station near our school which says ‘Zionists are baby killers.’ You see the hostage posters with the faces ripped out” around the neighborhood, she noted.
“One of the most devastating moments for me personally on this trip was when we went to Hostages Square. One of our students asked our tour guide if people tear down posters here, too. And the tour guide, talking about that, began to cry. We are coming here to show the deep pain we feel for Israelis, and she was showing her pain for us,” Lissy recalled.
Their tour guide told them, “This is a place where you don’t have to keep your pain and sadness inside. This is a place to feel safe, to feel angry, to feel sad, all these feelings.”
“None of us, myself included, have felt that we could do that” back home, Lissy noted.
‘I know I am safe, with so many Israelis who can protect me’
The group’s itinerary eschewed some traditional experiences in favor of volunteering, meeting with injured soldiers and visiting sites associated with the conflict. The group still visited the Dead Sea and Masada and enjoyed a Shabbat in Jerusalem, which led into the Purim holiday for the end of the visit.
Back inside the restaurant, some of the 13-year-olds were eager to talk about their week, clamoring to be interviewed and photographed as baklava and other treats were passed around at the end of the meal.
The trip was “really fun” and “strengthened your connection to Israel, to your identity. This is a moment in time, when there is a war going on, and we all know somebody who has been affected, so I think the trip has made a big difference in all of these kids’ lives,” said student Mia Edery, whose father is Israeli.
“Everybody has been talking about how connected they feel here. They aren’t scared to show their opinion or say how they feel, because they are in a space where a lot of people feel the same way,” she said, echoing other comments from the students and staff.
For Bar Elbaz, who was born in Israel but has lived in the US since he was five, the visit was “really amazing” and “super powerful.” Back in New York things are tense, but in Israel, “I know I can be safe, with so many Israelis who can protect me, it’s amazing.”
Friday night at the Kotel was a highlight, Elbaz said, as did all the teens who talked with this reporter. The Hannah Senesh students are used to praying in an egalitarian system, similar to the Conservative movement, but “we got welcomed into a lot of the Kabbalat Shabbat groups, I felt like we were accepted,” he said.
“All the soldiers and the girls were praying, we just went in and felt really welcomed,” confirmed Lev Tsur, another Israeli-American on the trip.
“I feel so much safer in Israel than in Brooklyn. Here you can express how you are feeling, you can do what you want in public and nobody will judge you, because everyone is feeling the same pain. In America, they are talking bad about you,” she explained.
“Now more than ever in Israel, people are so close. In America, it’s different, people are so far apart because of the war, but here in Israel, they come together,” added her friend Talia Cornwell.
Ezra Abel, who was “a little nervous at first,” was excited to do “community services and meaningful activities” during the trip. His family isn’t so religious, he explained, but “everyone was so inclusive,” especially at the Kotel. “I thought it was really amazing how everyone was together, really everywhere.”
As the meeting was winding down, Adam Shifrin, one final student, insisted on being interviewed. The trip was “a great experience” he said, which made “me grateful for my life… I think it’s important that if you are from a certain ethnicity, you should try to learn about it and learn what your past is like. It’s a beautiful thing.”
“I want them to understand that Israel is amazing, wonderful and it’s home, but it’s complicated with a lot of huge problems that aren’t easy to solve,” teacher Lissy said in parting, before the group returned to their hotel to get ready for the overnight flight back home.
“Israel is a complicated place and nobody has an easy answer. If they get that, I’ve done my job,” she said.
