Twenty years ago, Fay Ginzburg’s parents sent her on the Bureau of Jewish Education’s six-week trip to Israel.
The impact of that first trip at age 16 was so strong that Ginzburg made aliyah in her early 20s, married an Israeli and had her first child in Israel before moving back to Marin County.
Now, 36 and a consultant for nonprofit Jewish agencies and Israel-related organizations, Ginzburg will be reconnecting with the more than 130 people that shared her initial trip to Israel with her in 1983.
That Israel experience forged lifelong bonds that will surely make this 20-year reunion as sweet as the first-year reunion of the 2002 Otzma trip and the 30-year reunion of various synagogue trips that will occur simultaneously on Sunday, June 1 in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens.
This year, organizers of “Israel in the Gardens,” an annual family festival of live music, crafts and cultural activities, will celebrate Israel’s 55th anniversary by adding a massive reunion that will reunite old friends from more than 15 organized Israel tours during the past 55 years.
The reunions are expected to draw trip alumni from youth group tours, synagogue and community missions, study-abroad programs, Otzma and Birthright Israel, among others.
Reconnecting, sometimes decades after saying farewell in the El Al terminal, will offer hundreds of people the chance to share photographs and memories and to catch up on each other’s lives.
And, as they have grown older, so has Israel.
“My journey with all these 16-year-old kids started my lifelong relationship with Israel, as it did with many of us,” Ginzberg said. “June will give us all a chance to reconnect with Israel after all these years.”
Reconnecting with Israel, said event organizers, is the idea.
“There are many people who have had these life-transforming experiences going to Israel,” said Caron Tabb, the executive director of Israel in the Gardens and the Israel Center’s Living Bridge Program.
“There is also a longtime connection between people who have taken trips, and we want to celebrate their continuing connection to each other and to Israel.”
Tabb said reuniting these tour participants will re-ignite passions for Israel and reconnect people with the vitality of Israel that they might have put aside as they moved on with their lives.
From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., organizers, including the Israel Center of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and the Jewish Community Relations Council, will fill Yerba Buena Gardens with Camp Tawonga trips, Young Judea tours and Young Adults Division missions, to name a few.
Along with living, working and studying in Israel, spending a year there during one of the worst swells in violence since the start of the current intifada became one of those troubling, life-changing experiences that threatened to overshadow the more positive parts of the 2002 Otzma trip.
“Being there at that time was a huge thing, of course, and we all pretty much came together through these experiences,” said Jason Weiner, who went on that trip.
By hosting reunions, organizers of the festival hope to allow the story of Israel to unfold through the hundreds of stories and thousands of photos that they are asking participants to bring with them.
“We are eager to hear everyone’s stories and learn how Israel has shaped people’s lives,” said Nicki Gilbert, event coordinator for Israel in the Gardens.