Sixteen-year-old Briana Feigon has a novel way to gauge the success of her recent trip to Israel.
“On the flight over there we were really quiet,” she recalls. “The flight attendants loved us. On the trip back we were walking around, screaming over our seats. They hated us.”
That’s because after four weeks of crisscrossing the Jewish state, the 111 teens from across the Bay Area that took part in this year’s Let’s Go: Israel trip had bonded like brothers and sisters.
Co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay and the S.F.-based Bureau of Jewish Education, the trip has been one the most popular Israel programs in the country. (See a related story on the Diller Teen Fellows program sponsored by the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, page 4b.)
The kids and their chaperones took off for Israel on June 29 and for nearly a month they barely had a moment’s rest.
The trip began with several days in the Upper Galilee, kayaking down the Jordan River, making friends with residents in the East Bay federation’s sister city of Kiryat Malachi and visiting a Druze village.
It was there that Feigon found herself one afternoon helping out in the kitchen.
“The [Druze] women were cooking this bread with onions and tomatoes,” recalls Feigon. “Next thing you know, they pull me over. I helped them put the bread together, put it in the clay oven. It was so powerful for me, but to them they were just making lunch.”
Michael Citron, 16, was equally thrilled to be making his first trip to Israel. “All the Israelis we met were very excited we were there,” says the Orinda resident and member of Temple Isaiah in Lafeyette. “They wanted us to make aliyah.”
It wasn’t all fun and games. On a day trip to the Golan Heights, the kids attended lectures exploring the simmering tensions in the region. At one point they split up to participate in one of two special programs. Half the kids embarked on a mock boot-camp with the Israel Defense Forces in the northern Negev, the other half left to volunteer at an absorption center for Ethiopian Jews in Ashkelon.
Citron chose the former.
“It was basic training for four days,” he recalls. “The commanders were mostly women and they were yelling at us in Hebrew the whole time. At the end they introduced themselves to us as real citizens and said they loved us.”
Feigon chose to volunteer at the absorption center, which was as hard emotionally as the boot camp was physically. The memories still sear her.
“The windows had bars on them,” she says. “One kid put her hand through the window asking for mayim [water].” Soon all the children began begging for water.
“We ran out of cups.”
Even more dramatic, one morning Feigon came across a little Ethiopian girl, about 6 years old, moaning in the corner.
“I went up to her,” she says. “She was crying and holding her cheek. When she opened her mouth, I saw her back molar was black and corroded. It was the biggest cavity I ever saw in my life. I brought her to head of the center.”
Feigon never found out if a dentist ever treated the girl.
From there, the teens moved on to southern Israel. Several days in the Red Sea resort town of Eilat included a disco boat party and a sojourn into the Negev Desert.
Shabbats during the trip were special, reports Feigon. “The whole week we were pretty much roughing it,” she says. “Then Friday night the girls dressed pretty, the guys would look nice and we’d have our service. For me it was the most bonding time with the people I met on the trip.”
The group attended opening-night ceremonies at the Maccabiah Games and also spent a few days in Tel Aviv. But the highlight, as with most trips to Israel, was the time spent in Jerusalem.
“Went to the Kotel [the Western Wall] and the Old City,” remembers Feigon, a Lowell High student whose family belongs to Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. “We also went under the Wall in the tunnels. It was the holiest site, all musty and wet. We saw how the stones were put in there.”
The itinerary also included stops at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, the Knesset and the Israel Museum. The culmination was a brit olam service — a departure ceremony — held in the plaza just west of the Kotel.
“The whole group came together,” adds Feigon. “Some read poetry, some talked about what they liked most, some sang songs or told jokes. But everyone shared.”
And after that raucous flight home, the kids contemplated the impact of the trip. Based on the reflections of Feigon and Citron, it was an experience none are likely to forget.
Says Citron, “No one got homesick because we were doing stuff all the time.”
Adds Feigon, “I didn’t want to leave. People from Israel seem so happy to live there, so proud. I love how they have so much emotion and love for their country.”