The evening after hiking all day through the scorching Negev, Mara Burger burst into tears. It turned out to be a good cry.
The 17-year-old from San Francisco had hit her breaking point. But she wasn’t the only one. Sitting beside her were 19 other very emotional 11th-graders, Diller Teen Fellows who had come to Israel for the culmination of months of leadership training.
“We were just all crying and spilling out our guts and really having to deal with many different leadership styles and personalities,” she said.
Burger said the Diller group was composed of strong-minded, assertive people, who were learning to listen as much as talk. For many of them, it became the lesson of a lifetime.
“Being a leader doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to express what you feel and demand things,” she said. “It also means that sometimes you have to sit back and let things go the way they are and not mess with the situation.”
The Diller Teen Fellows program just closed out its eighth year with three weeks in Israel. The eight-month fellowship for 11th-graders uses seminars and retreats to teach leadership skills, Jewish and Israeli studies, and community service.
The program is underwritten by the Diller Fund of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund and is jointly run by the Israel Center and the Bureau of Jewish Education.
“This really is a perfect way to enter our senior year,” Burger said.
Ilan Vitemberg, who was one of this year’s winners of the Bay Area-wide Helen Diller Family Awards for Excellence, has been the fellowship coordinator for the past three years.
He said Diller fellows will return to school with new skills to deal with group situations, and greater knowledge about Israel they can share with their peers — knowledge based on actual interactions with Israelis.
“It’s a direct relation also to the culture and complexity and diversity, and I think they’re much more aware of the different colors that Israel has,” he said. “When the issue of Israel comes up either in school or in college they’ll be able to offer a much more informed opinion, based on first-hand experience.”
This is the second straight year the program returned to a trip to Israel. (The fellowship took a three-year break from going to the Middle East during the worst of the intifada.)
Most of the teens attended a two-week ulpan (Hebrew language school) that Vitemberg established at Kibbutz Megiddo, where he grew up.
For this year’s community service, the fellows cleaned a yard to plant a garden in front of a government-subsidized housing project in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem. Vitemberg said the project was “very meaningful” because local residents joined in, and then took the lead on the project.
Jessica Taich,17, of Sunnyvale, said the program helped her learn skills that would help her be a leader in college.
“The group is really great,” she said. “We work well together, and when we don’t we talk about it and we make sure it’s better for the next day.”
Taich said one of her most memorable experiences was walking through Jerusalem, when a Chassidic passer-by started a conversation with the group and advised them not to walk through one of the rougher neighborhoods in the Jewish quarter.
After talking for a while, he invited the 20 fellows and their leader into his home.
Vitemberg said the program was planned with enough space in the itinerary to allow for those kinds of spontaneous interactions.
“That has been happening, especially in places like Jerusalem, and we met wonderful people.”