When Maddy Zacks was studying for her bat mitzvah last year, she was thinking about Israel and the Jewish people. But when she actually went to Israel on Brandeis Hillel Day School’s recent eighth-grade trip, she stopped thinking and started feeling.
“What I kept saying to my friends during the whole trip was, thousands and thousands of years ago, people who could have been related to me were walking on the same ground,” the 14-year-old San Franciscan said.
Zacks was one of 29 students from both the Marin and San Francisco campuses on the trip, the first group Israel expedition in Brandeis’ five decades of existence. While students visiting Israel are often older teenagers or range up to 26 on the Birthright program, Zehava Dahan, Brandeis’ Judaic Studies coordinator, saw no time like the present for taking her students to the Holy Land.
“A lot of these kids are not going to a Jewish high school and some are not connected to a synagogue. So we lose a generation of kids who don’t have a connection to Israel,” said the Israel-born Dahan.
“This is how we are making the Jewish identity strong for our kids,” she continued. “They’re not just Jewish in our little school or in synagogue. Kids in our area don’t have any idea what it is to be Jewish in the bigger sense. They walk outside school and are not in places where they feel really Jewish.”
That concept certainly resonated with 13-year-old Jessica Katzki. Like so many first-time visitors to Israel, she marveled that she could look out the window at a crowded street scene and know that virtually everyone down below was a Jew.
“I’m in a Jewish Girl Scout troop and I do all kinds of volunteer work at Congregation Emanu-El. But [Israel] is completely different. It’s bigger. It’s like Israel in the Gardens times 100,” she said.
The students crisscrossed the country on the trip, visiting a potential partner school in Israel’s far north, hiking up to Masada at dawn, wandering the Negev, visiting Eilat, the Dead Sea, Tel Aviv and, of course, Jerusalem. Visiting the Western Wall was a highlight.
“It was an unbelievable experience. I’ve seen a picture of it and I’ve been able to visualize it,” recalled Zoe Frankel, 14, of San Francisco. “But then I was really there and it wasn’t a picture anymore. I’m touching the Western Wall.”
Dahan worked on making the trip a spiritual experience for the teenagers. They prayed in Masada’s old synagogue. They visited the Western Wall twice. And, in one memorable instance in the Negev, each student sat alone as far from fellow students as one could get without losing eye contact and prayed and meditated silently.
“Before I went to Israel I felt like I was never really in touch with my Judaism,” Zacks said. “Now I feel like I am a lot more.”
It “made me realize so much of who I am.”