Cohort 1: Day 12 in Israel: Shabbat and Closing Ceremony

We all spent our last Shabbat in Israel with our host families, catching up on sleep, hanging out, and shopping. Each person brought back silly stories and interesting pictures to our final gathering as an Israeli-American Kashlash group. We met at Nur’s house for the Closing Ceremony with all of the parents, kids, and coordinators. After mingling and eating delicious desserts, we finally sat down to begin the ceremony. We started by watching a slideshow about our fantastic week together. There were both funny and serious pictures that perfectly summarized our week. Next, Tal and Michal Nativ talked about their experiences and feelings after the week followed by Leah and Daniel, who shared the American perspective. Jessica and Rinat concluded the ceremony with lots of thank yous and laughter. That was it for the official closing ceremony! 

The time came to say goodbye to all of our host families--without them our trip would not have been nearly the same. Once they left we started to play Just Dance. We learned that our dancing skills are not up to par. Then we organized ourselves for an activity led by Nur and Ittai, where we shared new things we tried and a lot of funny stories. Jessica and Rinat then led a program where we said what we were grateful for throughout this entire experience. It was a good chance to reflect back and really see how this program has affected us all. 

After that we all just hung out, played jungle speed, and slept for a couple (maybe 3) hours. This morning none of us were ready to get up and say goodbye to our Kashlash family. We packed our 10 o’clock sandwiches and ended the usual way in a circle. We did our Kashlash cheers and tried to hold back all of the tears (unsuccessfully). We were given a few minutes to give our final hugs and say our final goodbyes…for now. We all know that it is only a “see you later,” though it is hard for us to imagine that our entire Diller experience is coming to an end. With tears in our eyes, the Chicago group boarded their bus for the airport while the Israeli group boarded their bus to Kiryat Gat to start their school week again. 

We slept on the way to Tel Aviv though the trip was less than an hour. Once we arrived at the airport, we checked in our bags and passed security without any problems. With time to spare, we stopped at the essential Israeli coffee shop “Aroma” for some iced coffee (that is much better than Starbucks….in our opinion). For the remainder of our free time, we bought some souvenirs for our families and friends. In our last half hour at the airport, we cherished the amazing memories we had together as a group and continue to laugh about the past two weeks and the 15-month journey we have finished. Now it’s off to Chicago to start school, sports, and daily life again! 

By: Shira Brandhandler and Leah Umanskiy

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Cohort 1: Day 11 in Israel: War and Peace

Bright and early, we began the day by driving to Gan Habanim, a beautiful park in the middle of Kiryat Gat. There two former IDF soldiers who now specialize in preparing youth for the Israeli army. The day was Army Day,and the Americans and Israelis were in for a physically challenging “training” day. For a warmup, we began with some sprints and pushups, then proceeded to fill up sacks with dirt. This wasn’t a workout – the sacks were loaded onto stretchers and for the next 45 minutes or so we practiced working as a unit to transport the 90 pound “injured soldiers” around the park. This activity seemed like a simple test of physical and mental strength, much like the basic training we hear about in American boot camps. However, we soon learned that there was another layer of meaning to the exercises. Often, the four people who shared the weight of the stretcher would need to stop or speed up very quickly, and the incline of the land would often change unexpectedly. These challenges, combined with the weight of the stretcher, made the activity extremely arduous for the people carrying the stretcher. So when we would stop our march, at first no one would help to support the stretcher. Our instructor eventually pointed this fact out to us and reminded us that as a unit, it is our responsibility to take care of each other. From then on, there was a surplus of people who helped to support the stretcher, to help the carriers up hills, and to take over when someone got too tired. As a result, the first part of Army Day was a great uniting activity for the group.

We continued our day to Moshav Netiv Assarah, which is situated on the border of the Gaza Strip. There, we visited the home of a woman who founded the Path to Peace project. Because of the constant rocket fire experienced near her home, she has dedicated her talents as a ceramics artist to creating a mural on the border wall between Israel and Gaza. We each wrote a wish on a beautifully painted and glazed piece of ceramic and stuck them up on the wall. This is her message – the hope for peace between Israel and the people of the Gaza Strip. 

Afterward, we met back at her house for a truly delicious lunch. As a group, we discussed our experiences as Americans and Israelis alike during the war this summer. We also discussed the similarities and differences between the American and Israeli armies. Just like the army training, Army Day was superficially about the military. On a deeper level, everyone in the group experienced the narrative of war and peace, and how each affects the everyday citizens of Israel.
 

By: Amanda Jackson

Cohort 1: Day 10 in Israel: North American Kennes and Reunion!

Happy New Year! It is finally 2015! As Robby would say, “this is the year we (the seniors in our group) graduate.” As a Chicago community we all stayed up together until midnight at Kibbutz Sde Boker to celebrate the new year on a mountain top. When 12:05 hit, all of us were already asleep since we had to wake up at 4:30 AM to climb Masada. So we got our four hours of sleep and the Chicago group went with the whole Kennes of American Diller teens to Masada. We took the Roman ramp up the mountain and met our tour guide, Eitan. Most of our group has been to Masada before, but Eitan's tour was different. He proposed the question, “Why Masada.” If you don’t know the story of what happened at Masada, it is quite tragic. Herod the Great, who was the ruler of the land, a crazy one. He wanted to be feared, so he killed his wife and most of his kids so that his throne would not be overtaken. He also built six hideouts in the desert of Israel in case riots broke out so that he would have a place to hide that no one would find. Flash forward a little less than a century and the Roman empire is in rule now and all the Jewish people need a place to be safe, so they remembered Herod’s hideouts and went there to save their people. The Greeks found them and surrounded them and were going to take them captive for slaves or prostitution. Instead the Jews hiding out there wanted to die with dignity since the Romans weren’t just going to kill them, so they all tragically killed each other and committed suicide. The interesting thing is this story has happened in five to six other places in Israel, so Eitan kept asking “Why Masada?". At the end of the tour he told us his theory, but he wants people to research and create their own theory, so I won’t let you know what he thought. 

After a great tour we were able to take the cable car down Masada and saw the beautiful views as the trolley car drove us down. We went directly there to a Kibbutz to eat lunch and debrief the Kennes, but everyone was just excited to go to the Dead Sea. We finally made it to the Dead Sea and an amazing thing happened--we all floated! Shocking, I know. It was so nice to just sit down in a sea and naturally float and have relaxing conversation. Even though the salt was refreshing on the skin we wanted a bigger spa experience, so we ran out of the Dead Sea and ran to the Dead Sea mud buckets to drench ourselves into the skin softening mud. It felt pretty gross at first, but after leaving it on and washing it, I understand why people pay hundreds of dollars for the mud. The mud really works wonders--my skin is still soft and glowing. 

After showering it was time to say goodbye to the Americans and finally meet back with our Israeli counterparts in Tel Aviv. We met at a restaurant where they hire deaf employees and ask the customers to try to learn the sign language they teach you to order and communicate with the waiters. It was a very interesting experience and it was fun as the waiters were very funny. After, we went into the theater at the restaurant which is a theater of blind and deaf people who learned a play that took them five years to learn. It was a stunning show as they explained all their dreams in life and it was spoken in Hebrew with Hebrew, Arabic, and English subtitles and a Sign interpreter. This play was very moving and even though it was a long day everyone was invested in watching the play. After the play it was past 10:00 PM so all the Americans had a really long New Year's Day and were tired, but it really was a New Year's Day to remember. The saying for Passover should go for new years too, “Next Year in Jerusalem!”

By: Colin Silverman

Cohort 1: Day 9 in Israel: North American Kennes

Today we woke up and went straight to breakfast then we split into our color groups and had some nice programming where we talked about our communities. In a group of around 5 kids we created a new ideal community on a piece of graph paper. In the program we had buildings that we could put in our community and each building cost a certain amount of squares on the graph. Also, as an added challenge, we could not have any of the buildings touch one another. It was very interesting to see who thought we needed what and how they justified their opinions. 

After that we had some programing at David Ben Gurion’s grave where we learned about his life and assessed some of his famous quotes as a group. I loved hearing all of the wonderful and unique opinions of the people in my group. Then we headed off to lunch and had a bit of free time. We Chicago kids led the pack in exploring the canyon near Sde Boker. Everyone had a “climbing” buddy as we climbed down the beautiful downward slope of the valley that revealed an excellent view that stretched for miles of what used to be a riverbed. 

Afterwards we had some inter-group programing where our color groups mixed with other color groups and had a program where we talked about the Jewish populations in different communities and as our conversations developed we ended up talking about all of our experiences with anti-Semitism. It was a beautiful thing to see how everyone supported one another even though we all lived hundreds of miles away from each other. We then listened to a wonderful lecture by Avraham Infeld and we learned about all of his views on the Jewish community. He feels that Jews should be connected with one another through identifying with at least three of five categories--memory, family, language, Israel, and Mt. Sinai. 

We ended the night with an extremely powerful night circle where we really bonded as a group and we popped party poppers of the edge of a cliff to celebrate the New Year!

By: Kyle O'Day