TEMPLE HIGHLIGHTS | RABBI'S MONTHLY COLUMN

Connection to Israel will deepen when we recognize connection is about relationship

From the study of Rabbi Stern

On our congregational trip to Israel in December, we met one morning with Rachel Korazim. Rachel is a woman in her early sixties, and a brilliant Holocaust educator. She stood in front of the adults of our group and asked us how many Jews perished in the Holocaust. With well-trained reflexes, we all uttered the words, “Six million.” “And now,” she said, “how many can you name?” Silence. One person could name Anne Frank. Another came up with Janusz Korczak. She reminded us that we can’t name Elie Wiesel because he is, thank God, alive. And then she said, as we prepared to board the buses for the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem, “Please learn some names today. The Nazis reduced them to numbers – let us not do the same.” And so when I think of Israel, and Yad Vashem, I think now too of the name Rachel Korazim, and the names she asked us to learn.

I add the name of another person we met on our trip, a boy called Itamar. Itamar is seven years old, and participates in an after-school program at Matte Asher, in the Western Galilee, a program our Dallas Federation dollars support through the Partnership 2000 program. We visited the program one Friday afternoon, and a party broke out. Itamar and I hit it off - all it takes is a soccer ball, or a basketball, a jump rope or a deck of cards, and all barriers of language, culture, and age drop away.

Add the name of Adam. Adam arrived at the Yemin Orde Youth Village, situated on a gorgeous hillside in the Carmel mountain range in northern Israel, as a 17 year-old in the summer of 2006. His journey had begun four years earlier when the Janjaweed had attacked his village in Darfur, causing him to run for his life.

We did not meet Adam, but we did visit the wonder that is Yemin Orde. For the past 54 years, Yemin Orde has provided a home and a future to abandoned and at-risk children from around the world. Most of them Jews, they come to Yemin Orde from troubled homes, from Brazilian orphanages, from the streets of Tel Aviv. And here they are loved and embraced and educated, made to feel worthy and whole.

Yemin Orde is renowned especially for their work with immigrant kids – most notably Russians and Ethiopians. The goal is to move kids from the periphery of society not just to the center of society, but to leadership. So now Yemin Orde is part of my Israeli lexicon – with boys named Adam, and with feelings called hope and pride.

The latest statistics suggest that the Reform movement in America has the weakest connection to Israel of any of the denominations, and here at Temple we are working to overcome that weakness. In Israel’s sixtieth anniversary year now beginning, thanks to the work of our Israel Committee, you will have the opportunity to learn more about our partner congregations, to engage with their communities, to support social justice in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, to travel to Israel on our next multi-generational trip in December 2008.

Our goal throughout will be to connect with the people who make Israel the living miracle that it is - people who live every day in the richness and complexity of an Israel that is not just a symbol, not just a poster on a Sunday School wall, but a living, breathing thrilling experiment in Jewish democracy and Jewish decency and the vigilant struggle for ethical survival. Our connection to Israel will only deepen when we recognize that connection is about relationship, and relationship is about people rather than headlines. In this sixtieth anniversary year, may we celebrate the place we call the Land of Israel, and the State of Israel, and may we learn some new names too - for it is also the land of Rachel, and the land of Itamar, and the land of Adam.