Features
Jaron Rykiss’s half-year spent on exciting “Kivunim” program in Israel cut short by COVID
By BERNIE BELLAN
In 2019 Winnipegger Jaron Rykiss embarked on what, for almost any recent high school graduate, would probably be considered the adventure of a lifetime.
Jaron, who had just graduated from Gray Academy in the spring of last year (and doesn’t that seem like an eternity ago, even though it’s really only a little more than a year and a half ago?), had decided to enroll in a program that is probably not all that familiar to many Winnipeggers, known as “Kivunim”.
Kivunim, which means “directions” in English, is a program begun in 2006. Here is how the Kivunim website explains what it’s all about:
“KIVUNIM succeeds in delivering an immersive and transformative gap year experience of serious academic study, focused international travel and cross-cultural dialogue. These take place within the context of impressive intellectual and aesthetic exploration and growth that develops and deepens our students’ Jewish identity as engaged global citizens.
“KIVUNIM students forge a lifelong connection with Israel and the Jewish people through thoughtfully and intentionally-designed travel experiences that impart what other Jewish education programs can only envy: a nuanced and integrated understanding of Jewish civilization through sophisticated contact with the remarkable spectrum of religious traditions, cultures and world views among which the Jewish people grew throughout our 2,000-year Diaspora. Israel, our gap-year program home for the academic year, provides a challenging and surprisingly inspirational setting for appreciating the possibilities of Muslim-Jewish and Christian-Jewish co-existence and informs our broader international encounter with ‘the other’.”
Sounds pretty fantastic – right? And for any graduating high school student with the resources to participate in a program like this, it has to be considered a dream come true.
I spoke with Jaron Rykiss about his experience in Kivunim, which sadly for him and everyone else in the 2019-20 program, was cut short by COVID.
I began by asking Jaron how he heard about Kivunim in the first place?
Jaron explained that back in high school he was very involved with BBYO. Through BBYO he was exposed to a certain amount of international contact and realized “that there’s more to life than just Winnipeg”.
As graduation from Gray Academy was approaching Jaron “sat down with Avi Posen” (who was still in Winnipeg at that point, although in the fall of 2019 Avi himself made aliyah to Israel with his wife, Illana Minuk), and “we began talking about the possibility of a gap year” (the year between graduating from high school and entering a post-secondary institution).
After spending considerable time researching various programs Jaron came upon Kivunim which, he says, was perfect for someone like him – someone who didn’t have much experience outside of Winnipeg.
I asked Jaron whether he had ever been to Israel before?
He answered that he had – “twice” – once when he was nine, for a family occasion, and then again in 2017 when he was one of the students participating in the P2G (partnership together) program that Gray Academy has with Dancinger High School in Kiryat Shemonah, Israel. “That was really when I fell in love with the country,” he noted.
Fast forward to September 2019 and Jaron is in Jerusalem – “which is now my favourite city on the planet,” he said. There were 54 students in the program with Jaron – mostly from the U.S., but one other Canadian from Toronto as well.
“We all lived in a dormitory together – in the Mamillah area,” Jaron explained.
Under the original plan, Jaron said, he would have been in the program for eight and a half months, which would have taken him to the end of May.
As it was, he came back in March of this year – “exactly five months after I left”.
I asked Jaron at that point to describe what exactly he was studying during the program?
He answered: “The program goes to show you religion in other countries, so we spent the year studying Judaism, Islam…a Buddhist monk came to live with us for a couple weeks in Jerusalem and then when we got to India he showed us around.”
Which countries did Jaron actually visit as part of Kivunim? I asked.
Jaron said that the first month was spent in Jerusalem, followed by what was supposed to have been the first of several international trips.
“We ended up going to Greece and Bulgaria for two weeks,” after which the group returned to Israel for a month and a half, then India, but trips to Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Hungary and Morocco were all canceled due to the outbreak of COVID.
“We were supposed to end up in Morocco and meet the king there,” Jaron noted. “It’s too bad that never happened.”
(Jaron added that they were also supposed to visit Turkey at the same time as they visited Greece and Bulgaria, but that didn’t happen either. As he explained, “there were a lot of political issues” – what with the heightened civil unrest in Turkey at that time.)
What was the actual learning experience like? I wondered.
Jaron described the learning as “experiential”.
“While we were in Israel we would study the places we were going to visit,” Jaron observed, “then we would experience what we had just learned about – so it was a combination of classroom and experience.”
I was still uncertain, however, what the overall purpose of the program was – beyond exposing students to a wide variety of experiences.
According to its website, Kivunim aims to provide a “liberal arts” type of education: “The power of conceptual and intellectual integration is the ultimate (and all-to-often illusive) goal of a liberal arts education.
The website goes on to say:
“Why do we train our children in the liberal arts? It is not because these studies can grant someone virtue, but because they prepare the soul for accepting it.”
“KIVUNIM represents the beginning of a unique intellectual journey for our students and our staff and faculty. KIVUNIM succeeds in creating a thoughtful, comprehensive, and resilient intellectual foundation for our students and alumni.”
Here are the five courses taught to students in Kivunim. (There are no optional courses and all students must take the same five courses):
Civilization and Society: Homelands in Exile
Land, People, Ideas: The Challenges of Zionism
Hebrew Language and Literature
Arabic Language and Culture
Visual Learning – The Art of Seeing
A more detailed examination of each course gives a clearer understanding of just what it is that Kivunim is attempting to convey to students. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from the course outline of Land, People, Ideas: The Challenges of Zionism: “Here we seek to make the history of the Zionist movement come alive and allow KIVUNIM students to truly appreciate the capacity of the human being to become an historical actor: to make things happen. The course explores the growth of Pan-Arab nationalism and the specific development of Palestinian identity and nationalism. We encourage our students to imagine solutions while studying problems and to develop their sense of empowerment in glimpsing a future more positive than the past or today.”
If this all seems slightly airy-fairy, then I wondered how a program like this would be perceived by other institutions of higher learning – for instance, at a university here in Manitoba? After all, on its website Kivunim maintains that its courses will give students 30 academic credits, which would be equivalent to a normal year of study in an Arts program at a Manitoba university.
Jaron, who is now enrolled in an Arts program at the University of Manitoba, said that the university has not yet accepted for credit all the courses that he took in Israel.
Thus far, he has received credit for two of the courses: “Civilization and Society: Homelands in Exile”, and “Land, People, Ideas: The Challenges of Zionism”.
He noted though that he is being asked to take aptitude tests in both Hebrew and Arabic to determine whether the courses he took in those languages will be accepted for credit. As for the fifth course – “Visual Learning”, he explained that he is not expecting to obtain credit for that course, since it was more of a “photography” course than anything.
The problem, however, as Jaron noted during our conversation, is that due to COVID, so much of the university’s decision making is backed up that he doesn’t know how long it will be before he knows what the status of the two language courses that he took will be vis-à-vis receiving credit for them.
As far as his future studies go, Jaron added that he plans on majoring either in Political Studies or Philosophy, with his ultimate goal to get into law. (By the way, did I mention that Jaron’s grandfather is Jack London, about whom I have a review of his book elsewhere in this issue? As a disclaimer though, I want to explain that I contacted Jaron long before I knew that Jack had even written his memoir.)
One final aspect of the Kivunim program that hasn’t been mentioned yet in this article is the question of cost. I sent an email to the Kivunim program, asking for information as to the cost of the program. Here is the response I received:
“Our tuition is $55,000 which includes room and board, international travel, academics, a round trip from New York, etc. Tuition plus a small fee also includes 30 academic credits from Hebrew College (a full college year) accepted by most colleges in the U.S. and Canada. Every year we offer scholarships and interest free loans. We give about 40-50% of our students scholarship each year. Jaron’s year, 45% of students received a scholarship totaling approximately $375k.” (By the way, as one might expect, Kivunim is not being offered in person this year, although there is an online program.)
Features
The Magic of DNA
By GERRY POSNER This is my story, but it just as easily could have been yours. Even at my older age, a new relative popped into the family. This was unexpected to me and the whole family and indeed the new family member as well.
Put the blame on or credit to DNA. What transpired I suspect is happening all over the world these days. That is, there is now a new first cousin in the family. Call her KBP. It seems that KBP took a test through ancestry.com not that long ago, just as I had done years ago. When you take the test, you end up receiving messages from Ancestry from time to time identifying people who have similar genetic markers to you, some closer than others. I have looked at these messages and have identified people I know to be my cousins just from the initials. However, most of the initials listed are completely unknown to me. These lists of relatives go on for pages and pages. I struggle with the value of trying to reach these distant relatives because, even if I can connect with any of them, no one can figure out just how we are related. What would we even talk about should we ever meet? Often, I just ignore the lists as there seem to be too many names to contemplate a possible contact.
As it turned out, KBP also took the same test with the same company, ancestry.com. But she also failed to notice a connection between her and anyone else. This story would have ended there but for the intervention of another cousin who also had taken the DNA spit test with Ancestry. This cousin spotted the relationship and alerted me. Once that occurred, we established a connection and then the rest of this story developed.
What took place some almost seventy years ago was the cause of this new relationship. Recall ( and this is particularly relevant to young readers) the decade of the 1950s was an era when abortion, though present, was in back lanes or in the shadows. Most of the time a child born out of wedlock was put up for adoption. In this case, an uncle and his then non-Jewish partner elected to put the child up for adoption and she was adopted into a family located in Alberta where she grew up. That would have been the end of the story – but for DNA.
My new cousin was ecstatic to find out about the whole new family she was now a part of and whose history was now hers. Even though she is now a Mormon, she was eager to explore her Jewish origins and indeed even came with me and my wife to synagogue at the Beth Tzedec Synagogue in Calgary not that long ago. She had much in common with the family. Most of all, she was so happy to delve into a past previously unknown. On the other hand, her birth mother, still alive at 93, rejected meeting her daughter from so long ago. KBP respects that view and has made peace with just her new association with Dad’s family.
Of course, what made this secret such a well kept secret for so long is that the uncle died young and never told anyone. Who then could have known? The truth is out and I, for one, am glad it is now out there. Not everyone in my family agrees with me, but the main protagonist in this tale, KBP, was supportive of my writing this article. Of course, the real test now is to see if and how this new relationship with KBP unfolds, if at all.
As I said in the beginning, this is not an isolated story. You can bet there are hundreds, maybe thousands of such stories out there waiting to be unearthed and told. It is all about DNA.
Features
Kevin Leach and the Sabre Training Advisory Group: Providing training assistance to the Ukrainian military
By MARTIN ZEILIG As a private citizen, Kevin Leach is following the example of the Government of Canada by providing much needed assistance to our democratic ally, Ukraine, in its fight against the unprovoked war of aggression launched by Russia on February 24, 2022.
Mr. Leach, who grew up in Palgrave, Ontario and lived in Toronto before moving to Ukraine, is the founder of the Sabre Training Advisory Group, a not-for-profit organization geared towards providing training assistance Ukraine’s military. He is a 10-year veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, and served as an OSCE ceasefire observer in Ukraine from 2018 until the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
He founded the STAG in November 2022.
“Since the beginning of 2022, Canada has committed $4 billion in military assistance to Ukraine,” says the Government of Canada website.
“This funding will allow Canada to deliver military assistance to Ukraine through to 2029. We deeply admire the bravery and courage of Ukrainians who are fighting to defend their independence and freedom, and we will continue to work closely with our Allies and partners to help Ukraine defend its sovereignty and security Canada and Ukraine are close partners with a long-standing defence relationship.”
As well, Operation (Op) UNIFIER, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) military training and capacity building mission in Ukraine, “was launched in 2015 at the request of the Ukrainian government,” and in 2023, was expanded and extended until March 2026.
“Since the start of Op UNIFIER, the CAF has trained approximately 41,000 Ukrainian military and security personnel in battlefield tactics and advanced military skills,” says the online information.
“As the mission progressed, much of the direct training undertaken by CAF members transitioned to members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, with Canadians acting as advisors and mentors as well as assisting in the development of courses.”
“Ukraine’s fight is a fight for international law, for the United Nations Charter, and for innocent civilians, including children, who deserve to live in peace,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says on his website.
Besides military aid and training, Canada has also provided significant economic support, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, and has welcomed tens of thousands Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war into our country.
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Mr. Leach, who is a frequent guest on the Mriya Report, a 24/7 site on X that provides in-depth information on the war, agreed to an email interview with this reporter.
Q: What was your motivation in forming STAG?
KL: Sabre is a professional military training non-profit. Our aim is to give Ukrainian defenders the skills to come home alive. We are building the capacity for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression.
Sabre Training Advisory Group grew out of the frustrations its founding members had with the chaotic and unprofessional way that many foreign instructors were attempting to train Ukrainian soldiers in the NATO and Allied style of warfare.
Q: Who else works with you in the STAG?
KL: We have a team of volunteers from all over the world. They are former soldiers from Canada, the US, UK, and even Australia, plus our local Ukrainian volunteers. Our executive staff, besides myself, are two former officers from the British Army and US Marine Corps, respectively.
Q: Do you work closely with the Government of Ukraine or Ukraine’s military and/or the Canadian Armed Forces?
KL: We don’t work closely at this time with any civilian government, but we have an official partnership with the 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade “Rubizh”. As we’re still a relatively small organization, we don’t warrant much attention from governments.
Q: What else that you would like the public to know about your work?
KL: Training inside of Ukraine is vital. It is far more efficient than moving large numbers of Ukrainian troops around Europe, and being here puts us closer to the action, and allows us to adjust faster to lessons learned on the battlefield. We also need support! It is hard to fund a program like ours, as it’s quite unique. Typically the role we are filling would be performed by private military contractors, which are illegal in Ukraine and carry severe political risk due to public perception of these companies.
We set out to establish a high standard, using proper training techniques and taking a systematic approach to instruction. In just a few short months we were able to secure a high-quality training area, and a team of excellent instructors who draw on decades of collected military experience. We have successfully trained over 3000 Ukrainian warriors and medics, equipping them with essential skills and knowledge to excel on the battlefield. Our track record of tangible results demonstrates our commitment to the mission and the decisive impact on Ukrainian defenders.
For further information, visit the STAG website: www.sabretag.org
Features
Exploring 8 Innovative New Services in In-Home Care
In-home care has evolved significantly in recent years, driven by advancements in technology, changing demographics, and an increased focus on personalized care. These innovative services are transforming the way support is delivered, enhancing the quality of life for seniors and individuals with disabilities. Here are some of the most exciting and groundbreaking innovations that families can depend on when it comes to their space and the best practices to ensure comfort and safety.
Telehealth and Telemedicine
Telehealth and telemedicine have revolutionized health care by providing remote access to services. Through video consultations, seniors and caregivers can communicate with doctors, nurses, and specialists without leaving their homes. This reduces the need for frequent visits to health facilities, which can be challenging for those with mobility issues. Telehealth also enables continuous monitoring of chronic conditions, allowing providers to adjust treatments promptly and prevent complications.
Remote Monitoring and Wearable Devices
Wearable devices and remote monitoring systems are becoming essential tools. These devices can track vital signs such as heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen levels, providing real-time data to caregivers and health professionals. Advanced systems can detect falls, monitor medication adherence, and even predict health issues before they become severe. This proactive approach allows for timely interventions, improving outcomes and enhancing the safety of in-home recipients.
Virtual Companionship and Social Engagement
Loneliness and social isolation are significant concerns for seniors living at home. Virtual companionship services, such as those provided by robots or virtual assistants, offer interaction and engagement to mitigate these issues. These technologies can remind individuals to take their medications, guide them through exercises, and provide cognitive stimulation through games and conversations. Additionally, platforms that facilitate virtual social gatherings and activities help seniors stay connected with family and friends, promoting mental and emotional well-being.
Personalized Care Plans and Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a crucial role in developing personalized plans. AI algorithms can analyze data from various sources, including health records, lifestyle habits, and genetic information, to create customized strategies. These plans are tailored to the unique needs and preferences of each individual, ensuring they receive the most appropriate and effective solutions. AI can also assist caregivers by predicting potential health issues and suggesting preventive measures, thereby enhancing the overall quality of support.
Smart Home Technology
Smart technology is making it easier for seniors to live independently. Voice-activated assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home can control lights, thermostats, and appliances, reducing the physical effort required for daily tasks. Smart systems can also include sensors that detect movement, alerting caregivers if there is unusual activity or inactivity. This technology not only improves safety but also provides peace of mind for both the recipients and their families.
On-Demand and Flexible Care Services
The gig economy has introduced on-demand services to the in-home care industry. Platforms like Honor and CareLinx allow families to find and hire support quickly, providing flexibility and convenience. These services offer a wide range of options, from a few hours of assistance to round-the-clock support, accommodating the varying needs of individuals. The ability to schedule help on short notice ensures that support is available when it’s needed most. This includes teams like the one at Parners for Home Care; more on their services and support options can be found on their website: https://partnersforhomecare.ca/
Integrative Health and Wellness Programs
Holistic approaches to health and wellness are gaining traction – and for good reason. Integrative health programs combine traditional medical care with complementary therapies such as yoga, meditation, nutrition counseling, and physical therapy. These programs focus on the overall well-being of the individual, addressing physical, mental, and emotional health. As a result of promoting a balanced and healthy lifestyle, integrative health services can enhance the quality of life and prevent the onset of chronic conditions.
Enhanced Training and Support for Caregivers
Innovative training programs for caregivers are crucial in improving the quality of in-home care. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies provide immersive training experiences, allowing support workers to practice and develop their skills in realistic scenarios. Additionally, online platforms offer ongoing education and support, helping individuals stay updated on best practices and new developments in the field. Enhanced training ensures that everyone is well-prepared to meet the diverse needs of their clients.
The Future of In-Home Care Services
The way we grow and age in comfort is rapidly changing, thanks to these innovative services and technologies. Telehealth, remote monitoring, virtual companionship, AI-driven plans, smart technology, on-demand services, integrative health programs, and enhanced training are all contributing to more personalized, efficient, and effective support. As these innovations continue to evolve, they hold the promise of significantly improving the lives of those who rely on in-home care, allowing them to age gracefully and independently in the comfort of their own spaces.