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For one group of friends separated by geography, a single Israel experience builds lifelong bonds
When Ashley Inbar of Portland, Maine, got married in a traditional Jewish ceremony at the Jamaican beach resort of Ocho Rios in early January, there were five very special names on the guest list.
Just half a decade earlier, they were all complete strangers.
But then they met in Israel on an unusual Birthright trip geared toward “older participants” — those ages 27 to 32 — and forged bonds that have only grown over the years. When that 2018 trip drew to a close, six of them resolved to hold annual in-person reunions, despite the vast geographical distances that separate them.
“Pretty much right when we got home, we started planning to meet up somewhere,” said Inbar, who heads fundraising for the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine. “Our first trip was to Denver, then we traveled north to Redstone, Colorado, and stayed for the weekend. As soon as we end one trip, we start planning the next one. We see each other as often as we can, and we talk every day through group chats on Instagram.”
The tight bonds established by the six friends — Inbar, Tim Campbell, Max Staplin, Carly Herbst, Simon Muller and Jared Glassman — are part of the goal of Birthright Israel, which seeks to offer participants a “life-changing experience.”
While forging bonds between Diaspora Jews and Israel is the main purpose of the trips, which are given to participants at no cost to them, the 10-day Birthright experience also aims to strengthen both participants’ Jewish identity and their connection to fellow Jews (including Israelis). Countless long-lasting friendships and romances that started on Birthright have blossomed into marriages and Jewish families.
From Inbar’s group five years ago, the vast majority of participants are still in touch, she said.
“There were 38 of us, and our entire group got along really well,” Inbar said. “We were all at similar places in life, and all of us already had careers. Even today, 95% of us are still connected through social media.”
During the pandemic, when the six couldn’t meet up in person, they held biweekly Zoom chats where they’d talk for hours on end, playing games and discussing the ups and downs of their lives — including engagements, illnesses, deaths of family members and job promotions — as well as their shared memories of their Israel experience.
Ashley Inbar, third from right, with her Birthright friends celebrates her January 6, 2023, wedding on the beach in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. (Courtesy of Ashley Inbar)
The group also stayed in touch with the Israeli security guard, Gal, who escorted them on the trip. Gal video-chats with the group at times of conflict in Israel to share his experiences on the ground — and at other times to practice his English. “He just became an integral part of our collective experience, and I think it was as impactful for him as it was for us,” Inbar said.
Staplin, 36, a franchise attorney in Philadelphia, says the 2018 Birthright trip was one of the best experiences of his life. While the tours to the Dead Sea and Masada were amazing and the vibrancy of Tel Aviv unforgettable, he said, what remains with him most are the friendships he formed during those 10 days.
“We’d stay up till 1 a.m. every night talking. We knew then that we’d be friends for the rest of our lives,” Staplin said. “We decided to have a reunion every year. The first was in New Orleans, then the next year we visited Ashley in Maine. As we were figuring out where to do the next reunion, Ashley got engaged.”
Since 1999, more than 800,000 young Jews from 68 countries have visited Israel on free 10-day trips offered through Birthright, known in Hebrew as Taglit (Discovery). The vast majority were 18 to 26, but from mid-2018 until recently some 13,000 Jews in the 27 to 32 age bracket got to visit Israel as well, according to Noa Bauer, Birthright’s vice president of global marketing.
Now that the pandemic has ended and trips to Israel are back in full force, the organization is seeing its highest demand ever and can’t accommodate all would-be participants without raising additional funds.
“Given the limited spots, we went back to the original age group of 18 to 26,” Bauer said, “though we did allow those who missed out during Covid to participate this past summer as a last chance even if they aged out during the pandemic.”
On Inbar’s trip, the cohort of older Birthright participants included two married couples and several people with children, including her.
Visiting Israel at an older age made all the difference to Glassman, a 36-year-old firefighter in New Orleans. He cited “a much higher maturity level” as one of the advantages of doing Birthright when he did.
“At 18 or 19, I wouldn’t have appreciated it as much,” Glassman said. “Everyone on our group really wanted to be there. In my case, as a young adult, I became much closer to my local Jewish community. I’m a pretty active member of my temple, Touro Synagogue, so when Birthright opened that slot for my age group, it was almost like it was meant to be.”
Staplin said that what really stood out from his experience was the 360-degree view of Israeli life and history that the Birthright trip gave him – not something he could have gotten on a typical vacation.
Six participants of a 2018 Birthright Israel trip gather for their annual reunion in 2022 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Courtesy of Ashley Inbar)
“The most meaningful part was gaining an understanding of what day-to-day life is like in a country with so much history but still in the middle of so much conflict in present times,” he said. “Watching the people of Tel Aviv just going about their regular work days despite the announcement of the largest rocket attacks in years. Taking a bus ride through the middle of nowhere to Masada and learning about what happened there centuries before America was discovered, and then seeing the daily struggles of the Bedouins the next day. Going from the Western Wall to the Mahane Yehuda Market. Eating schnitzel in a kibbutz and then eating fancy Thai-fusion food at a restaurant in Tel Aviv.”
Herbst was 32 when she went on Birthright. Until then, she said, her travel priorities were to visit countries other than Israel, even though her older brother had gone on Birthright and had a positive experience.
“I wasn’t that interested at the age when you’re supposed to go,” Herbst said. “But our group had a different perspective. We weren’t looking just to get a free trip. Even my Jewish identity was certainly different for me in my 30s than in my 20s.”
Now 37, Herbst works in business development at a New York City tech startup.
“For me, what’s special about Israel is the enduring history of religion, and not only of Judaism,” she said. “Even seeing how strong of a presence Islam and Christianity has there was really fascinating for me. There’s no other place in the world where you see that.”
Muller, 37, grew up outside Rochester, New York, and was supposed to go on Birthright in his mid-20s. But a month before his planned trip, Muller lost his job after the congressional office where he was working in Washington, D.C., suddenly closed. He never got around to rescheduling the Israel trip, and then he aged out.
Nearly six years later, he said, he got an email that Birthright was doing a pilot program for older Jews.
“It was just before my 32nd birthday, I didn’t know anybody else,” Muller recalled. “It was a shot in the dark. I had low expectations.”
The trip turned out to be one of the milestones in his life.
“I found people I really clicked with,” said Muller, now an international trade consultant in Seattle. “We all live in different places and have different interests, but Birthright really bonded us. It’s been a wonderful experience.”
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At Chabad Hanukkah party in California, hours after Bondi Beach massacre, joy defied grief’s shadow
PACIFIC PALISADES, CALIFORNIA – A familiar sight at public gatherings, especially Jewish ones — young men in Hasidic garb wrapping black leather tefillin straps around the arms of strangers — felt different here Sunday evening as Rabbi Shimon Goldberg helped Rick Entin fulfill the commandment at a Hanukkah block party in the Palisades. The mitzvahs of tefillin and lighting candles had become acts of defiance and joy as the gathering grieved the 15 people killed at a Chabad Hanukkah event in Sydney.
The attack cut deeply in the close-knit Chabad community, whose brand — and vulnerability — lies in the proud public practicing of Jewish rituals. Some of them were personally connected to Rabbi Eli Schlanger, the Chabad emissary who had organized the Sydney event, and died in the attack.
Yet they were celebrating Hanukkah on Sunday with a group that knew something about resilience: 11 months earlier, the Palisades fire tore through this area, destroying thousands of homes, including Entin’s just up the street. For many, the Hanukkah event was the first time they had been in Jewish community in the Palisades since the inferno. This was the occasion the Palisades Chabad — whose campus was damaged in the fire — had planned to commemorate, and from which its leaders would not be deterred.
“Whoever was strategizing this terrorist attack, they want the Jews not just in Sydney, but even in Los Angeles to fear showing up for a Hanukkah event,” said Goldberg, head of a local Chabad-affiliated nonprofit, as he placed a tefillin box atop Entin’s forehead. “This we won’t allow them to do.”
The 38th annual Palisades candlelighting was always going to be bittersweet; many there remained displaced by the fire, and some remain unsure whether they will rebuild. Jewish leaders who planned the event said they did not need to change the program due to the terrorist attack — it was already about celebration in the face of loss.
So, too, is Hanukkah, a holiday that tells of a miraculous jug of oil found amid great ruin. And both Chabad and Kehillat Israel, a Reconstructionist synagogue in the Pacific Palisades that co-sponsored the event, had, miraculously, found the spark on an otherwise gloomy day.
Overlooking the street that had been blocked off for the event were vacant lots where homes had stood a year earlier. But melancholy was hard to come by as one walked through the teeming masses at the event. Kids sat for glitter tattoos and balloon animals; lines snaked for latkes and jelly donuts and hot chocolate, all free. Old friends exchanging long-overdue hugs could be heard saying I’m so sorry about your house. On stage before the candlelighting, a gaggle of youngsters delivered a spirited rendition of “I’m a little latke.”
“It’s almost like the Maccabees,” said Chayim Frenkel, Kehillat Israel’s longtime cantor. “They went into the Temple, cleaned it up, found the menorah, found the oil. And surrounded by the rubble of what the Greeks did, we brought light and hope.”
The Palisades Chabad members in attendance were putting on a doubly brave face: The fire had damaged part of the school on the campus of Chabad of Pacific Palisades, according to Rabbi Zushe Cunin, its director. Classes have still not returned to the building.
“It’s been hard,” Cunin said. “So much trauma, a lot of people have not resolved things, their house, their insurance, their struggles. But Hanukkah is a time to rise above that. Tonight is about strengthening our resolve.”
Cunin’s son, Mordechai, was among the group channeling that resolve through tefillin. The mitzvah — which is required only of Jewish men — was one the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, had implored his followers to promote in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah. Mordechai and his yeshiva buddies reported having wrapped at least 10 men that day, including three first-time wearers.
It was not lost on the tefillin crew that Schlanger — whose nephew is Mordechai’s classmate — died doing what they were doing now — helping Jewish people from all walks of life connect to Judaism. But to Goldberg, that was only reason to lean in.
“When someone leaves this physical world, their soul is still there, but they can’t do mitzvos,” Goldberg said. “When we think of Rabbi Eli, we are his hands and feet. He can’t put on tefillin today — but we can put on tefillin for him.”
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In the fight against K-12 antisemitism, we are grateful for allies – but are not afraid to call out antisemitism when we see it
Recent articles in the Forward spotlighted important conversations around combating K-12 antisemitism that took place at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly, but missed critical distinctions about our commitment to working with partners throughout the K-12 space and our stance on teachers’ unions. In particular, they ignored the distinction between the two largest teachers’ unions in the US – the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
Federations throughout North America work closely with educators and educational leadership. We are grateful to the many educators committed to doing right by their students and by the Jewish community, and to our many allies in the education space – including the AFT, led by Randi Weingarten, and its New York affiliate, the UFT, which recently partnered with the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York on a curriculum and training about Jewish Americans.
We are committed to ensuring teachers have access to the content and knowledge they need to accurately educate about Jewish communities, Israel and antisemitism and to provide safe learning environments for Jewish students. Increasingly, however, we also see instances of organizations and individuals encouraging teachers to use materials and trainings that seek to disconnect educators from those positive resources, or worse, to provide resources that harm Jewish students and foster classroom antisemitism.
Some union spaces have become toxic even for Jewish teachers. The recent debate at the NEA’s Representative Assembly about boycotting the ADL, as well as a union resource guide linking to a third-party source erasing Israel off the map and sympathizing with the Holocaust, were shocking. We are grateful that NEA leadership vetoed the boycott resolution and apologized for the link, but we are reminded of the need for vigilance and organizing so that this type of resource is not recommended – even inadvertently – to educators. We stand ready to work with the NEA to help ensure that biased and ultimately harmful teaching materials are legitimized.
Both nationally and at the local level, Federations are proud of the educational partnerships that make our schools better and stronger. We are grateful every day to the educators who teach our children and seek out accurate information and ways to teach critical thinking that enable the foundation of our future democracy – and our safety within it. We are eager for additional partners and partnerships. But at the same time, we will not stand by when antisemitism is enabled in the classroom.
Our commitment is to promote policies and actions that enable Jewish children and teachers to be safe in school and take pride in their identity, and to ensure that Jewish identity, culture and resilience are celebrated and accurately taught.
The post In the fight against K-12 antisemitism, we are grateful for allies – but are not afraid to call out antisemitism when we see it appeared first on The Forward.
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Her daughter left the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration just before the shooting, then asked, ‘Mommy, why do they hate us so much?’
The daughter of an American expatriate living about two miles from the mass killing at a Hanukkah celebration in suburban Sydney, Australia, escaped the carnage by coming home to change clothes, her mother said.
“She’d been there earlier that afternoon, on the bridge where they were shooting. She came home, changed her clothes, and was getting ready to go again,” said Michelle Stein-Evers, a former Los Angeles resident and a co-founder of the Alliance of Black Jews in 1995.
“She and her friends were on their way back to Bondi to go to the party and have something to eat, and they were stopped by the police,” Stein-Evers said. “She found out why, and she started calling everyone to let us know. Her best friend’s cousin was killed. Another best friend’s cousin was shot in the leg.”
Her daughter, who is 22, had previously locked down her Facebook account out of privacy concerns and requested that her name not be used. As the massacre unfolded Sunday, she turned to social media to search for information.
“‘Oh my God, there’s bodies everywhere,’” Stein-Evers said her daughter told her.
She also asked where her father was, amid rumors — later proven untrue — that the neighborhood where he had gone to play tennis was also affected.
Stein-Evers said the events were unfolding within minutes of their home, where she was alone after her daughter headed back toward the beach.
“It was scary. It was nothing but sirens — sirens and sirens — and helicopters,” she said.
Stein-Evers said she knew the first victim publicly identified among the dead, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who helped organize the celebration.
“He was, by consensus, one of the nicest guys in the Jewish community in Sydney,” she said.
Antisemitic incidents have been rising in Sydney and across Australia since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Stein-Evers said, adding that her daughter stopped attending the prestigious University of Sydney because of campus protests.
“She was constantly being heckled, asked, ‘Where are you from? Are you Jewish? Are you an Arab? Why aren’t you with us?’” Stein-Evers said. Her daughter would not respond to the questions and eventually enrolled in distance learning through a college in Melbourne.
Stein-Evers, who has lived in the Middle East — including in Muslim-majority countries — as well as Europe and the United States, said she now has concerns about her own safety.
“I was never scared to be a Jew in America. I was never scared in Germany,” she said — a fear she said is now shared by her daughter.
“When she came home last night, she was in tears,” Stein-Evers said. “‘Mommy, why do they hate us so much?’”
The post Her daughter left the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration just before the shooting, then asked, ‘Mommy, why do they hate us so much?’ appeared first on The Forward.