For Leah Rothstein, front left, the joys of her year in Israel included hikes like this one with her class in the Arava Desert north of Eilat.
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July 2, 2009
As leaders of the Jewish community debate how best to keep alive a love of Israel in the younger generation, one old rule keeps proving true: Let the country work its magic.
Leah Rothstein, 18, was one of hundreds of young Jews who spent an extended period of time in Israel, many of them filling the “gap year” between high school and college.
A few days after her return, Rothstein talked about how the magic worked on her.
“I expected to be bored or homesick, but I wasn’t at all,” she said, chatting over iced coffee at a kosher doughnut store in Elizabeth.
Her watch was still on Israeli time, one small way of holding onto that distant, very different setting.
Eager as she was to get back to her parents and brother, she said, she found herself in tears on the plane. “I wanted to see my family, but I was really heart sore about leaving Israel, and I want to go back,” she said. “It was just incredible being there.”
A 2008 graduate of Bruriah High School for Girls in Elizabeth, Leah — together with 17 other Bruriah students — went to Israel for a year’s study at Michlala-Jerusalem College. She had been to Israel two years earlier for a six-week course and wanted to go back for long enough to really find her feet there.
She didn’t anticipate how much she would love it. “The people are so amazing,” she said, “and just being in the land with so much Jewish history and so many Jewish connections, and seeing all those people — from Ethiopia, and France, and other places, and yeshiva students — and knowing they are all Jews, there is such a sense of unity.”
The seminary is set on a hillside in the Bayit Vegan neighborhood, which she found absolutely beautiful, and she shared a cottage with three other girls. They studied in English or Hebrew from Sunday to Thursday, with Tuesday afternoons dedicated to hesed, social service. Friday and Saturday they had to themselves.
The pleasure was threefold: the very challenging academic program that she said greatly deepened her appreciation of Torah study, new friendships with girls from all over the United States and other countries, and getting to know ordinary Israelis, who, she said, are “amazing.”
Each Shabbat, the students were free. Many went to visit relatives or family friends; Leah, who has no relatives there, made a point of visiting different people in different settings each time. It gave her experiences that ranged from a stay in Hebron with a woman whose husband was attacked by a terrorist — whom he caught — to Hoshaya, a moshav in the North.
Rothstein gets a taste of ancient Jewish life in the historic village of Kfar Kedem.
Every one of those Shabbat encounters, Leah said, was full of warmth and welcome. “Everyone we met was so hospitable,” she said, “even the ones who didn’t speak any English.”
Her own Hebrew improved a lot. Whatever language barrier there was, however, proved no obstacle to enjoying the country’s culture, mindset, and geographic wonders. Whether catching buses into the center of the Jerusalem and witnessing the mix of people there, rafting the rivers, or hiking from the valleys high into mountains, she found the variety endlessly fascinating.
That was her feeling despite the fact that the war in Gaza erupted while she was there. “Being in Jerusalem, we were hardly affected by it,” she said. “It’s understandable that people here are more scared about what’s going on, because all they read about is the violence, but there you’re seeing how people just carry on with their normal lives.”
That didn’t mean she was untouched by the crisis. Friends in Be’er Sheva — Americans who made aliya just a few years before — told her they found it an unbearable strain trying to get their two small children into a shelter every time the siren sounded. Another acquaintance was in Sderot, the target of repeated attacks from Gaza. But even those people, she said, were unshaken in their passion for the country and their determination to stay.
Come September, Leah plans to start an undergraduate arts degree at Barnard College. She hasn’t begun to decide yet what career she wants to pursue. But about one thing she is absolutely clear: She wants to get back to Israel.
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