Shortly after Oct. 7, 2023, the leadership at Heilicher Minneapolis Jewish Day School decided it was the right moment to start planning for its eighth graders, the oldest group of students in the school, to take a class trip to Israel.
I’m a big believer in “The right people, the right place, the right time,’” said David Ackerman, the director of Jewish living and learning at HMJDS. “That’s why things happen here or there at a time when they don’t happen in the same place at other times.”
The idea of the trip – Aliyah Chet – which took place in late February, isn’t a novel one; K-8 day schools around the country send their eighth graders to Israel as a culmination of their studies. At HMJDS, the trip was a reflection of an Israel studies program that has been strengthened over time.
“The question is if this is what we’re doing in the classroom, how do we create a capstone for it?” Ackerman said. “What does it build to? I think the change in the climate, both in the United States and worldwide, vis-à-vis Israel, perhaps made that a little more salient for the community to begin thinking seriously about bringing children to Israel even as young as the eighth grade.”
Fifteen of the 19 eighth-graders went on the 10-day trip, and participants ranged from first-time travelers to Israel to those who have been there several times.
“It’s so cool to be the first ones out of so many other [students] that have been at the school,” said Aviva Blumenfeld, one of the students on the trip. “[Future eighth-graders] are going get to have the same experiences.”
Finding out about the opportunity 16 months before actually going on the trip – and only two months after the Oct. 7 attacks, didn’t dim the anticipation. But it did leave a little room for doubts.
“We were excited, but also the war was going on, and we weren’t sure,” said Elnatan Joffee. “It was never like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna go to Israel.’ It’s like, ‘We’re hoping you’re gonna go to Israel.’”
Said Stacie Abelson: “I was a lot more unsure when we first heard about it, then, as it was getting closer and we were learning more about Israel and connecting more with it, and that kind of helped make it even more exciting to be able to go.”
Planning what the group was going to do on the trip wasn’t impacted that much by the current situation.
“A lot of the people who go to Israel right now are going because they want to bear witness to what happened on October 7, and they want to see how Israel is managing,” said Simcha Cohen a middle school Jewish studies and Hebrew teacher at HMJDS as well the founder of Mayever Travel, the travel company that planned the trip.
Cohen said that in those cases, guides are taking people to the Nova Festival site, volunteering on a farm, or go to a kibbutz. “When you’re taking a group of eighth graders, that’s not the version we’re trying to do,” he said. “We’re trying to create the classic Israeli trip. But because of October 7, we have to also be mindful and to leave that in as well.
“People asked if we were going to the Nova Festival site, and I didn’t think that was appropriate with kids.”
They did go to Kibbutz Nirim in the Gaza Envelope, where Ackerman lived when he lived in Israel.
“It was a way to personalize the trip in an appropriate way for these kids,” Cohen said. “[They’ve] heard about these things, but now they saw it firsthand. Talking about the day, really focusing on what’s happened since, and how the country has come together, what’s our role and how we can support.”
Abelson said the visit to Kibbutz Nirim was one of the most impactful stops on their journey.
“They’re still rebuilding from Oct. 7 and we got to see the aftermath of what actually happened there,” she said. “It’s so much different than just hearing about it or seeing it on the news.”
Abelson said the group heard from someone who was in the Kibbutz and survived Hamas’ attack.
“It was so sad and heartbreaking to hear, but at the same time, I could feel how important it was to be there, and I knew that we were doing the right thing by seeing it. I’m really grateful for that experience.”
Said Cohen: “There’s really a shared ‘Am Yisrael Chai,’ and we talk about that all the time and we use that phrase, but the kids felt it,” Cohen said. “We want to be [in Israel] and the Israelis said to them, ‘Thank you for being here. That strengthens us.’”
Blumenfeld said that she felt the gravity of being there, particularly as people showed their gratitude to the Americans for being in Israel.
“Us being there was so important and meaningful to us,” she said. “But I can’t imagine how meaningful it was to the people that live there and to the people that saw us visiting.”
New educational approach?
Now that the trip is going to be an annual experience, Ackerman said he’s predicting that there will be a change in Israel education going forward.
“If we know that our students are going to go as a class to Israel, that may cause us to rethink a little what they’re learning in each of the grades leading up” to the trip, he said. “Right now, there’s a very clear progression. Each grade has a topic so that by the end of seventh grade, we can say with a fair amount of certainty we have exposed them to all of the biggest, most important things that a child that age should know about Israel.”
Ackerman said that the next step is to determine if any rethinking needs to be done with respect to what is taught in what grade.
“Is everything in the right place and at the right stage? And are we missing something?” he said. “It changes how we might think about our program along the affective dimension, not the cognitive dimension. If this now becomes something that the kids, we hope, get excited about and look forward to, how do we leverage that? Not only in terms of the classroom curriculum for the study of Israel, but in anything Israel-related within the context of the school.
“Our job before the trip has been exclusively, how do we bring Israel into the school? Now it’s how do we take our school children to Israel?”
The work the school has done in preparation seems to have worked. Eighth-grader Atara Marmor said that, despite having been to Israel before, felt a connection to the people that she hadn’t before.
“When you’re there, you can sort of just feel that everyone’s connected and everyone cares about each other more than anywhere else,” she said.
Blumenfeld said it was special to have learned about places in Israel in their Jewish studies classes, and then to go experience it firsthand. Joffee said that it wasn’t just the trip that was special, but the group that was part of it.
“Because we were all connected to Israel, it helped us build connections with the people in our group – more than if we went on a trip to [Washington,] D.C.,” he said. “I think the connections that we built from that trip was because it was Israel. It brought us closer together.”
Said Cohen: “The way we approach travel is about personal growth, partnering with institutions, helping them along the way. Personal growth…could be pushing you outside your comfort zone. It could be eating something new. It could be you trying something for the first time. It could be traveling and being away from mom and dad and your family. But we really want to identify ways that these kids can grow as individuals and as a community.”
While the trip was the capstone of the students’ HMJDS experience, they returned and still had a few months left of their school year. Cohen said the timing of the trip was intentional.
“Most schools think about doing [their trip] at the end of April [or] end of May,” he said. “Our kids are back in school, and during the [Yom Ha’atzmaut, Yom HaZikaron] programming, they can bring back their experience and their connection, like ‘What does Israel mean to me today?’ Hopefully something different for those 15 kids than it did before they left on the trip.”
Marmor said the trip was a worthy celebration for everything they’ve learned in their time at the day school.
“You can actually go and understand what you’re seeing, because you’ve learned all that,” she said. “That’s what makes it so special to go in eighth grade with your school.”
