I was born in Odessa but came to the States when I was one year old. My parents decided a better life awaited us here and being back proved they just may have been right. I didn’t feel much until the moment that the plane landed in Ukraine, when a feeling of excitement and maybe even pride came over me. It was quick and powerful. I was home.

I knew we had a great group of participants, a solid itinerary, and a lot to learn. I didn’t know that forgotten memories related to my Ukrainian background would resurface. My grandma, a holocaust survivor, passed away a little over a year ago. When we were in Hillel Odessa , we were introduced to a Ukrainian song that brought my grandma back to me. It was a song that she taught me when I was a kid. A song I hadn’t heard since then but still knew. A song that brought me to tears.

Visiting the shtetle of Berdichev overwhelmed me with an intangible sadness. Maybe it was the fact that the city once housed 50,000 Jews but it now has only 500. Or that the youngest ritual participants are in their fifties. Or that the Torah scrolls were stolen three times. The Jewish people have such a sad history. I am the Jewish people.

Equally moving but opposite in mood have been my fellow participants. We have shared too many laughs, beautiful song, free spirited dance, and memories that no one can ever take from us. It is so interesting to hear two recent strangers from different walks of life talking. Our differences just reinforce that there is no particular look of Jewry or Jews. I like it that way. 

The sun has set on our day trip from Odessa, through a few Jewish Communities, to Kiev. The first stop was Uman, site of Rabbi Nachman’s grave, and then to Berdichev, site of Rabbi Levi Yitzak’s grave. The last stop of the day was Zhitzomer to visit a synagogue before we reach Kiev for the remainder of our time here.

Despite the long hours of driving in between communities, it was a very good day. Visiting all of these different areas in the countryside made me realize that even in the most remote towns, there is a proud and thriving Jewish community. They are all small in size; the Berdichev rabbi said that there are 10-12 men that come for the daily mincha. The Jewish crowd is a much older set. In Berdichev, the groundskeeper of the synagogue said that the youngest members of the synagogue are in their fifties. While he himself was almost 70, he said that he was not even close to being the oldest member.

This has been an interesting few days. I don’t mean interesting in the way that if someone’s food tastes bad you tell them it is “interesting,” but interesting in the way that really opens your eyes and teaches you something new.  Everyone has different views, but what ties us all together is that we are Jewish. At the first Pesach seder that we had as a group, we all brought a bit of our family traditions. We ran around swatting each other with towels, which is a tradition of my roommate Lital’s Persian family.

I have really learned so much while on this trip. On the drive from Kiev to Odessa, I was taught how to read the Cyrillic alphabet, and am now able to identify most words on the street signs. I also know how to have a 2 sentence conversation with a Russian speaker, with the following phrases: hello and how are you. I also know important phrases like how to scream for help, and ask for the location of the ladies room.

In the days to come, I am excited to get to know everyone else on the trip better. I really didn’t know anyone before coming on the trip, except for Matt and Boyana. As unlikely as it seems, but i have already made such a strong connection with a few of my fellow participants. Given our situation, I know that I have made friends for life.

With apologies to Abraham Joshua Heschel, long distance travel is a palace in time.  However, the seats in this palace have no legroom and fold-down tables, the meals are indiscriminate meats in tiny trays and the language is 1000 dialects of Babel. 

We started our journey with a three-hour delay in Newark due to high winds and torrential rain.  

Depsite all that, we still made it to Warsaw a mere 15 minutes after our connecting flight was scheduled to depart.  Even though there were close to 50 people on our flight that needed the connecting flight to Kiev, the plane still took off without us and the rest of the passengers.  But hey, we got a meal voucher!

We were able to negotiate a new itinerary that now included a short flight from Warsaw to Vienna on a two propeller plane and a flight to Kiev from there.  Understandably nervous about the luggage situation, we had no choice but to board. 

It couldn’t have been that simple however as all but one of us was booked for the flight with Luba inexplicably booked for the waiting list for the same flight.  Pleading with the kind Austrian Airways staff yielded one first class ticket for our group and confirmed seats for the rest of us. 

When we finally landed in Kiev all seemed well…except when the luggage carousel stopped with three bags missing.  I can only hope that LOT Airlines will do whatever they can to get the remaining luggage to us in Odessa, free Hillel t-shirts only go so far. 

Enough with the mundane aspects of travel though.  We were finally all here!  New York, Israel and Kiev together at last!  This morning we met in the Kiev Hillel to receive an official welcome from Osik Akselrud, the Director of the CASE Hillels.  I had a great sense of pride and accomplishment already as I looked around the room at the 30 students and staff from all around the world, here together for Kol Hillel.  Over a year and half ago, this was just an idea on a piece of paper.  The Jewish Peoplehood Innovation Award from NADAV Foundation helped kickstart the initiative and helped attract more support from UJA-Federation of New York, Jewish Agency for Israel and the Global Jewish Connections Initiative.

 It was so amazing to see the things that we had spent so long planning with Kiev Hillel and IDC Hillel actually happening.  To hear the participants laughing and smiling in Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew and English…it was indescribable.  This is what Jewish Peoplehood is all about…the tangible unity of an indescribable commonality.  Everyone in this group has a very different connection to their Jewish identity; there may be different knowledge, different experiences, different traditions and cultures, but we are all united.

Next post: A Passover seder from Russian-language haggadot, planned and led by everyone here.  This too is the reality of Jewish Peoplehood…the varying cultures, traditions and languages will combine to create something greater, something holier, something very, very Jewish.

P.S. BORSCHT!!!!

We are less than 24 hours away from our first Kol Hillel trip!  

A big thanks to NADAV Foundation, UJA-Federation of New York, Jewish Agency for Israel and Israel Connect for helping make this all a reality!

Keep checking in during the coming days as we'll have regular posts from trip participants (pictured below on a video conference with Kiev and Herzliya).

Chag Sameach!  !חג שמח 

My Experience at the General Assembly

Education Deprivation

   A mere five years ago, my reading material was limited to things that were religiously uncontroversial, I could count the      number of movies I had seen in theater on my fingers, and I was not allowed to use the Internet without parental supervision or consent.  Today I am 20 years old, enrolled in Baruch College, and I have discovered that the insularity with which I was raised pales in comparison to the xenophobic and overbearing nature of other religious sects. 

   About a month ago, I was introduced to Footsteps (footstepsorg.org), a secret society of sorts.  This group is comprised of young adults who have elected to leave their ultraorthodox way of life.  The members come from religious sects that censored their education and manipulated their lives to a dastardly extent. 

   They come from communities in New York State with regulatory power akin to that of a regime.  These communities have their own judicial system they turn to as a form of arbitration recognized by and supplanting New York’s judicial system. They have their own private schools wherein instead of educating their students, they seem to exist for the sole purpose of depriving their students of education.  These schools teach a maximum of one and a half hours of secular studies each day just four days of the week; the remainder of the time is devoted to religious studies.  The students leave these institutions without a substantive grasp of the English language and with no knowledge of their country’s history and heritage.  They are proficient in a language that is not quite a single language, but a bizarre dialect, a relic of ancient Europe, a conglomerate of languages seldom spoken outside their community. These students have never heard of the United States Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, and they will never learn about the big bang, evolution, and age of the universe or anything scientific that might remotely associate with anything religiously contentious.

These communities have separate institutions for girls and boys.  Girls are typically privileged with a more decent education than boys, but even their education pales in comparison with the public school system.  The girls, like the boys, are also lacking in knowledge that might be fundamental to even a high school drop out; things children are mandated to learn in grade school. The girls, at the very least, learn the English language and can speak it fluently though amateurishly by comparison.  In some of these communities, the boys are expected to pick up the English language once they are married, their wives serving as their teachers.

New York State has very explicit standards for education, and these communities are in flagrant violation of those.

Citation Text:

NY EDUC s 3204

Mckinney's Consolidated Laws of New York Annotated Currentness

Education Law (Refs & Annos)

 Chapter 16. Of the Consolidated Laws (Refs & Annos)

 Title IV. Teachers and Pupils

 Article 65. Compulsory Education and School Census (Refs & Annos)

 Part I. Compulsory Education

§ 3204. Instruction required

Section 3204.2 - Title IV, Article 65, Part I states:

"Instruction given to a minor elsewhere than at a public school shall be at least substantially equivalent to the instruction given to minors of like age and attainments at the public schools of the city or district where the minor resides."

It should be noted that this law was later amended.

Education Law: First Amendment, Due Process and Discrimination Litigation

Chapter

1. Religion Issues and Public Education[*]

§ 1:11. Religious Objections to Secular Curriculum and Activities—Generally

This amendment invokes both the establishment clause and free exercise clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) to make allowances and raise objections on religious grounds to school activities or curriculum.  However, this amendment also states that “even when there is a substantial burden on religious beliefs, the state's interest in educating its population may nevertheless prevail.”

The state has prescribed standards and requirements for the education of its citizenry and these are clearly not being met by some institutions. The educational attainments of the students who attend these ultraorthodox institutions are not near commensurate to those of even your less than average public school student.  These children do not even obtain a high school diploma, depriving them of any hope of attending college and achieving a higher level of education.  Some of the very motivated and highly intelligent young adults who have left their oppressive communities turn to organizations such as Footsteps to help them obtain a GED and go on to earn post secondary degrees. Along the way, they encounter many difficulties between supporting themselves, self-teaching things that many others take for granted and coping with estrangement from family that often results from their decision to pursue higher education.

            Young Adults for Fair Education (YAFFE, also a transliteration of the Hebrew word for “beautiful”) was conceived to promote student activism, inform the public of the grievance of the victims of these ultraorthodox communities, and to take legal action, whence appropriate. YAFFE aims to provide a more beautiful and enlightened future for those who have been deprived of the education and the tools that would have enabled them to find their futures on their own. 

[For more information or if you would like to get involved, please contact yaffeorg@gmail.com or you can be in touch with the author of this article by contacting miriam.lipsius@baruchmail.cuny.edu]