AFRICAN ART FROM

OPINION - -

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TI1ROUGIN JANUARY 3, 1595

My Israel Experience

MATTHEW GREGORY

Special to The Jewish News

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11/6
1998

Northwestern Highway, between 12 & 13 Mile Road

36 Detroit Jewish News

received a call from Rabbi Steve
Burg in Detroit in June, asking
if I was interested in traveling
to Israel with a Jewish youth
group, TJJ (The Jerusalem Journey).
The cost would be $2,500. I would
be away for about 29 days. I said I'd
love to. My parents agreed, but only if
I could raise -the money myself
My parents spent•$100 on a pass-
port and $200 on clothes I needed
for the trip. I raised $260 for my
plane fare from Detroit Metro to
LaGuardia in New York.
Then Nancy Margolis of the Jew-
ish Community Center of Washtenaw
County said the center would award
me a $1,000 scholarship toward the
trip. Barry Goldficher in New Jersey,
director of TJJ, said he would do his
best to have the National Conference
of Synagogue Youth, which is the
sponsor, supply the rest of the schol-
arship, or $1,500.
On June 29, my mother, Beverly
Schuelke, my grandmother, Irene
Adelstein, and I left for New York.
An aunt who lived in Great Neck,
N.Y., invited family and friends to a
going-away party, where I received a
siddur and tallit. The gifts made me
feel that I was on a higher spiritual
level.
On June 30, my aunt, uncle,
mother and grandmother came with
me to John F. Kennedy International
Airport to see me off. At 11:30 p.m.,
with tears on my cheeks, I said my
good-byes to my family and boarded
Tower Air Flight 30 for the 10-hour
flight.
We spent the first day of our trip
hiking a mile and a half in a water
tunnel, which was 30 feet under-
ground in the City of David. From
there, we went to a youth hostel in
Bayit Vegan and stayed there for four
days.
We left on July 5 and drove two
and a half hours to Allone-HaBashan
in the Golan Heights. We climbed
Mt. Benthal and swam through three
waterfalls; it was refreshing since the
temperature was 98 to 106 degrees
most days. We went down the
Hazbani River, only using our bodies,
hitting our bottoms on the rocks on
the river bottom.
We spent Shabbat in Zefat, one of

Matthew R. Gregory is a 10th grader
at Grass Lake High School in Grass
Lake, Mich.

the holiest cities, then traveled back
to Jerusalem. We stayed overnight the
week of July 13 in Ramat Shapiro.
While there, our group visited a
prison that held Jews before the
Holocaust and a detention camp used
during the Holocaust. One of the
most exciting activities was an archae-
ological dig at Maresha, where we
spent five hours walking and crawling
in underground tunnels. We decided
to stay and dig in an underground
cave for 3,000-year-old pottery; I was
lucky to find the bottom of an
ancient cup.
The saddest thing we did was visit
the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial
Museum. The children's memorial
was the hardest to walk through
because we saw millions of candles lit.
When we came out, we learned it was
only one candle; we were walking
with mirrors all around us. The rea-
son is that 1 1/2 million children
were killed in some way in the. Holo-
caust.

Visit to Yad
Vashem was the
saddest part of
trip.

Later, we went to Eilat for two
days. We snorkeled in the Red Sea,
although it did not split for us. We
also played "capture the flag" on the
border of Egypt. We climbed Mount
Tzefachot for five and a half hours,
but since we were going through
waterfalls, it was okay.
We stayed in En Gedi, which had
the best hostel because it had air con-
ditioning. The Dead Sea was right
across the street. I fell into the water,
of course, but was only in the water
for two seconds because it burned my
body.
We planted trees in the Keren
Kayemet Forest on the last full day of
the trip. I planted a tree in honor of
my grandmother.
As we got off the plane at JFK
after the long flight home, I was cry-
ing again as I said goodbye to all my
new friends from the extraordinary
trip. When I came home to my par-
ents in Detroit, I was relieved to see
their happy faces as I exited the ter-
minal. El

