To Life!

EDUCATION

Trip Of A
Lifetime

Young students share
their journey to Israel.

Shelli Dorfman

Staff writer

ir

his year, a longstand
ing eighth-grade class
trip to Washington,
D.C., became a first-time, two-
week-long mission to Israel for
students at Hillel Day School•of
Metropolitan Detroit.
The firsthand look at Jewish
history and Israeli culture ran
the gamut from a kibbutz stay
and mountain hikes to a night
under the stars in a Bedouin vil-
lage and volunteer work at a soup
kitchen. .
During the April 23-May 8
trip, the 47 Hillel students baked
pita, prayed outdoors, visited Yad
Vashem and the graves of Israeli

Hillary Dorman of West

Bloomfield and Rachel Reed

of Bloomfield Hills, both 14,

take a ride on a camel during

a visit to a Bedouin tent in

the Judean Desert.

.

Rachel Margolin of

Orchard Lake and Alyssa

Adler of West Bloomfield,

both 14, hike in the Eilat

Mountains.

Corey Rosen, 14,
of Farmington Hills

prays at the Kotel.

leaders and soldiers, shopped at a
mall and met Israeli teens.
One day was spent harvesting
vegetables for Table to Table, an
organization that feeds the hun-
gry in Israel.
"We were in the wilderness
of our ancestors:' wrote Steve
Freedman, Hillel's head of school
in an e-mail to the students'
parents. At one point, the group
stopped half way up the Eilat
mountains to study a text from
the Tanach about Elijah. "The
story took place in the Sinai
which was in plain view to us,"
Freedman wrote.
"Our guide connected the story
to the raw power and beauty of
the desert as we sat in silence to
hear the stillness and the 'gentle

Jared Hirsch of West

Bloomfield, gym teacher Brad

Freitag and Joshua Lowenthal

of West Bloomfield enjoy a

mud bath in the Dead Sea.

•

whisper' of God in the wind. At
the peak of the mountain, we saw
Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia
— while standing in Israel!" .
And as for the Washington trip.
"Our seventh-graders went right
before Pesach break:' Freedman
said. So, nekt year, for them,
a visit to Israel will be part of
Hillel's new annual tradition.
Several of this year's partici-
pants reflect on their experience:

By Rachel Margolin
In the Torah, we learn that when
you go to harvest your crops, you
should save the corners of your
fields for the poor and hungry:
When I went to Israel this past
month with Hillel Day School, we
participated in that mitzvah.
In Israel, there is an organiza-
tion called Table to Table that
works with farmers to harvest
unsold fruits and vegetables for
the hungry. The eighth-graders of
Hillel came to one of those fields
to volunteer and were assigned to
pick beet roots.
We did not waste any time
worrying if we were going to
get dirty. As we began this fun
mitzvah in the fields, we came
to realize how many people in
Israel we were actually helping.
Within less than one hour, we
had picked 97 large crates of
beets, which were to be distrib-

Trip of a Lifetime on page 54

June 1 . 2006

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