Movin' On Out

This will be my last entry of Track 2 with OTZMA. All of the Kiryat Malachi roommates have packed their bags and are awaiting new adventures. We have finished our last days and said our goodbyes to all the children and students that have been a part of our lives for the last three months.

Lately, the sun has been out in full force and we have been spending a lot of time in a park near our house. I had a really special moment this week when I was playing Frisbee with my friend Brent and a little boy came up and looked like he wanted to play. Brent tossed him the Frisbee and he joined right in. We taught him how to throw with our broken Hebrew and body language and by the end this little guy was actually giving the disk a good spin! It was the cutest thing!
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I’m really going to miss these little interactions. This has been such a touching place to live. Everyone we have interacted with has been much more generous, patient, and hospitable than I would ever have imagined which has added so much to my experience. It will be sad to leave.

But new exciting things are in store. For the next three weeks I will be volunteering in the Israeli Defense Force. It’s not really as extreme as actually joining the army, but we do get to wear uniforms and live on the base. I am really excited about it and will post an entry soon.

After the army, it will be Track 3 where I have decided to live on Kibbutz Shiller for the rest of the program. I have always wanted to spend time on a kibbutz and felt like this was the perfect opportunity to take in order to carry out this goal. Last week I got a chance to visit. The kibbutz has tons of fruits and vegetables and when I go I’ll be picking oranges and avocados! I love avocados! The other volunteers are from all over the world and all around my age which is always fun. I can’t wait! Expect to hear fun stories from here as well! That’s all for now.

Almost As Good As Alaska

I was sure I’d have to go a whole year without hittin’ the slopes. There is actually one mountain in Israel, but really, skiing? In the Middle East? I didn’t even think it got that cold here (It does. It gets really really cold!) let alone that I would take a ski trip. But my arm was twisted when my friends suggested renting a car rather than figuring out all the transportation. We all piled in and headed way up to the top of the country – Mt. Hermon.

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Hermon had surprisingly nice slopes. There were three lifts on the front side and one on the back and a lot of different runs all over the mountain. Both of my friends were fairly inexperienced and hung out on the bunny hill for most of the day. But it turned out that inexperience was not such a big deal on this mountain. Israelis really are not the greatest skiers. In Alaska and Canada, and everywhere else I have skied, my abilities are about average (I could even keep up with Josh Schorr for a few runs during the ski weekends). But I am used to people just FLYING down the mountain. At Hermon, at any given time, at least 50% of the people were splattered all over the slopes. Random skis and poles littered the run. I picked up and delivered three different hats and a pair of sunglasses to thankful owners throughout the day. On the lift one time, I saw an empty snowboard go straight down from the very top, no rider in sight. So when my friends attempted the mountain and (ohh the poor guys) fell the whole way down, they kinda fit right in! It was quite a funny sight. The best part was that I was a pro here! I was the one flying down the mountain this time. It was great!

The weather was perfect awesome sunny spring skiing. For some of the day I was even just in a t-shirt. It was really some of the best skiing I have done in a long time. I wish I had a ski buddy, but the ipod worked almost as well. If you have the means, I highly recommend checking out skiing in the Middle East.

My Jewish Identity (or lack there of): Why did spending a year in Israel completely altered my concept of what it means for me to be Jewish?

I was a late bloomer. I was, and although for some hard to believe, shy. And yes, sadly to admit there were many times of social awkwardness in my younger years. But I knew this way of life was not for me, and I slowly began to develop my identity of self. It started towards the end of high school. But really it wasn’t until college that I really felt it, I was finally – cool.

Once I began to feel comfortable with my individual self, and as everyone does during this large leap of self-awareness, I took on different traits to see how I could further develop Jess. There was Party Jess, Studious Jess, Social Butterfly Jess, Sexy Jess, and to draw in the topic at hand – Jewish Jess.

I would go through these identities in different waves, sometimes too strong, and sometimes too weak, but through many years of trial and error, of extremes and lows in each trait I settled into the Jess, much more balanced and with a more defined sense of self than ever before, that walked across the UO graduation stage last June.

Now of course each of these strong aspects of my personality have some great and pretty hilarious stories of development, but what has driven me to write this article was an unexpected twist in Jewish Jess. Really upon reflection, Judaism has really been the only personality trait with the most stability throughout my life. So it only seemed natural for me to spend a year in Israel when I was lacking direction everywhere else in my life journey. Imagine my surprise to find that living here has made me feel less of a Jew than I have ever felt in my life.

I’ll explain how this happened with a short comparison of the American Jew and the Israeli Jew. As a minority in America, we are constantly bombarded with reminders that we are not like the rest of the population. The real kicker’s Christmas time, but I’m also talking about every year that I’ve had to explain what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were to my teachers (and professors), I’m talking about every time someone says “Oh I didn’t know you were Jewish – cool,” I’m talking about this assumption that we are something we’re not – Christian. Due to this, American Jews desperately try to hold on to everything they’ve got to identify with Judaism. Whether this is through the lens of Orthodoxism, Conservatism, or Reform observances, the methods practiced are to reinforce what it means to be Jewish and to connect us together as a people spread wide and far in the Diaspora. For me this was done as it was for many of my Jewish friends. I was sent to Sunday school, had a Bar Mitzvah, was sent to Jewish summer camp, sang Jewish folk songs even if I didn’t know what the words meant, lit candles and ate challah on Friday nights, knew many of the prays for services, wore a Star of David necklace for many years, and spent time with other Jewish people doing similar things. From this I classified myself as culturally Jewish. I have not believed in God for a very long time and anything religious my practice I would call traditional. These are things “Jews do” and I want to identify as Jewish and so I do them. I love matzo ball soup. I love tearing apart a loaf of challah. Everything I hold as Jewish reaffirms my identity of self and brings me comfort and contentment.

But this all gets flipflopped when the minority part of the equation is taken out. In Israel, being a cultural Jew is just being. What I did to identity as Jewish in American can now be accomplished by stepping into a grocery store (it’s a Jewish grocery store). By going to the mall (it’s a Jewish mall with Jewish shops). By going to a concert (the band is Jewish and so is everyone dancing around me). No longer do I have to pick things out to do specifically Jewish, because everything I now do in a land of Jewish people is, by definition Jewish. So why do I feel like I’m not?

Finding out that being Jewish is not by definition being Israeli has been a destruction of my foundations. I thought I would step off the plane and be just as home as in Eugene, but it hasn’t been like that. Israelis do weird things like park all over the sidewalks, they don’t understand my social boundaries, I still don’t understand their language, and people seem to be okay with not being polite. So now I am stuck with this cognitive dissidence and learning how to deal with it. Its not that I don’t love Israel, I do. It is just learning to see it as a foreign country and not home sweet home that creates this conflict.

And as I reflect now I have learned to appreciate what a special situation we have in American. It is a place where Jews can express their Judaism in ways that Israelis are not able to. There are as many degrees of religious and cultural observance as one can imagine, not a black and white – you either observe all the way or do nothing at all. The paths to finding one’s own Jewish journey and identity are flexible and individualized. I cannot be in Israel and do what I need to do to be Jewish. As contradictory as this sounds, it is comforting to put into words. I have had an amazing time spending the year here, learning more about life and myself than I ever expected, but I also know I could never live here.

Europe Is a Little Chilly This Time of the Year

I moved out of Alaska for the first time in my life at age eighteen and found to my surprise, in the lower 48, it is possible to drive for 5 hours and be in a completely different state, as opposed to just being still in Alaska. Similarly I have recently discovered since moving out of America that one can hop on a fairly cheap flight and be in a totally different country!

On this note I just spent the last weekend in Budapest. A friend of mine on the program found an amazing deal on the Internet for a $200 ticket that included a nice hotel. So off we went. Other than a small run in with the mob, freezing cold weather, lots of Goulash and drab communist housing, the trip went flawlessly. Below are the details of the fun and beautiful things we saw.
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2/3/06 First Day

Walking Tour on Our Own
We spent the first morning checking out the sights on our own. First walking down a cute street with lots of little shops. I went to my first H&M, and there were pink phones in the telephone booths! Budapest was once two cities Buda and Pest. They are divided by the Danube River, which you can cross at several bridges. The oldest of which is called the Chain Bridge. It was huge and beautiful. At the other side is the Buda side of town which is on a hill. This was the transportation to get up to the top. The view was awesome, but definitely a bit chilly.


The Matthias Church
This church was so gorgeous. We got lucky because there was a free English tour right when we showed up. This is the building where all of the Hungarian kings had been crowned and had also been destroyed several times through out Hungary's history. Both the Nazis and the Communists had their way with this place, putting stables in the church area and using the crypts underneath for sewage storage. But each time it was rebuild. Now it was almost completely restored.

Fishermen's Bastion and St. Steven
St. Steven was one of Hungarianain kings. I think his statue sorta looks like the old man guarding the holy grail in the last Indiana Jones movie.

Labyrinth Caves
Umm.. this was a mistake. So Budapest is apparently on top of a huge cave system and there are places to go explore and crawl through them. We thought this was it so we paid the admission fee and went inside. It started off a little cheesy, but with potential. The guide booklet told us the beginning was supposed to represent the beginning of the world and center of "our soul” and some other weird hippy stuff. The air was dense and damp and it was really dark. There was also this drum beat sound like a heartbeat that was honestly a little freaky especially when my friends would run ahead and jump out of dark corners. It was complete with fake cave drawings and odd heads coming out of the ground. Sorry I can'’t offer more of an explanation - there was nothing that made sense! When we finally meandered through all this craziness, we got to this one thing that said while they were "excavating" they had to stop because of a miraculous find. A fossil from the extinct species "Homo Consumpionous”. And the fossil was a Ked shoe print! It went on to show a fossil of a computer and the last straw - a Coke bottle! Are you kidding me???!! We only had two days in Budapest and we wasted an hour of it here!

More Walking
It was night by the time we got out, so we went around the rest of the sites in the dark. This was okay because most of them had really cool lights,but the museums were closed by then. Also what was really a bummer was we missed being able to see the great synagogue. Hungry had a Jewish population of around 40% before the Holocaust and there was the Dohany Street Synagogue built in 1859 in Budapest that fit around 3,000 people! We saw it from the outside, but it was closed when we got there.

2/4/06 Last Day

Opera House
Our first stop was to see the opera house and get tickets to Swan Lake, which was playing that night. Unfortunately the tours were later in the day and that’s when we were planning on going to the bathhouses so we missed that.

Turkish Bathhouses
When the Turks took over in the 1500s they put these amazing bathhouses all over Budapest. The one we went to was this huge structure with three swimming pool sized hot tubs in the courtyard and inside there were all these rooms with fancy columns and all these different tubs of different temperatures! It was AMAZING! And there were saunas and steam rooms all over the place.

Swan Lake
Then we saw the ballet Swan Lake in the opera house. I'’d never seen a ballet besides the Nutcracker and this was so cool. The dancing was absolutely amazing and kinda made me wish I had stuck with ballet lessons when I was little.

Authentic Dinner
For food that night, we got recommendation for a real authentic place for Hungarian food. After wandering super sketchy alleys to find it we arrived. It was so worth it at the moment, but not so much on the stomach later. Hungarian food is very heavily fried meat and potatoes and fried. A little too dense for my taste.

And that was it. The next day we hopped on a plane and headed back to Israel. Not such a bad way to spend the weekend!

The OTZMA Volunteers of Kiryat Malachi

Mindy Goldberg, Jess Mauer, Jeramie Bloom, Alissa Goldstein, Jen Matlin, Stephanie Hanna