Arad teens visit Schechter students
By Seth Mandel
Jan. 4, 2008

As the students at Solomon Schechter Academy of Monmouth and Ocean Counties piled into their Howell school house the morning of Dec. 5, they were joined by a group of teens who had traveled just a bit farther, but were still on time.

Through a teen exchange program, kids from Israel's Arad-Tamar region visited Monmouth County the week of Dec. 5-12. Their first stop, straight from the airport, was Solomon Schechter.

"They spent time with all of our kids in all the classes; they even had a music class together, and they sang Israeli songs and they danced," said Schechter Principal Rivka Budelman. "It really was a wonderful, wonderful day."

Arad-Tamar are the sister cities for the New Jersey-Delaware region of Partnership 2000, a program developed by the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) that partners Diaspora communities with Israeli communities. The Jewish Federation of Greater Monmouth County organized the exchange program along with eight local synagogues, which for the last four years has given Jewish teens in the area a chance to mingle with their Israeli counterparts.

Miriam Mizrahi, the director of leadership development for the Monmouth federation, said the trip's main purpose was to help each group of teens understand the lives of the other, appreciating the differences and celebrating the similarities.

"Although the situation is a little different, their life is kind of the same," Mizrahi said. "They listen to the same music, and they all have iPods, and they don't go to school on camels -- that was a question that was asked a few times. So it was kind of just to show them that they live the same kind of life."

One of the stark differences, however, is the Israeli teens' compulsory army service.

"And you saw the faces on the teens here how they were shocked -- they're going to go to college and have fun and these kids are going to go straight to the army," Mizrahi said. "So that was something that they found very interesting."

Mizrahi said the Israeli teens that were selected had to go through a screening process, and one of the factors in the application process was their grasp of English, to make sure that the groups could communicate clearly with each other.

"We got the best of the best as far as their English," Mizrahi said.

But Budelman said the Israeli teens were surprised to learn how well the Schechter kids could speak their language, during afternoon prayers and in casual conversation.

"Some of them were amazed that our kids can pray like that, and they were very impressed with the Hebrew our kids spoke, and the way they could express themselves in Hebrew," Budelman said. "So it was really nice."

Budelman said the Israeli teens showed a video they made of life in their home towns and took questions from the Schechter kids, who had plenty to ask.

Budelman said that because of the annual Schechter graduation trip to Israel, the school is developing close ties with the communities of Arad-Tamar, and this visit served to strengthen that bond.

"We have a longstanding relationship with Arad," she said. "And every year when our kids go to Israel for their eighth grade trip, we make sure that they hook up with kids from Arad. So last year when the eighth grade went, they had a baseball game together. And this year I'm going to make sureÉ that we meet with the kids that were here, so that should be even more exciting."

Mizrahi said the teens' trip started at Schechter, and from there the kids traveled around Monmouth County to Hebrew high schools and other local schools, and then ended their trip with a visit to Solomon Schechter in Marlboro.

She said all the teens live in the Tamar Dead Sea region, but some of them came from the city of Arad, and others came from a nearby kibbutz or moshav, so the Schechter kids got a firsthand account of the different walks of life among Israeli teenagers.

"It was really nice to see how well the teens here took to it and how much they learned," she said.

This was the first year that Mizrahi accompanied the kids on their trip through Monmouth, but she said it was definitely a successful visit and officials are planning for a fifth year of the exchange program next year.

"There are kids who now want to go to Israel who probably never thought of going ever in their entire life," Mizrahi said of the effect the Israeli teens had on their new American friends. "It was an amazing experience. These kids were amazing."