A year of a lifetime

The Institute of Youth Leaders from Overseas celebrates 70 years.

By WENDY BLUMFIELD
Students of the 1963-4 intake of the Institute for Youth Leaders (photo credit: WENDY BLUMFIELD)
Students of the 1963-4 intake of the Institute for Youth Leaders
(photo credit: WENDY BLUMFIELD)
As one follows the lives of olim from Western countries, it is obvious that their aliya was based mainly on idealism.
Whether they were embarking on a new life in their youth, coming with young families or retiring in Israel perhaps to join their adult children, it was a dream of a lifetime often inspired by their youth movements.
This year, the Institute of Youth Leaders from Overseas (Machon Lemadrichei Hutz La’aretz) celebrates 70 years since its inception. In the absence of an international event covering all those years, Rona Hart and several of her comrades from the 33rd intake (Mahzor Lamed-Gimel, 1963-4) decided to organize their own reunion. Together with Yigal Levine, Ruth Tenenholtz and Reuven Genn, they traced old friends from Israel and overseas and put together a three-day program based in Zichron Ya’acov.
Starting with a festive dinner at the Eden Inn, they shared photographs and presented brief biographies, catching up with ”53 years in five minutes” as each participant talked about his or her life since that life-changing experience.
They also tracked down a former teacher at the machon, Prof. Gidi Shimoni, emeritus professor of Israel-Diaspora relations at the Hebrew University and himself a graduate of an earlier intake. The former South African was delighted to meet his old students and gave a lecture on “Zionist Discourse on Right to the Land, Then and Now,” examining the historic, religious, moral and legal claims made by the early Zionists, as well as noting claims made by the Arabs.
The second morning was spent at nearby Ramat Hanadiv, where Genn, who volunteers at the magnificent Rothschild Gardens researching rare species of plants, had organized a guide and lunch at the Mataim Restaurant, a social venture of the Dualis Foundation, which hires youth at risk.
With a barbecue in Karkur at the home of Reuven and Rina Genn, the group discussed Israel today and many issues that concern them, including protecting the environment, recycling and social tolerance. They listened to the odyssey of an Ethiopian immigrant and the dangers and hardships he endured when, at age nine, he and his family journeyed to Israel.
SPEAKING TO many of the 25 participants at the reunion, it was obvious that the machon experience was a watershed that has impacted their lives.
For most of them it was their first time away from home. At the age of 17 to 21, they spent a year in Israel without the modern technology, emails, Whatsapp and Internet that makes today’s gapyear youngsters more accessible to their families.
The machon was founded in 1946 by the World Zionist Organization to train Zionist youth leaders who would return to their home countries, work in the Jewish community and pass on Zionist values, promoting aliya.
The program, which has reached more than 12,000 young people from all over the world, is intended to strengthen their leadership skills and enhance their knowledge of Jewish and Zionist history and society. Apart from the studies based in Jerusalem, the students toured the country and volunteered in development towns and kibbutzim.
So it is not surprising that many of those students of the 1960s have in, their various ways, made a difference to the communities in which they have lived and worked.
Rona Hart has lived in Haifa since 2008 but had spent several periods before that in Israel. She was born in Llandudno and grew up in Colwyn Bay, a small but united Jewish community in Wales. Her father was the highest-ranking Jewish firefighter in the UK. She was active in Hanoar Hatzioni, and in 1963 she participated in the machon.
On her return home, she fulfilled her leadership work in Liverpool.
Returning to Haifa in 1966 to spend time with her boyfriend, Hart worked as a nanny for an English family. She remembers the excitement of visiting the Western Wall on the first day that the public was allowed access.
During the next years she worked for Jewish community organizations in England, including the British Aliya Movement, and volunteered with the 35’s women’s campaign for Soviet Jewry.
“But all the time I was drawn back to Israel,” she says.
The Jewish Board of Deputies sent her on its mission in Israel as public relations officer, a job she kept for 11 years, during which time she also lobbied for the Concerned Citizens Organization.
She returned to the UK to care for her elderly father.
In 2008, she returned permanently to Haifa. Now retired, she is busier than ever, active in public diplomacy (hasbara) organizations such as the Coalition of Hasbara Volunteers and working with Christian groups on coexistence.
YIGAL LEVINE is known to many British immigrants for the many years that he worked in the Tel Aviv head office of the British Olim Society. Sponsored by Habonim in Glasgow, he had been inspired by a summer camp.
“Although I was an only child, I was encouraged by my parents who were active in Zionist causes,” he recalls.
His mother worked for WIZO, and his father in the Technion Society. Following the machon, he spent time at the David Eder Hachshara farm in England and continued movement work in Manchester, where he met his future wife, Linda.
The couple made aliya to Kibbutz Amiad, where they spent the first year, after which Levine studied to be a teacher in Jerusalem. With a first baby on the way, he needed to work. For the next 29 years, he was with the British Olim Society. This was followed by his work as deputy director of the Commercial Section of the British Embassy until his retirement. Today he has eight grandchildren, enjoys gardening and volunteers at Beit Hatfutsot – the Museum of the Jewish People.
Ruth Tenenholtz was born in Holland and got a stipend for the machon from Bnei Akiva. She arrived before the rest of the group, as her sister had made aliya in July 1963, and she used the time to attend an ulpan at Kibbutz Yavne.
“An amazing year; it made us what we are” is how she describes the machon, where she met her future husband. In 1969 they made aliya and settled in Kiryat Shmuel. Arriving with two small children, three more were born after their aliya. She was a licensed teacher, studied for a PhD in English literature and spent her professional years training teachers.
Now retired, she is writing a book and enjoys swimming. After 40 years of marriage the couple separated in 2003, and her former husband died in 2012.
Reuven Genn is one of those people whose life in retirement is as challenging and as active as his years in his varied professions. He joined the machon from Brooklyn, sponsored by the Betar movement.
“I felt right at home in Israel,” he says.
In May 1967 he took the last civilian flight out of New York to support Israel during the Six Day War, then returned home to complete his studies. He worked in Jewish community outreach, developed community-based federal drug programs and studied group psychotherapy at Johns Hopkins University and the Gestalt Institute.
In 1974 he and his wife returned to Israel, where he directed city community centers in Afula and established a school-based model in Nahariya. He served in the army and later helped to initiate Sar-El, working with volunteers from abroad. The couple later moved to Moshav Zar’it on the northern border, where there were “chickens, apples, vineyards, olives and lots of Katyushas.”
He taught at the University of Haifa and worked as a therapist and professional supervisor for kibbutz and moshav family clinics and social services in the North. After two years as an emissary in Miami, he studied information science at Bar-Ilan University and worked in hi-tech, digitalizing artifacts and documents for museums and creating employment and fund-raising data bases for the Ethiopian community.
In his retirement he regularly hikes, having completed the Israel Trail, does woodwork and volunteers at the Rothschild Botanical Gardens and Nature Reserve.
Few readers have not heard of Jacob’s Ladder, the folk and country festival held at Lake Kinneret, often called the Anglo Mimouna. Its founder, Menachem Vinegrad, was also a graduate of the machon (Mahzor Lamed-Gimel).
He was born in Hull and grew up in Leeds. Vinegrad was sponsored by the Dror youth movement and, on his return to the UK, he started a Dror group in Leeds.
“It was life-changing, one of the finest years of my life,” he says.
He was the youngest student at the machon, coming to Israel at age 15. He made aliya to Kibbutz Mahanayim in 1967 with his wife, childhood sweetheart Yehudit, where he worked as an English teacher, as well as in the kibbutz agricultural branches. After shlihut in the US, the couple returned to Israel, joining Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi.
“By that time we wanted a family. As the kibbutz still had children sleeping away from the home, we changed lifestyle and moved to Katzrin,” he says.
The couple have three children and five grandchildren.
Vinegrad was greatly influenced by the folk music revival in the UK and the Civil Rights Movement in the US. In 1978, he and a few like-minded immigrants launched Jacob’s Ladder.
“When Yehudit and I came to Israel, we wanted to change the world,” he explains. “I never learned a musical instrument, although I sing British folk.
Jacob’s Ladder is more professional and has developed over the years. We’re pushing 70 and carry on.”
Other graduates who attended part of the reunion included Yair Hirschfeld, who since 1979 has worked on dialogue with the Palestinian leadership, negotiations based on the Camp David Accords. In 1991 he wrote a research paper which became the blueprint for the Oslo negotiations, although he himself opposed the Oslo II Agreement. To this day he is an adviser to the government and assisted in the coordination of security between the IDF and the Palestinian security forces to ease the disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank. He is academic director of the Daniel Abrahams Center for Strategic Dialogue at the Netanya Academic College.
In the world of art, Yael Artsi, a world-renowned sculptor, joined the machon from Morocco. She made aliya at age 22 and in 1973 studied art and sculpture in Paris. She has three children and lives with her husband in Kibbutz Sdot Yam, where she has created a sculpture park overlooking the sea.
Her sculptures are exhibited in numerous overseas projects, but her most famous works in Israel are at the Peace Garden in Eilat, the sculpture park in Ashdod and the dramatic basalt stone memorial of Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv, a work that was an expression of her grief about his assassination.
These are just a handful of stories of these amazing graduates who, when only in their teens, left their families and homes for a year in Israel, an experience that prepared them for a life of challenges and reinforced their Jewish and Zionist values. And each one in his or her own way has contributed to the quality of life in Israel. Those who returned to the Diaspora retain their loyalty and love of Israel and continue to contribute those values in their own communities.