Creating leaders with NCSY-OU’s JOLT

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Summer can be a time of relaxing or slacking off for some students, but for 33 high school age girls and boys on NCSY—OU’s Jewish Overseas Leadership Training (JOLT) program, it was a summer of action, roller-coaster like emotional highs and lows, and spiritual and leadership growth.

The students on the program hailed from 12 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces and traveled through Poland to Auschwitz, Majdanek, Birkenau, Treblinka, Tiktin, Gur, Chachmei Lublin and the Warsaw Ghetto and cemetery. Guided throughout by six advisors, the program continued with the students honing their leadership skills by running a summer camp for German Jewish teens, bonding with each other and the German Jewish youth. The last leg of the trip brings them to Israel.

“It’s a visceral but necessary week,” said Rabbi Nahum Zak, the director of the program, of the visits to the concentration camps, noting that the program is titled Past, Present and Future. “It’s not gratuitous. We focus the kids on how to be as dedicated to building Judaism as those monsters were to destroying it and to take the inspiration and translate it into concrete action.”

NCSY, formerly the National Conference of Synagogue Youth, was founded by the Orthodox Union in 1954 to help inspire and train Jewish teens to connect with Judaism through Torah and leadership skills. JOLT is almost 20 year old, said Zak, and its goal is to train Jewish leaders by combining the “theoretical with the practical.” Originally a financial adviser, Zak began working with NCSY 14 years ago and was regional director of the New York region for five years and Southern region for the last three years. “JOLT is the most significant thing I’ve done with NCSY,” he said. He noted the members are an “eclectic mix,” that it is a “very selective” program and the students have to be “brave, not scared to not know anybody.” He admits to learning “new things about myself and about my Judaism every time.”

Renee Wietschner of Woodmere, a senior at Central (Samuel H. Wang Yeshiva University High School for Girls of Queens), said the highlight of the trip was landing in Israel after the trip through Poland on LOT Polish airlines. “We were finally in Israel and the only ones on the plane excited to be landing in Israel; we were the only Jews on the plane.” She noted that it was a “small group” so they “bonded with everybody” and they were “friendly, like a family.” She found that “in the beginning it was hard to connect,” noting that she is a fifth generation American on both sides and has no immediate family affected by the Holocaust, “but it is still my history.” The trip through Poland, she said was “emotionally draining. Auschwitz looked like a college campus with brick buildings, in a weird way,” but “Majdanek was scary,” she said. It looked, she said she thought, “the same way as when it was functioning. We were able to see the Zyklon B on the walls of the gas chambers. The Nazis kept the ashes” of the victims and the students cried the most there. “It was also scary to see the ovens; it would take 30 minutes to put back together to get it up and running, I think… everybody was crying--there was not one dry eye. We said Tehillim and Kadish in all the places. The advisers cried with us; we couldn’t not cry.”

She noted her brush with anti-Semitism there. “The Polish and German people looked at us the wrong way,” she said and a stewardess on the Polish airline “shoved me to the side,” she said. “That was my first taste. In Auschwitz, people were having a picnic on the lawn there; it was really disgusting. They use it as a public park.”

Zak said that the kids have a connection to the Poland experience and “take mental snapshots” and write in journals. “The inspiration may wane,” he said, they “have what to draw from and continue forward. It’s intentionally a process. Germany is the next step” where they “run a camp for German Jewish kids. They are given the opportunity to put together educational modules and schedules….It makes them reassess their own Judaism. In Germany, they are scratching and clawing to bring Judaism into their lives. It’s so easy for us, what is taken for granted. It extends to me as well. I feel spoiled as a Jew, it’s so accessible and easy (in New York). There were 3.3 million Jews in Poland before the war. There are 4.8 million Jews in the U.S. now, but only about 1.5 million are affiliated. There were more affiliated Jews in Poland before the war and now it’s a wasteland. What if Central Avenue or Kings Highway looked like this. They see the ghosts of the last generation.”

JOLT celebrated Shabbat in Cracow in NCSY fashion, holding on to the day as it drew to a close, “ebbing” Zak called it, for an additional hour or two, singing and dancing in the streets of Cracow, “dancing with the ghosts of the other generation.” He said that people stopped to take pictures and ask if they could join, Jews and non-Jews. After that, arriving in Israel, he said, “there is no way that you can look at Israel the same way. It’s almost like going the first time; it’s fresh, new, magical. When we arrived at Ben-Gurion airport, we all stopped at the first mezuzah we saw there, a three-foot mezuzah, the first one we saw in three weeks. There, in Israel, we have the freedom, guns and army.”

During the camp in Germany, Wietschner taught a girl to say “Shma” and basic Hebrew and became close with a girl close to her age there. “She called me up and Skyped last night,” she said. “And she said ’I just said Shma!’” Another girl “recorded on Facebook that she kept her first Shabbat at home by herself.” Wietschner said they made a bat mitzvah party for the girls with a party and shared divrei Torah and a 15 year old boy who hadn’t had a bar mitzvah was called to the Torah and was helped to make a bracha. “It was amazing to hear,” she recounted.

Hudy Rosenberg, of Queens, another Central senior, has been active in NCSY since her freshman year and was one of the New York regional presidents this year. Her older brother went on JOLT and she decided to go on JOLT as well. Rosenberg has relatives who are Holocaust survivors on both sides, either escaping, being in the camps, kinder transport and related to others who did not survive. She said that she was really touched by some of the mass graves they saw. “One was an entire shtetl that was killed and connected me to my grandfather. Another was a mass grave of 42 children and we ran a camp for 40 children. It made us feel that although there was a Holocaust, we are still here. Rabbi Zak said that it is as if we are spitting in Hitler’s eyes.” She said that she has a weekly chevruta (personal learning session) with one of the girls from the camp “practicing reading Hebrew using her siddur so she can learn to daven (pray) better.”

She said that Majdanek was “overwhelming; I couldn’t process it, I felt sick, I felt like throwing up.” She said that she had been to Israel twice but that “this time it was a sense of relief” that they had been in an environment of “no Judaism, no kosher food” where they felt unsafe and that they “had to hide their Judaism.” When they arrived in Israel this time, she felt “a sense of belonging, a sense of home. I never felt like I belong in Israel so much as after Poland and Germany.” She noted that through the program she was able to connect with many types of people and “understand different viewpoints and levels of religiosity.”

Rosenberg also paid for the trip herself. “The entire year I was consumed (by the need to) save for the trip. I saved for it and appreciate it better.” She saved her money from babysitting, working in the shul youth department, and if her mother asked if she wanted to “buy something” she said she would “rather save for JOLT” and put the money in her “JOLT jar.”

“I never appreciated my yeshiva education until now,” said Wietschner. “I’ve been living in the Five Towns and had a yeshiva education all my life. I never realized how much I had, how much I take for granted. I didn’t realize that you really can have nothing.”

For more information on OU-NCSY programs go to www.ncsy.org.