During those 11 days in Israel we aimed to teach and empower young leaders and go from strength to strength, both in Netzer and as a community!
To gain a deeper-than-falafel insight into Israeli society and religious issues we met with a variety of organizations and social action groups.
This was the second time ever that we have planned a tour/seminar for our future leadership in Israel.
Thirteen participants from Cape Town, Pretoria, Johannesburg and Durban madrichim joined in, touring around the holy and hot land of Israel from the Galilee to the Arava, visiting Progressive communities, spending Shabbat in Jerusalem, meeting Netzer's people in Israel, and on the Shnatties and hadrachah (leadership) programmes.
We went to controversial places like the Lebanon border, where we saw the actual place where the soldiers were kidnapped one year ago, the separation wall in Jerusalem, the environmental Reform Kibbutz in the Arava, underprivileged neighbourhoods of foreign workers in southern Tel Aviv, Yad Vashem (the Holocaust museum) and more. The theme of the tour was Progressive Judaism in Israel, with all the conflicts and complexities that it includes in Israeli society in 2007.
This tour will serve to inspire our leadership and will give them a tangible foundation from which to develop into madrichim in our movement, and later leaders in the community.
We hope this tour will prove itself very successful and reach its aims in building a strong leadership in Netzer, and making the madrichim enthusiastic and committed to the movement.
Nilmad v'Na'aseh!
We will learn and we will do!
Gareth Hall, 16, a Netzer madrich from Johannesburg, tells