By Natalie Rosen
The senior Lev Ve’Nefesh, or “heart and soul”, trip is one of the most meaningful and exciting events that students look forward to each year as a conclusion to their high school careers. In the past, the trip ran for two months at the end of January until the end of March, consisting of one and half weeks in Poland and six plus weeks in Israel. This year, the Israel portion of the trip has been a big concern due to the ongoing war with Hamas. This presented a challenge to those involved in the planning process of the trip. Due to the complications presented in Israel, going to Poland without Israel afterward would have been a different experience, therefore resulting in the addition of Italy.
Rabbi Harry Pell, Associate Head of School, knew he did not want to bring students to Poland without having some way to debrief after.
“Do we really want to take our students to Poland, give them a deeply impactful Shoah experience, and then have them get on a plane to fly right home without time to process together?” Pell said. “It just felt educationally irresponsible not to keep the group together. So we decided we wanted to do something else Jewish and positive after Poland.”
While crafting the trip, it was very important to Pell to maintain a theme of jewish history while also shifting to something more light hearted, in contrast to heavy holocaust sites in poland. He also had to consider safety in different countries due to a recent spike in anti semitic incidents.
“Italy is a country that has incredible Jewish history, and has the infrastructure to bring Jewish groups,” Pell said. “I knew we could put together a trip there and I also felt it could be meaningful and give the students time to be together as a group after Poland. So Italy was sort of the perfect solution to that puzzle.”
Senior, Robin Bosworth, explains the importance of the trip to her and her peers while also explaining the significance of experiencing Lev Ve’Nefesh with the school community.
“The Poland trip is so important, I think, for every single Jewish person to experience at least once in their lives,” Bosworth said. “And I think it’s really special and impactful that we got to experience it as a grade and I think it’s such an integral part of what Leffell offers.”
She continues to explain one particularly impactful experience on the memorable trip.
“They took us to this square in the middle of nowhere in Poland and in there, there was this Bima,” Bosworth said. “The synagogue around it had been destroyed, but the Bima was the main structural part of the building, so it’s still standing. It really summarized the meaning of this trip. They tried to knock us down, they tried to literally burn everything down, but we’re still here, we’re still the Jews. This Bima in the middle of nowhere in this random Town Square in Poland is still standing. I will definitely remember that forever.”
Another student on the trip, Mitchell Breakstone, describes a different kind of meaningful experience he had in Poland. He talks about the emotions he felt when they visited Majdanek death camp.
“At Majdanek, there was no one there, it was just us,” Breakstone said. “It was a rainy day and there were crows roaming around, and it was just so eerie. I was thinking about how we were dressed in our nice clothes and our expensive jackets and we were wet and freezing. We also had our stomachs full, and we were perfectly hydrated, but we weren’t comfortable. To think of the people that had to live there with no clothing, minimal food and water, no privacy, terrible living conditions, sparked emotion in me at Majdanek that I personally didn’t feel anywhere else.”
As mentioned before, a lot of thought had to go into why to visit Italy and what to do there. Pell recalls an enlightening experience near the tower of Pisa in Italy, somewhere that one might think is very touristy but actually has interesting Jewish History.
“In Italy you can find Jewish history going back, 2000 plus years, or in the case of Venice, 500, 600, 700 years,” Pell said. “Most people don’t know that there used to be a Jewish cemetery right outside the city wall by the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The headstones are gone now but as a kindness to the poorer Jews, they had their name etched into the wall so it could be their headstone. Most people walk by and have no idea that there are still Hebrew names on that wall, so to be able to take students to see the wall and touch history was really powerful.”
Even though the Poland trip was run at a normal time with the addition of Italy, the Israel trip was pushed back until after Pesach and shortened to accommodate graduation in June. In order to plan a meaningful trip and get to a point where they felt comfortable bringing students to Israel, Pell and Lev Ve’Nefesh program director, Marc Kaye, had to ask many important questions.
“How do you take a two month program and make it into a one month program?” Kaye said. “How do we help the seniors understand what happened with the war? What do we want to do differently this year and what do we think is important to do, because of the war’s impact on Israeli society?”
Despite the war, Kaye felt it was incredibly important, especially now during this uncertain time, to visit Israel.
“We’re not just coming to learn history about the Jewish people like we normally would,” Kaye said. “We’re also coming during a very, very vulnerable time for Israel and Israeli society and we want to allow students an opportunity to contribute something. I think that’s a really important message.”
As they move further from the first half of the trip, excitement is building in the senior class for the upcoming second half of Lev Ve’Nefesh.
“I think that we’re all really looking forward to being together and just spending time in Israel together,” said Mitchell Breakstone. “I think that this variation of Lev Ve’Nefesh is shaping out to be a really, really meaningful, powerful and fun experience.”
On top of the excitement of spending time together in Israel, there is a particular feeling of going to Israel right now that is certainly indescribable.
“I think, for me, being back in Israel after October 7 is going to be really impactful because the world kind of flipped upside down that day,” Robin Bosworth said. “I think it will be really cool and meaningful to be back in our country, our home.”
