The year that shaped me What I learned by spending the mid-1960s in Israel
An essay by Seymour Epstein
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NAOMI HARRIS
I n 1965-’66, at the age of 19, I spent a year studying in Israel, a time that transformed me deeply. What follows is a recollection of how that groundbreaking year shaped my future. Borrowing from my memoir, From Couscous to Kasha: Reporting From the Field of Jewish Community Work , about my 18 years spent with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee:
“As a student of Hebrew literature in my early 20s, I was much influenced by Chaim Hazaz’s short story, ‘The Sermon’ (haDrasha), in which the anti-hero, Yudka, bemoans the fact that Jewish history is done to us. In his Zionist fervour, Yudka yearns to be a subject but believes we have become objects of history.”
My chosen career as a Jewish educator was my humble attempt to do Jewish history by teaching a new generation of Jewish youth about their rich heritage of languages, litera- ture, values, and spirituality. In the mid-1960s, I was a student in the joint program of the Jewish Theological Sem- inary and Columbia University. The Teachers’ Institute at JTS, as it was then known, was an academic program designed to train Jewish Studies teachers for Jewish educa- tional institutions. As at similar schools in
“I was born one year after the Holo- caust ended in Europe and two years before the establishment of the State of Israel, and spent much of my youth mourning and celebrat- ing those two events. I had the sense that the great moments of 20th cen- tury Jewish history had passed me by, and that my life would be lived as a passive object of that history, not as one of its writers.
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