trip of the summer. This gave me the mobility to properly tour the small, divided city that Jerusalem was in 1965. It also permitted me the odd road trip to Tel Aviv to visit a couple who had adopted me on that boat from Na- ples to Haifa. I had no family in the country, and that couple became my link to Israeli life, since most of my time was spent with other transient students. Studying with Israel’s best minds Of all the exciting experiences, it was the high quality of teaching by the very best instructors in Jerusalem which made the year for me. My studies at Hebrew Univer- sity included a Bible course with Nechama Leibowitz. She refused to teach at Mechon Greenberg for religious reasons, but did teach at Mechon Gold, run by the Torani (religious) division of the Jewish Agency, and at Hebrew University, a secular institution. One can imagine how much sense that made to us North American students. Her approach to text was based on close reading and profound respect for tradition- al interpretation, along with an emotional attachment to sacred text. It was so different from the highly rational, scientific study at JTS, which I also valued for its intellectual integrity. It was Prof. Leibowitz who taught me that both were possible and that, indeed, the mix of cognitive analysis and emotional identification was a holistic perspective I could best identify with. There were some dramatic moments in her class, as when a passage from Exodus had some exceptional contemporary meaning for her and she would reveal her innermost feelings. I remember so well her teaching of the passage in which God tells Moses how He will deliver the Jews from their Egyptian enslavement and bring them to the land of Israel. When she arrived at verse nine —“And Moshe spoke thus to the Israelites, but they did not heed Moshe out of shortness of breath and hard bondage”—she was visibly shaken by the fact that the children of Israel could not listen to the lofty words of God be- cause of their hard work and their shortness of breath. She emphasized that kotzer ruach is not “impatience,” as in modern Hebrew, but literally shortness of breath or even em- physema, the disease of slaves. To this day, I love teaching that text to Israelis so that they can see the brutal origin of a term they use so differently today. Over the years, I have found several new meanings in that text as I teach it again and again. It was Prof. Leibowitz’s passion for the text itself and her innate pedagogic skills
with which I pursued my studies that year. Mechon Greenberg was spread over three locations in the Baka and Talpiot neighbour- hoods of 1965 Jerusalem. We studied on Rechov Shimshon, we ate on Rechov Reuven, and we slept in Pension Carmi on Rechov Ein Gedi. Our dormitory was the last house on the border of the no-man’s-land that sep- arated it from Jordanian Jerusalem. If your laundry blew across the fence, you didn’t venture out to retrieve it. The students from North America arrived in September, the middle of the academic year for the South American students who were attending what they spelled Mejon Green- berg. They studied all day at the Machon. We spent half the day there and the other half at the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University. There was some culture shock. The room “The cook would bake a cake for every birthday and it seemed that each Argentine had three or four of them every year. We all learned ‘Happy Birthday to You’ in Castellano... ” I shared with an American student was so small that only one of us could get out of bed at a time. Hot water for showers was available only for a few hours on Friday; a weekly shower before Shabbat was deemed sufficient. In the Jerusalem winter, taking a cold shower every day, as was our custom, was a challenge. Some of us learned to do it less, while others devised complicated rituals involving kerosene heaters. Eating Jewish Agency food was yet another challenge. The cook was a former dishwash- er who replaced the original cook, who we believed died eating her own fare. The food was austere, bland, and in short supply. We North Americans who studied at Hebrew University had vouchers for the student cafeteria, where we made the most of much better cuisine. The South Americans had a trick of their own. The cook would bake a cake for every birthday and it seemed that each Argentine had three or four of them every year. We all learned “Happy Birthday to You” in their Castellano variety of Spanish. I had a Lambretta scooter I’d purchased in Naples and brought over on my last boat
other American cities, undergraduates at JTS were offered the option of a year’s study at Mechon Greenberg in Jerusalem, a teacher training program sponsored by the Jewish Agency and named after Chaim Greenberg (1889-1953), an early Zionist activist and ideologue. At the time, the Jewish Agency ran three such programs for Diaspora teachers and informal educators: Greenberg, Mechon Gold for religious women, and Machon l’Madrichei Chutz for youth leaders. I had not yet been to Israel, but had attended Zionist schools and camps. The Greenberg program was for me. Arriving in Israel With limited financial resources, I funded the trip by working on a tour of Israel and Europe under the leadership of Rabbi Eugene Weiner and his wife, Anita. It was a luxury tour for students that involved two Mediter- ranean cruises, which meant that I arrived in Israel by boat. I have a very clear memory of my last night on that Zim boat before the morning arrival in the port of Haifa. I thought of my mother, of blessed and wonderful memories, who died a young woman just five years before. She was a First World War orphan from Koretz, Ukraine who always spoke (and sometimes sang) lovingly about Israel. Some of my earliest memories are her conversations with me about the new state. I felt I was making this trip for her, and openly cried on deck thinking about how much she would have wanted to see this place I was about to experience. Some Yiddish song about “What will you do in Palestina?” kept rolling through my head. That summer of 1965 was a mix of new ex- periences, Israeli touring, some great cities of Europe, a close bond with Rabbi Weiner and his wife, and a variety of strange, young Jews on the trip. I was in charge of daily prayers and taking special care of a few of the stran- ger students. At times, my two duties were in perfect sync. The one moment I remember best was linked to the gap between my Dias- pora Hebrew (I attended a Jewish elementary school, and most of the courses at JTS were conducted in Hebrew at the time), and mod- ern Israeli Hebrew. I had been hospitalized near Tiberias for minor surgery and developed some heartburn from all the medication. Not knowing the word for heartburn or indigestion, I exclaimed, “bo’er li ha’lev” (“my heart is burning”). That got a rise out of the nurses and a doctor, and it took some tricky gesticu- lations to calm them down. It may have been this moment in my Hebrew education that inspired the zeal
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