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Fledgling Jerusalem Yeshiva Making a Name for Serious Study in a Tolerant Setting
THE JEWISH WEEK
Yaakov Arnold, Editorial Assistant
After graduating from UCLA in 1997, Liana Barkan knew what she wanted to do before going to graduate school."I had been waiting for an opportunity to learn in a yeshiva in Israel," says Barkan, now in her second year at Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.
Although she had attended classes in Jewish studies at organizations throughout Los Angeles' large Jewish community, Barkan says she "wanted a more formal learning environment." Through friends she heard about the Mayanot Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. "The experience was phenomenal," says Barkan, recalling her year at Mayanot. "It was a very intimate learning environment. Everyone had an active role in the learning process."
In a country where there are as many yeshivas as falafel stands, Mayanot is gaining a reputation as an accepting institution that provides intensive study programs for those with a limited Jewish background.
"There are many baal teshuvah yeshivot in Israel," says Jason deVries, 26, who attended Mayanot in 1998. "None of them are as open." A former youth director who ran Israel programs for the Australian Union of Jewish Students, deVries says he brought many students ages 17 to 23 to Israel and saw them go to yeshiva. "Many had negative experiences," he says. According to deVries, many would spend a few days in a yeshiva and return wearing a kipa and tzitzit, but would not be able to explain why they were wearing the new garb. A few would not consider him Jewish enough after a few days of study.
When deVries, who made aliyah and now works in the education department of the Jewish Agency, decided to attend a yeshiva, he looked for one that was tolerant.
"They [Mayanot] are very open and they accept you for who you are, no matter how you act or behave," says deVries, adding that the only request made by the rabbis was to wear a kipa while in the yeshiva.
And the learning? "Excellent," says Zev Henig, 20, a Brandeis University junior who is spending his year abroad at Hebrew University. "Mayanot gave me the foundation and tools to do my own learning, " says Ari Strauss, 24, who received his master's degree in electrical engineering from UCLA.
The men's division, which was founded in 1997, has full- and part-time programs that currently enrolls 20 students. The women's studies program, which opened a year later, offers a part-time curriculum.
The women say they are being treated as serious students - among their courses are Talmud and chasidic philosophy - and do not feel as though they are being prepared to be Jewish mothers. "They don't teach about cooking and sewing here," says Jody Krasner, a Mayanot alumnus and free-lance writer who immigrated to Israel from Toronto. "You're learning about Judaism and Torah, not housekeeping." Krasner had attended another women's yeshiva before switching to Mayanot.
The institute, an affiliate of Australian philanthropist Rabbi Joseph Gutnick's Haichal Menachem-Chabad organization, recently moved into a larger building. It plans on opening a full-time women's program within the next few years. Internships are available for students who study part-time, and there are summer programs for men and women.
The yeshiva is Orthodox and under the auspices of Chabad Lubavitch, but students say there is no pressure to adhere to any specific philosophy or adapt to any lifestyle.
"The atmosphere is so accepting," says Henig, a Westchester County resident. "Even though the rabbis are Lubavitch, they don't push anything on you." "People tend to go from one extreme to the other," says Maxim Maximov, referring to the experience of some when they first become observant.
While it is not uncommon for students to grow beards and move on to other Lubavitcher yeshivas upon completing Mayanot, Maximov, a 24-year-old native of Coney Island, Brooklyn, says the rabbis at Mayanot" are great mediators in terms of worldviews and approaches to doing things. They don't treat you like you are a piece of clay that needs to be molded." Students say they are taught "not to shun your past," says Strauss, a California native. "You are the same person. The difference is you have learned more."
Many credit the institute's approach to its director, Rabbi Shlomo Gestetner. "Chabad chassidus [philosophy] emphasizes ahavat Yisrael without any qualification," says Rabbi Gestetner, a 34-year-old Australian. "It stresses to take one's creativity, one's individuality, and use it to have a positive impact. It is not denying one's past but evolving from it."
According to Rabbi Gestetner, "many students stifle their individuality and their past [when they first become observant]. I believe that is a very unhealthy approach to their Judaism." Many students also credit Rabbi Gestetner with eliminating the demagoguery typically associated with yeshiva heads. "[I] appreciate not only the accessibility of the rabbis but how human they allow themselves to appear," Krasner says. "[It] doesn't seem rehearsed but rather an honest and sincere concern for and relationship with the student."
Before he opened Mayanot, Rabbi Gestetner was the director of the Jewish University Leadership Scholars, a Jerusalem-based organization that ran programs for students spending their year abroad in Israel. It was during his three-year tenure with JULS that Rabbi Gestetner decided to create Mayanot. "We wanted to open a center in Jerusalem that would be a bridge between modernity and tradition," says Rabbi Gestetner, who made aliyah in 1992.
"We want to cater to the student who is getting a six-week Israel experience and to the person who is looking for a yeshiva." Besides classes in Talmud and Jewish studies, Mayanot also offers ulpans, intense Hebrew language courses, and takes students on trips throughout Israel. The school is accredited; many colleges give course credit for Mayanot classes.
"Jewish students must have firsthand experiences," says Rabbi Gestetner of Mayanot's excursions. "They must go to Safed to get an appreciation of our mystical heritage. They must visit kibbutzim."
Mayanot also offers lectures by Israeli politicians and leaders, including President Ezer Weizman and Interior Minister Natan Sharansky. The esteemed philosopher Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz also has spoken at the institute.
"No matter how long the students come for, they leave with a greater understanding of Judaism and Israel," says Rabbi Gestetner. The goal of Mayanot, he says, is for students "to become independent, intellectual Jews." That includes giving students the tools to study on their own.
"To make an impact," the rabbi says, "we have to teach the students how to learn and not just to be reliant on a lecturer."
"Only a holistic kind of Jewish education that aims at creating a set of ideas, needs, mannerisms, and other elements of Jewishness has a chance at continuing the link between the Jewish people and their past. Jewish scholarship is a fine thing. But a lonely Jewish scholar without an audience,without people understanding him, reading and responding to his work, is quite useless."
We have to recreate the Jewish audience. We need to recreate the Jewish home. We need schools for educating Jewish leadership.
There is an immediate need for a school to provide us with what we need most: Jewishly educated leadership. We need to create a knowledge corps which disperse all over the world. We must teach abstract knowledge, and the laws, and the history, and the language- the Jewish way of life. This can be done.
Creating a Jewish leadership, providing opportunities for Jewish leaders, or future leaders, to learn and to study would be a great thing. To enable people to reach a higher level of Jewish education and to relate it experientially with Judaism, making it meaningful in everyday thoughts and events - this I think is very important, perhaps the most important thing for our future.
- Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
Teacher, Philosopher, Author
"While at Mayanot, whether it be in terms of Jewish Philosophy, Humash, Talmud and so forth, I have acquired a great understanding of Judaism, Jewish values and Jewish texts What makes Mayanot unique is that it has offered an environment in which I could take authentic steps forward. Each step has been made with a certain intellectual appreciation, and a strong inspiration within. Thus, Mayanot patiently allows its students to move forward at their own pace and thereby lays down a path which its students will follow with confidence the rest of their lives.
This life-long path is created by a combination of amazing teachers and committed students. Regarding the teachers, not only do they bring a wealth of Torah knowledge to the students but their personal examples as well. Consequently, I have learned not just how to think, but also how to live. Such is the beauty of Judaism, fusing together the world of thought and the world of action."
- Steven Rochester, 23
Yale Graduate in Philosophy 96'
Mayanot 97-98
"As a medical educator at three US medical schools, I have taught thousands of students. I wish I could be as successful as the teachers at Mayanot... You should be very proud of this program, a it truly is a beacon bringing light to ease the darkness."
Robert M. Kliegman, M.D.
Profesor and Chair
Medical College of Wisconsin
On Millennium's Heels, One for Jews
New York Times, December 31, 1999
by DEBORAH SONTAG
The turn of the millennium is a confusing time for those who live in the land where Jesus was born, lived and died. Mostly Jews and Muslims, they do not attach religious significance to the moment, yet they live, to some degree, in the modern, secular world. It may be the year 5760 according to the Jewish calendar, but there is no denying the worldwide "energy and sense of trepidation," Rabbi Gestetner said.
And so he came up with an idea: a Y6K benefit concert. Two hundred and forty years early, but why be an accountant?
"I'm not expecting the end of the world, but we are still waiting for the Messiah," said Rabbi Gestetner, director of the Mayanot Institute of Jewish Studies, a modern Hasidic organization that caters to college-age students from abroad. "And in Jerusalem, all good Jewish organizations are always looking for a way to fund-raise."
Significantly, the Y6K event will take place on the night of Jan. 1, and not on New Year's Eve, when Jerusalem will effectively be shut down for the Jewish Sabbath. The actual millennial eve will be a non-event for most people here, although secular Tel Aviv and Palestinian-ruled Bethlehem are expected to be lively. But in the holy city, where most millennial tourists are staying, it will be at best a closeted party of limited merriment -- no music, no dancing -- because of Sabbath restrictions imposed by the rabbinical authority.
"Oh, pooh," said Jane Waugh, a tourist from Nottingham, England. "We're not terribly religious but we figured this would be the most happening city in the world. Now it seems, by all accounts, that it will be dead here. Nottingham would be more eventful."
The day itself is likely to be bustling, particularly at the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, in the Old City, which will see hundreds of thousands of worshipers in shifts -- first Muslims, then Jews, then Christians. The Muslims, for whom this is approximately the year 1420, are expected en masse to pray at Al Aksa Mosque for the fourth Friday of Ramadan, the holy month. At sundown, the usual traffic of Jewish worshipers will crowd the plaza at the Western Wall.
And, later, local Christians and pilgrims will gather at the Basilica of Gethsemane and at the Mount of Olives.
The literal millennium madness is no longer expected, although anything is possible.
Kfar Shaul, the mental health center, had reserved beds for foreigners struck by doomsday delusions or the more commonplace Holy City derangement labeled Jerusalem Syndrome.
But Dr. Yair Barel, the director, said not a single person believing himself to be God, a prophet or in direct communication with either had shown up in the last 10 days.
Sam Jabari, owner of the Black Horse Hostel off the Via Dolorosa, said a Swedish woman had left suddenly, saying Jesus had instructed her to check out. And a woman from Canada, who claimed to be speaking with Jesus, was taken away by the police and deported, he said.
Other hoteliers in and around the Old City reported "nothing out of the ordinary," as Stellios Odeh, the Gloria Hotel's reception clerk, said.
The police, though, will remain on high alert. Earlier this year, the police deported to the United States and Britain a group of apocalyptic cultists and several religious eccentrics who had lived on the Mount of Olives for years.
Now their concerns are broader: the combustible mix of religious groups revolving through the Dome of the Rock and Western Wall area, worldwide terrorism cautions, specific terrorism concerns related to the revival of the peace effort, and Y2K computer issues. The government sought and received special dispensation for a heavy mobilization of police officers, public workers and volunteers on the Sabbath.
The police will heavily guard most religious sites. At the national park in the ancient city of Megiddo, for instance, the police and forest rangers will step up their patrols since the site is believed to be the Armageddon from the New Testament: the place where the world will end.
In Jerusalem, almost all restaurants are closed on Friday nights, and this Friday night will be no different. The hotels, whose invaluable kosher certificates can be revoked if there are perceived violations of the Sabbath, had reached an agreement with the rabbinate allowing modest parties. But after pressure or perceived pressure from the local religious councils, most hotels will not hold anything more than a Champagne toast at midnight.
"Almost all the hotels that had plans to do events for Christians only, they withdrew those plans and none of them will do anything," said Yonatan Harpaz, director of the Jerusalem Hotel Association, referring to "threats that are more than veiled."
In line with the downsizing of the millennial eve, the Israeli government has canceled a scheduled concert of Handel's "Messiah" at the Jerusalem Convention Center.
Undeterred, Ronit Levy, an American-born university student, was stocking up on Champagne this week. "I really don't think the state of Israel should be cowed by the rabbis into conceiving of New Year's Eve as a Christian event," she said. "Hello? How many Israelis have any clue that it is the Jewish month of Tevet? My laptop isn't programmed to the year 5760. We're Y2K like the rest of the world."
Officially, though, Israelis seem both ambivalent and sometimes clueless hosts to the Christian pilgrims in their hotels. The Hyatt Regency unwittingly held its Christmas dinner on Dec. 24, following the Jewish tradition of holding the festival meal on the eve of a holiday.
The once vaunted "millennial season," which some hoteliers say was inadequately promoted by the government, is turning out to be a dud. Many hotels, which raised their rates in anticipation of hordes, are experiencing lower occupancy rates than last year. At the Jerusalem Hilton, the Christmas-New Year's season usually brings back-to-back bar mitzvah groups, but not this year.
The Palestinians do not have many hotel rooms to fill. But they are holding another celebration in the newly refurbished Manger Square in Bethlehem, where they will release thousands of doves of peace -- despite opposition from a French animal rights group.
Like Hatem Abu Ahmed, a Muslim food vendor, most Palestinians will not celebrate the day themselves. Mr. Abu Ahmed said the millennium meant nothing to him, and then retracted his statement. "If I am lucky, the millennium will mean a good day for shwarma," he said, referring to the meat in pita sandwiches that he sells.
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