From July 10-21, the Nashville Jewish community welcomed seven Israeli teens and two adult chaperones to our community as part of our Hadera-Eiron Partnership program. While the teens were in Nashville, they stayed with host families, led activities for the campers at Camp Davis, and got to know some of the participants in the Gordon JCC’s TGIT weekly senior lunch program. They also explored Nashville, visiting places like the National Museum of African American Music, touring of Carnton House with the Battle of Franklin Trust, and taking in a Nashville SC soccer game.
As part of this experience, the teens also explored many of the different synagogues and institutions that make up Jewish Nashville and learned more about what it is like to be a Jew outside of Israel. All of that is what Israelis might call the “tachles” or, to put it another way, the nuts and bolts of what they did.
Having experienced those 10 days with them, I can tell you that they did so much more than what their paper itinerary described.
The group built deep and meaningful relationships with their host families, playing with the younger kids, and getting close to their host parents who did all kinds of fun activities with them during their free time.
The group also was able to have a brief but meaningful respite from the realities of living in Israel after October 7. Our Partnership region is in Central Israel and is fairly safe, but the realities of the hostages still being held in Gaza almost a year later and the soldiers and reservists and their families having their lives upended by war are still very real for them. Even as being in Nashville was a bit of a break from that reality, it was also a meaningful connection point for them to see how our community is standing with them and their families and how we are feeling the same things they are feeling at home.
Perhaps most important, the group developed a sense of deep connectedness to our Nashville Jewish community. We were lucky to spend two Shabbatot with them and their host families together, and even though we all live and come from different parts of the world, we all got to share the same feeling of Shabbat and togetherness as one Jewish family.
That is what the Partnership is all about and this is why the Partnership is not like any other Israel program. This isn’t just about being a Zionist or supporting Israel politically or financially or about educating people about Israel. Having these teens visit our community, along with everything else our Partnership does, is about giving our community an opportunity to build deep, personal relationships with Israel and with Israelis. And in doing so, we can develop within our community a dynamic, three-dimensional understanding of what it means to be Jewish in the world today and what we really owe each other as a global, interconnected Jewish community.
If you want to know more about what other activities our Partnership does towards these ends, you can read about it HERE. If you have any questions about upcoming programs or would like to get involved, you can email me at eitan@jewishnashville.org or call me at 615-354-1664.
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