A Year That Stays With You

For more than fifty years, the Year-In-Israel has been the beating heart of a Hebrew Union College seminary journey. Generations of Hebrew Union College rabbis and cantors and educators have packed their bags, said goodbye to family and friends, and moved to Jerusalem for a year that almost everyone describes the same way: formative.

It is where lifelong friendships are forged, where future spouses are met, where Hebrew stops being a subject and starts being a language you live in, and where an abstract love of Israel becomes something lived, complicated, and permanent.

Rabbi Faith Joy Dantowitz: YII Class of 1988-89

Rabbi Faith Joy Dantowitz arrived in Israel in the summer of 1988, placing her at a hinge point in Jewish history. Women of the Wall formed while she was there, and Dantowitz was present at one of its earliest, most violent confrontations - tear gas, thrown chairs, an Orthodox man redirecting a canister at the women praying nearby. It's a memory she has returned to again and again in her decades in the rabbinate, preaching about it, praying with Women of the Wall on later trips back to Israel, and following the news of her friend and classmate Susan Silverman being arrested there years afterward. The Ethiopian tallit her class bought that year became another quiet thread of connection - she and her beloved classmate Rabbi Andrea Weiss z"l discovered, decades later at a CCAR convention in Israel, that they'd both kept wearing theirs.

Now more than thirty years into her rabbinate, Dantowitz says the power of that year isn't something she can fully articulate. "The YII deepened my Ahavat Yisrael. Experiential education, classroom lectures, conversations, and learning more about all religions and Reform Judaism in Israel planted seeds for deepening connection through the decades". Her class has weathered real loss, including Weiss's death, and that of Rabbi Sissy Coran z"l and Rabbi Steve Mills z"l, but the bonds forged that year - through shared Tiyulim, early-morning minyanim, and the ordinary chaos of being twenty-something and far from home - have proven durable in a way few other experiences are.

Rabbi Jonathan Blake: YII Class of 1995-96

Rabbi Jonathan Blake's year in Israel was, in his words, his very first introduction to the country - he'd never set foot there before boarding a flight just two weeks after graduating college to begin rabbinical school. That timing meant Israel and the rabbinate arrived in his life almost simultaneously, and he credits Hebrew Union College directly for what came next: a Zionist identity, and a relationship with the Jewish state, that has only deepened in the twenty-five years since. "Without my year in Israel experience," he says, "I would be spiritually and intellectually and morally impoverished as a Jewish person and as a rabbi."

That conviction is what led Blake, now the senior rabbi at Westchester Reform Temple as he approached his own twenty-fifth ordination anniversary, to do something unusual with the milestone: rather than simply accept Hebrew Union College's honorary Doctor of Divinity, he built a fundraising campaign around it, one explicitly tied to the Year-In-Israel program. He and a host committee of devoted congregants raised money for an endowed fund to help students afford that formative year. He made the case in real time and against a difficult backdrop, launching the campaign as war continued in Gaza and antisemitism was surging globally, arguing that a rabbi's foundational connection to Israel matters more, not less, in a moment like this one.

Blake describes the campaign's success as a kind of ripple effect: several dozen congregants who now know something important about the formation of the rabbis coming out of Hebrew Union College. He points to Micah Glickman, Westchester Reform's rabbinic intern, as proof of what the investment produces - a student who could field congregants' pointed questions about what the year in Israel is actually like, and about where the College stands on students who self-identify as anti-Zionist, with a thoughtfulness Blake says made his case better than he could have himself. "We want more of that," he says. "We're trying to produce this."

Rabbi Harry Rosenfeld: YII Class of 1976-77

Harry Rosenfeld first lived in Israel at 16, as part of NFTY-EIE High School in Israel - a given, really, since he'd grown up in a staunchly Zionist Reform congregation. Those six months changed his understanding of Israel in profound ways. Until then, everyone he knew who cared about Israel saw it in black and white, good or evil. That experience pushed him to understand Israel as an amalgam of grays - an understanding that only deepened his commitment to the place.

Five years later, he arrived at Hebrew Union College's Jerusalem campus, skipping the culture shock most of his classmates faced but not the emotional weight of the year itself - a weight that deepened that same amalgam of grays. It's the life he built outside of school that he remembers most: hosting the first American Cantorial student to study in Jerusalem, spending time with Hebrew University students, and deepening a friendship with an Old City textile merchant named Abed that would last, through multiple intifadas and decades of visits, until Abed's death. It's a friendship Rosenfeld says never would have existed without that year - and one that taught him to see Israel not in black and white, or even in grays, but in "every hue of color that's possible."

Fifty years on, Rosenfeld says the two experiences together taught him to stay open to new understandings of Israel, her people, her government. He no longer sees the country in black and white, or even as a spectrum of grays - now he sees a full spectrum of colors, some beautiful, some ordinary, some ugly. That realization, he says, has only deepened his commitment further.

Cantor Lauren Goodlev: YII Class of 2011-12

Cantor Lauren Goodlev came to her year in Israel - 2011 to 2012 - by a slightly circuitous path: a master's degree in opera, a stint doing psychology research, and a growing realization that the cantorate was calling her.

Looking back, Goodlev is thoughtful about how she describes what the year gave her. Ahavat yisrael, she says, wasn't something anyone taught in a lesson plan. "I don't know that I could pinpoint one thing that they did specifically. It was pretty organic. Just being there, living it, eating it, experiencing it, wrestling with it - that's what helped us love Israel." She'd been to Israel before - a congregational trip at 13, an NFTY teen trip at 16 - but the Year-In-Israel program was, in her words, "something totally different," not simply because it was longer, but because she engaged with the place in a wholly different way.

That different way of engaging showed up in the density of connection the year produced. Thirty-six students, scattered later across three campuses, but bonded first in Jerusalem - writing and performing a Purim spiel based on The Book of Mormon, choosing whether to live with classmates or with Israelis to sharpen their Hebrew, riding across the country together on the Ride for Reform and the Passover Project supporting Jews from the former Soviet Union. So many classmates paired off that year that placement committees had to hold special meetings to sort out the logistics of an unusually intermarried class. Goodlev also started wearing a kippah that year, full-time, as part of claiming her identity as a cantorial student - a practice she still returns to today, even as it has evolved into something less rigid and more personal.

Fifteen years later, Goodlev says the year still surfaces in small, specific ways - a lesson from a beloved teacher that finds her every time she studies a particular Torah portion, the memory of chanting Torah with Women of the Wall that she now shares with her own congregation to make Israel's ongoing struggles feel immediate rather than abstract. Having actually lived there, she says, lets her engage with Israel's complications - as they "develop and are complicated" year after year - in a way she couldn't if she'd only ever visited. "You can feel what a community is," she says, "in a way that you don't have otherwise."

That, in the end, is what she credits with turning a series of visits into something more durable. "Because of the amazing teachers and fellow students with whom I studied, I was able to form a relationship with Israel that is deep, complicated, real, ever-changing and somehow constant, and totally mine. And I am eternally grateful."

Sarah Foster: YII Class of 2012-13

Sarah Foster arrived in Israel for the 2012-13 school year as a student in Hebrew Union College's School of Education - at the time, a full year in Israel was a requirement for all full-time education students, the way it remains today for rabbinical and cantorial students. She was also pursuing a dual master's in nonprofit management, a degree that didn't carry its own Israel requirement but that she added on and is now reaping its own benefits as she has built a career in the nonprofit world.

Going to Israel after years working as a youth group advisor was not necessarily a given. Unlike some of her classmates, Israel had never been the center of her Jewish identity; she calls herself a Zionist, but says the country was never emotionally central to how she understood being Jewish. That didn't stop the year from delivering - in relationships (she met her husband that year, among all the lifelong friendships), in experiences, and in understanding.

That lived, complicated relationship with Israel has mattered most in her professional life, working for Hillel on college campuses during a period of rising tension over Israel among Jewish and non-Jewish students alike. Having actually lived there, she says, lets her hold nuance that many students today resist - Israel as a place you can love and criticize in the same breath. "College students today see Israel as incredibly black and white," she says. "I understand Israel as complicated," and that, more than any single memory from the year itself, is what she says she carries into every conversation she has about it now.

View more photos shared by these alumni of throughout the years: