Onward Israel's Impact: Interview with Stef Part III

To conclude, Stef talked about her experience joining and working with Onward Israel, the program where I met her.

Mariya: Jumping back in time a little bit, when you were in Onward Israel, what made you decide to join that team? 

Stef: Before I made aliyah, I was a high school teacher.

M: What subject did you teach?

S: I used to teach Jewish Studies at a Jewish high school in Chicago, and I loved working with teens. The next step after teens is college students. So when I came here and this opportunity came up, I was like, "OK, that's a population of people I enjoy working with, the young adult population." And the truth is that a number of my students that I worked with in Chicago came on the Onward trips when I worked there. It was really fun to see them in their next stage of life.

Another aspect was that I love when people come to experience Israel. I think Birthright is a great program, but I think the biggest barrier after Birthright is experiencing Israel beyond the tourist bus. I think it's great that people come here and have a wonderful 10-day experience, and see all the sites, and interact a little bit with some native Israelis, and it's all fun, and maybe there's some learning content. But when that trip's over, it was a vacation, and a lot of people say, "Oh, I'm going to come back to Israel," and then they don't because life happens. You go back to school, you get a job.

Onward is this really unique opportunity to come back to Israel to have a job, to live in an apartment, to not always be on a tourist bus. Yes, we did some trips and we tried to get out there, but the bulk of the program was to give people a taste of what it's like to live here. It's not exciting every day because you're going on a trip and you're going to the Dead Sea, and you're going to Masada, and you're going to Tel Aviv to a nightclub. You lived in an apartment, you had to go to the grocery store, cook your dinner, wake up in the morning, take a bus, go to work, meet locals who were working in a field you might be interested in working in some day, come home, be tired, make dinner, go to sleep. You know, that's what normal life is. I think people often have this expectation of living in a foreign country that it's going to be fun, fun, fun all the time. I think a really important piece is that if you really want to experience what a culture is like you have to immerse yourself and see how the average person spends their time.

Onward was a unique experience in that it was able to give, even if it was just for two months, people who had been here before and had already experienced the travelling side of things, to then experience the living side of Israel.

M: Yeah, that's one of the things I loved about the program. And still in interviews for jobs that I've had since then, that is one of those formative experiences that I always come back to that kind of shaped part of the career that I went into. Is there anything you remember most fondly from the year of my trip (2013)? You were just pregnant with your twins.

S: [Laughs] I remember being on the bus, and I don't think I had told anyone that I was pregnant, right? I don't think you guys knew yet.

M: Not right away, no.

S: I remember we were on the bus on one of our trips, and I got so nauseous, I threw up. And I remember some people who were sitting in the front of the bus started whispering, "Did she just throw up? Is she ok? Is she pregnant?" And I was dying laughing in my head. I figured at some point over the summer I'm going to have to tell them because at some point I'm going to have a belly.

That was actually my first summer with Onward was your group. What was exciting for me was that the program hadn't existed in Haifa prior to that summer. That's one of the jobs that I got upon accepting the position with Onward. They had had programs in other cities in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in other summers, but not in Haifa. So I was given this blank slate. They were like, "Here are these students coming. Find them jobs." And I was like, "OK!" I really spent a lot of that year researching what are the jobs in Haifa, what do these students want to be doing, and making those connections. By doing so, I really got to know my city so well. To know what kind of industry is in Haifa, to know what kinds of organizations, non-profits, schools, to get to know the neighborhoods, where everything is located, especially because I was also new to the city at the time.

I had only been there for the year leading up to that summer. So it was an amazing opportunity for me, it was very personal, that I got to know all of these places. People who grew up in Haifa their whole life don't know these places exist there. Why would they? I don't know. I don't necessarily know all of the industry where I grew up. It really gave me this amazing opportunity to delve deep into Haifa and get to know the city so well. It also gave me an opportunity to learn what students in America want to be doing here since it was the first summer, and in that way, sort of guinea pigs. From the company's side, what they're hoping to get out of the experience, from the students' side, what they're hoping to get out of the experience, and making that connection -- that's what stands out for me.

And I don't think everything went smoothly. I think there were issues and all different things, and that's the problem solving piece of the job too -- helping people figure out how to make the best of a situation, how to make things work.

M: Yeah, that trip was really, really special. Something I've said, too, to people from the trip who I still kept in touch with is part of that was because of you just being such a great guide through the whole process even when things didn't go smoothly.

S: Thank you.

M: Now that you’ve moved on from Onward Israel, have you maintained your connection with participants on the trips (other than me, or course) or the members of your former team?  

S: Yeah, Facebook is an amazing tool in that it allows you to keep in touch with so many people even if not actively, but somewhat passively. I am Facebook friends with many, many, many of the participants that came through the program. There have been a number of participants who have come back. While that may not be the main goal of the Onward program, but one of the underlying goals of it is that they build a deep connection with Israel and they want to come back whether it's for visits (which is great), for a sabbatical, for a time period of some point. Some students have come back and they call me up! It's great to hear what people are doing with their lives.

There are participants who have gotten married already. There are participants who have gotten careers in the fields that they had their internship in. There are participants from Onward that have made aliyah. It's fun for me to see my babies growing up. It's fun to see where people have taken the experience from when we were together and moved forward. If you ever come back, call me up! I love grabbing coffee with people and just catching up, seeing what people have been up to. I think that's been, for me, a big piece of the Onward puzzle, is that through Facebook and other social media where we keep in touch passively, but when people come back here.

Not just me, but I know people who have come back for a family trip and they get in touch with their old boss and they go out for drinks with their old boss. I think that's such a great thing also because it means that you have a deeper connection with the people, with the culture, with the community whose here. And not just say, "OK, I'll go to a hotel, I'll go to a museum, I'll go on this hike." No, "I'll go meet up with a former colleague, a former boss, we're going to catch up."

M: Alright, well, thank you so much Stef!