Since I haven't posted anything here for about 6 weeks, this is going to be a long one. TL/DR version: everything here is going great. I love Ulpan, seeing visitors, hosting and being hosted, eating out, and soaking in the atmosphere. Now, for some more details...
First of all, the thing that centers my experience here, is my ulpan class. I am enrolled in Kitah Alef at Ulpan Morasha located on Queen Shlomzion Street in the City Center. Last post I was unsure if the class would continue, well, it did continue as a morning class through the month of June. 5 days a week (Sunday through Thursday) from 8:30 am to 12:45 pm. I learned SO much. The teachers are all really dedicated and wonderful and my classmates are also great. As a matter of fact, several of us from the morning class are having a BBQ tonight at Gan Sacher to say farewell to each other. At the end of June, the class closed and many of us were transferred to other classes. I was very grateful to be able to join the English based evening class that meets three times a week: Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays from 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm. Most of the students are taking the class on Zoom but there are a handful of us who go in person. We have the same teachers that we had for the morning classes and the learning is still wonderful! We can't do as much as quickly but we do have the in between days for review, study, and absorption which helps with retention. I love it so much that I hope to continue learning in the class from California after the August break. Classes resume Sept. 3 and would be at 7:30 am for me. If my teaching schedule permits, I get to continue studying Hebrew! So fun!
Another thing keeping me busy overall is my continued work for Hadassah. I meet often with my Educators Council co-chair Gail Hammerman on Zoom, always in the evening for me which is the morning/early afternoon for her. I visited Hadassah Ein Kerem twice, the first time with Stacy Margolin (May 8) and the second time on July 4 on my own. I visited Hadassah's Youth Aliyah Village, Meir Shfeya on June 4th and spent a lovely day there with Lauren Stern Kedem. On July 10th I was able to visit the Mt. Scopus campus, and on July 18 I will visit Hadassah Neurim, the other Youth Aliyah Village. I will publish a separate blog post with ALL of that after the last scheduled visit happening on July 18th. I do have lots of photos to share! Also in the Hadassah realm, I had a zoom meeting at the end of May with Gail Black who is my Speakers' Bureau mentor. She gave me some really good tips, and we got along great. It will be nice to work with her over the course of the next year or two.
We have taken two trips outside of Israel: In May we went to both Petra and Cyprus. I will do separate blog posts for those trips as well. In addition, we took one weekend trip to Tel Aviv in April and traveled all around Israel with our congregational trip in June (that week and a half definitely deserves its own blog post). In early June, we rented a car for a few days and one of those days we drove to the South to pick up a tallit Mark ordered online and to visit the Yatir Winery.
Virtually every Shabbat we try something new. I will do a separate blog post about all of our Shabbat experiences as we near the end of our four months here.
At the end of May I was fortunate to connect with an English speaking Mah Jongg group. So grateful, so much fun, and of course there will be a whole separate post about it!
We have hosted some scheduled visitors, both friends and family, connected with Birthright trip participants we know, and do our best to go out of our way to connect with anyone who is visiting Israel. When we had the rental car, we took a trip to Netanya where we saw former congregants, Bernard and Alison Hazen, and their children. We were honored to be able to host Alison and the children for a circus performance during the congregational trip's closing dinner while we were in Tel Aviv. In Netanya we were supposed to see my 2011 Ulpan friend, Corinna, but they had a medical emergency in their family so we have postponed. I'm currently scheduled to see her this coming Tuesday, the same day that I plan to visit Neurim. We also traveled to Hertzilya at the end of April to see our friends we made on the cruise, Dany and Hazel, and they treated us to ice cream. We spent the end of Passover at Brenda and Steve Ganot's home and friends of theirs had us over lunch while Brenda and Steve gave us two dinners and a breakfast! Such gracious hosts.
Here at home in Jerusalem we have hosted Hannah Reback for a beer at a local spot, Shabbat lunches for Mark's fraternity brother Mark Stovsky, relatives Barry and Lauren Bloom, Ronn Berrol and Joan Korin, Michelle Brint and a friend of hers named Tsvi, and Mark's Crocker friend Lisa Mackin and her husband Steve. We had lunch with Sarah Liron, enjoyed Passover and Yom HaAtzmaut with the Swidler family, burgers near the Shuk with Amy Wittenberg and Talia Bornstein and Ari Bornstein (who later spoke to our TBA congregational trip and we took him to Pizzaria Flora afterward). We got to meet two long lost cousins of mine: in Jerusalem cousin Michelle Brint (who we later hosted for Shabbat as mentioned above) and in Tel Aviv, cousin Maia Brint (Michelle's first cousin). At the same cafe with Maia we got to have lunch with Cousin Sharona Guggenheim Plumb and her husband Nathan. We had a dinner with Brenda and Steve at the phenomenal taco place across the street from my ulpan where we also had dinner once with Tracy and Leon Waxman who we know from our year in Australia. We saw David Reback in Tel Aviv, Jennifer Long and her husband also in Tel Aviv, had dinner with Taylor and Amikam also in Tel Aviv, hosted a friend named Shanna from Singapore from my ulpan class, were hosted by Aliza Greyevski's parents in Jerusalem surrounded by their friends and family, were hosted for Shabbat by Barbara Sofer and her husband, including others of their friends, had a lovely dinner at Joy in Mamila with Luisa Narins from Hadassah and two of her WRJ friends, saw Mark's cousin David Lazarus a few times, my cousin David Krefetz for a day in July, saw Dumisani Washington and Joshua Washington in Jerusalem where Joshua was performing a concert, spent several times with Mark's friend Ruth Eberstein, were hosted by Debbie Weinstein's sister Lynne Weinstein and her husband Adam Frank, Dana and Alan Edelstein hosted us for a Shabbat dinner and a lovely Agur winery visit, saw Eliza Kaufman in the Old City, saw EJ Miller, Gabriel Bostick who was in Gan at TBA with Micah, and his brother Max, had an amazing vegetarian lunch cafe moment with Jennifer Greyber (though I wasn't able to eat due to an upset stomach), and my sincerest and deepest apologies to anyone I've forgotten. Micah is coming to visit us for the next week, and we are very excited about that.
My other apologies go to all of you who waited so patiently to hear about how things are going here. I have promised five more specific posts and will work on them diligently instead of binge watching Netflix, I promise.
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