A witness to history in the making

In late June, Jason Katz flew to Israel for five weeks to learn about the history of the Jewish people. As it turned out, he witnessed part of it firsthand.

Jason, who attends Temple Bat Yahm in Newport Beach, was with 25 other California high school students on July 12 when violence broke out on the Israel-Lebanon border. At the time of the first attacks, the group was barely a mile from the border — and while viewers around the world sat captivated by the bombings shown on CNN, Jason and his companions simply felt a tremor in the ground.

“We could feel and hear the bombings because they were coming through the hills,” said Jason, 17, an Irvine resident.

This year, for the first time since 2000, the Bureau of Jewish Education sent a group of local students to tour Israel. During the trip, the participants visited historical sites around the country, rode camels and camped in the Negev Desert. Along the way, they studied Israel’s past in chronological order — and had just gotten to the onset of World War II when a new conflict erupted miles away.

With armed security guards and a careful itinerary, though, nearly all of the students remained on the trip. By the time the group flew back to Orange County, it had seen two sides of Israel — ongoing violence and the resilience of citizens who had lived around trouble all their lives. Even as turmoil raged in the north and south of the country, the Californians met with Israeli students, visited malls and watched people eking out a daily living.

“It was hard to stress to our parents how safe we felt, when all they saw on TV were bombings,” said Alex Jackson, 16, a Sage Hill School senior who went on the trip.

When the group touched down in California again on Aug. 4, Jason and Alex said they even felt a culture shock: In Israel, they had grown accustomed to seeing people carry guns in the open.

In 1996, the Bureau of Jewish Education — a partner of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, located in Irvine — began holding yearly trips to Israel, only to stop four years later when war broke out with Palestine. Chief Executive Officer Joan Kaye said the bureau planned to continue holding the trips unless the situation worsened.

“If we didn’t feel we could keep them safe, we wouldn’t send them,” Kaye said.