Orientation (flashback)

It was a packed few days. We met in New York and then bussed out to a retreat center in Connecticut.  It was a very beautiful site on a lake, and they grow almost all of the food they serve in the dining hall.

We got a ton of information about the transition to life in Israel, and did many many team building activities.  There was the old favorite - make a tower out of spaghetti and marshmallows, but with a twist that I liked a lot and made it a lot more interesting. Lots of games involving passing balls, some "are you more like the wind or more like a leaf?" type games, group discussions, etc. We also each gave 15 minute introductions of ourselves. 15 minutes goes by pretty quickly, actually!

I'm really impressed by the other fellows and excited to spend the year learning with and from them. There are some excellent writers, an environmentalist, a medical scientist, some academics, some dancers, an actress and advocate, an educator, a photographer, and these are all gross simplifications of what they do and who they are. It's fun to be around people who are informed about Israel again, some much more than I am, and fun to be around such diversity of opinion.  Everybody's really friendly, too.

I really loved learning about Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson, the founder of the Dorot Fellowship.  Her family had enormous wealth from the paper business and they've done some incredible things, including purchase the original Dead Sea Scrolls for Israel and build the Shrine of the Book in which they are now housed, constructed some very important buildings around Israel, funded several professorships at various universities in the US, and much more, including fund 10 Americans every year to go to Israel and grow and develop to hopefully bring change to the future of the American Jewish landscape :). But Joy was a really amazing woman beyond being generous. We got to hear from an old friend of hers... stories of how good she was to people, and how much she wanted to change the Jewish system.  I wish I could have met her, but she passed away some time ago.

I also loved hearing about the Dorot alumni, who come together at least once a year for Shabbat at the same retreat center. Dorot has some INCREDIBLE alumni! Wow, so much accomplishment and talent. I'm excited to meet them and be part of that family!