Once Israel scorned the Diaspora, but times have changed and this year a master teacher from Los Angeles will be honored as Israel turns 57
Sheli Teitelbaum Los Angeles
Many Diaspora Jews may be said to carry a torch for Israel. But on the evening of May 11, in a move likely to furrow the brows of a few Zionist dignitaries, for the first time ever, one of the dozen people invited to hold a torch on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem to mark Israel's 57th birthday is someone who might be called a "yoredet," an Israeli who left the Jewish homeland to make a life elsewhere - a category Yitzhak Rabin once scorned as "weaklings."
Of course, Jewish educator Metuka Benjamin was only 15 when her parents left Israel. And Benjamin, who helped found and now directs the many-faceted school system of the Reform Stephen S. Wise Temple in Los Angeles - with four separate schools, the largest non-Orthodox Jewish educational enterprise in the United States, according to the Los Angeles Jewish Journal - turns out to have Rabin's imprimatur. In 1990, while an opposition Knesset member, Rabin visited the Temple's posh Bel Air campus. His arrival filled Benjamin, who says her parents' decision to leave Israel made her deeply unhappy, with great trepidation. "I was trembling," Benjamin told The Report in her office overlooking the verdant Santa Monica Mountains shortly before she departed for Israel in early May.
But after meeting the Israeli-flag-waving students, many of whom spoke Hebrew and asked informed questions, Rabin told Benjamin that his visit to Stephen S. Wise was the highlight of his trip. "You know what I say about Israelis who leave," she quotes him. "But to you, I say, stay where you are. You are doing important work."
The essence of Benjamin's work has been to make Israel studies and the teaching of Hebrew central to the education of young American Jews. Fifteen years after Rabin's visit, Benjamin continues to direct all educational programs at Stephen S. Wise, including the early childhood center, supplementary religious and Sunday school, elementary school (grades K-6) and its 13-year-old Milken Community High School (grades 7-12), which is housed in a 180,000-square-foot, $ 33-million building that includes a state-of-the-art theater, gymnasium and Olympic-size pool.
Altogether, these schools, with a full-time teaching staff of 250, serve 1,600 students, many of whom attend from early childhood through high school, steeped in Benjamin's Israel-centered Jewish curriculum - which creates, she says, "for each child an unbreakable link to their people, through a deep knowledge of their history, their Bible, their land and Jewish values." She adds, "Israel is the critical connection. It links our secular and religious studies. It links the observant and less observant. And it links the Jews of the Diaspora directly to our homeland, our history and our future."
Her schools' achievements have been recognized with such honors as Tel Aviv University's 2003 Constantiner Award for Jewish Education, the 1990 biannual Zalman Shazar Prize from the Jerusalem-based Shazar Center for Jewish History, and the 1990 Milken Family Foundation's Jewish Educator's Award.
Born in Tel Aviv to successful and well-connected parents, Benjamin is hardwired into Israel's political and academic establishment. Her father Abraham, an immigrant from Vilna, created a huge American-style ice-cream operation shortly after the establishment of the state; her mother, Evelyn (nee Fein), hailed from an ardently Zionist Detroit family and was a well-known figure in Tel Aviv's Anglo community; Benjamin describes her parents as religiously "traditional" but not Orthodox. Her family left Tel Aviv for New York during Israel's socialist heyday, Metuka recounts, because "my father, who had studied business administration and was quite brilliant, had the misfortune to believe in free enterprise. My mother, however, did not want to leave Israel. Every stone was precious to her."
After arriving in New York, Benjamin completed Forest Hills High School. "I wasn't very happy," she remembers, citing the sadness of leaving friends behind and a difficult social adjustment in her new home. Even as a child, she had wanted to be a teacher, and after high school, she enrolled in the education program offered jointly by Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. But it was as a substitute teacher in a strongly Zionist synagogue school in Brooklyn that her career plan became a "mission" - a word she uses often to describe her professional path. "The principal told me I was a natural teacher, and I saw how the kids clung to me. I understood the mentality of American kids. I felt I had the good of America and the good of Israel in my hands."
In 1961, she followed her family to Los Angeles, where for seven years she taught and developed Hebrew curriculum at Reform Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills under the school's Orthodox educational director. There she introduced a "new method" of teaching Hebrew - "everything in Hebrew," with no translation. The kids asked for an extracurricular Hebrew club, she remembers - "a big accomplishment when most children hated Hebrew school." Some of her students went into Jewish education or the rabbinate. "I feel I inspired them," she says.
In 1963, some months after the birth of her only son, Daniel, now a filmmaker, she was asked by Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin, who had also worked at Emanuel, to join him and a core of 35 families in founding a new congregation later named for strongly Zionist Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. Like Zeldin, the son of a New York Orthodox rabbi, Benjamin wanted the new congregation's school, which she headed, to emphasized Zionism, Hebrew language skills and a more stringent approach to Torah studies than typically associated with Reform Judaism.
"Our school - and for that matter, any non-Orthodox Jewish school," she said when accepting her award from Tel Aviv University, "needs to have Israel at the core of its curriculum - and more importantly, b'tokh halev, at the core of its soul." "We built a school before we built a synagogue," Benjamin recounts now. "Rabbi Zeldin felt that you could pray anywhere" - the synagogue first met in a Presbyterian church near UCLA - "but to teach children, you needed the proper environment and facilities."
Enrollment was helped in the 1970s by the widespread enforcement in Los Angeles of busing to ensure racial balance in the city's schools - and the attendant phenomenon of "white flight" to the suburbs or private schools. This provided Zeldin and Benjamin with an opportunity to quickly build their educational operation. By 1987, with 850 elementary children enrolled in the elementary and middle school, Stephen S. Wise boasted the largest non-Orthodox student body in the Los Angeles region.
Benjamin was the first Jewish educator in Los Angeles to insist on taking secular studies teachers (both Jews and non-Jews) to Israel. "I wanted them to understand that Israel was a core of everything we were doing in our school." The Hebrew language curriculum was also molded to connect holidays and ceremonies to the Israeli experience.
Catering to upscale parents and their progeny, though, presented challenges. Especially during the school's formative years, many parents valued secular studies over Jewish studies. Some, Benjamin recalls, seemed to value sports and a daily physical-education program over Hebrew or Torah study. But Benjamin says her school refused to pander to parental whims while at the same time establishing a very high-level secular curriculum. She compares the level of academics at Stephen S. Wise to that available at the city's more exclusive and elite academies, "but we also provide a lot of nurturing and a great deal of stress on Jewish and universal values."
Combining her concern for her native and adopted countries, Benjamin pays special attention to Israeli exchange students who arrive each year before the High Holidays and stay for two months. This program, begun in 1998, is part of the L.A. Jewish Federation-sponsored Tel Aviv-Los Angeles Partnership, an overall effort to forge and fortify links between the two cities. The program, which includes an exchange of 20 students each year from Milken and an equal number from four Tel Aviv high schools, exposes the Israeli youngsters to Reform religious practice and to the centrality of the synagogue in American Jewish life. "In Israel they are exposed to one form of observance - Orthodox - and they hate it," Benjamin says. "Here they see that it can be done differently and meaningfully. And they come to understand that a trip to Los Angeles does not necessarily begin or end with Disneyland." The two-way street of the exchange program includes staff exchanges and has added such innovations to the curriculum of the Tel Aviv schools as joint parent-student learning and kabbalat Shabbat celebrations.
A new formula for the Independence Day ceremonial torch lighting gives two places to Diaspora participants, along with 10 Israelis, a gesture toward recognizing the partnership between Israel and the Diaspora in Jewish life. Benjamin will be joined atop Mount Herzl by Canadian philanthropist (and Jerusalem Report co-founder) Charles Bronfman.
Nor does Metuka Benjamin intend to drop the torch. She will be back next month for meetings related to reforms of Israel's flagging education system urged by the Dovrat Commission report in January. The commission especially suggested elevating the professional status, training and salaries of Israeli teachers and increasing the executive independence of school principals, but plans to increase available funds by firing many teachers and shrinking the Education Ministry have prompted threats of a teachers strike. Benjamin will not speak about her ideas for reforming the system yet, however. "I want to meet with the commission members and also with the teacher's union. We cannot abide the status quo much longer."
Finally, Benjamin hopes to promote a new project, Atidim ("Futures"), aimed at identifying and supporting gifted university candidates from underprivileged settings who would otherwise be forced to give up their dreams of higher education. In this, as in all her educational endeavors, Benjamin has a single, simple goal: "To instill passion in students, to create in them a strong commitment to Israel and Judaism and to help them become knowledgeable leaders of the Jewish people. Look," she adds, "this is not a job like working in an office. It's a mission."