By Dan Aznoff, Jewish Sound Correspondent
Every mother of a Jewish teenager will likely agree that leadership is a natural ability within most young people. And a new program that sends high school students to live in Israel for two months has been created to cultivate that inherent aptitude.
The program that will send young Jews from across the United States and Canada to the Alexander Muss High School is being coordinated in the Seattle area by Shaindel Bresler, who runs the Jewish Women’s Renaissance Project that reconnects Jewish women with their heritage.
“We want to empower the next generation of ambassadors who can strengthen the bond between young Jews in the United States, their counterparts in Israel, and the Jewish homeland,” Bresler explained. “As mothers, we have seen a crying need to give young people an avenue to connect with teenagers in Israel and to learn more about the issues that face Jews around the world. And we need to do that before they go off to college.
“We need new leaders who can step up to make a difference in how the world perceives the state of Israel.”
The first step, according to Bresler, will be an exchange program that sends high school students to the Alexander Muss High School beginning this coming February. Students selected for the program will spend two months at the secondary school campus in Tel Aviv in a program called the Muss Young Leadership Experience (MYLE). The young leaders will attend accredited college-prep classes on campus and spend three days each week touring religious and cultural sites in the Holy Land.
“The land becomes your teacher,” Bresler said. “There is no way a young person can visit sites like Masada and discuss the options between right and wrong without maturing as a Jew and a potential leader.”
The academic curriculum at Alexander Muss High School will be enhanced with instruction on the characteristics of what it takes to become a leader within their own community.
Bresler founded of the award-winning Total Sunday Jewish Experience in Seattle. The mother of seven described MYLE as more than just a student exchange program. Alexander Muss High School has partnered with the Jewish National Fund to provide the only pluralist, non-denominational, fully accredited international study abroad program in Israel for high school students.
The roots of the MYLE program date back to a trip to Israel several years ago by a group of Jewish mothers patterned after the Birthright adventures available to teenagers. The tour consisted of 20 women, including Bresler and three others from the Seattle area, and from countries as far away as Brazil and Australia, who bonded over the need to provide more options to Jewish youth.
“The mothers from countries outside of the United States discussed the various non-Jewish programs that give teenagers the chanc
e to experience life from another perspective in countries throughout South America,” she recalled. “We all agreed there should be a program that brought Jewish youth to Israel to help them connect with their own heritage.”
Part of that came from a consensus that teens aren’t having the same kind of exposure to Israel as the moms had.
“Young people need the experience of what it means to be Jewish today and throughout history,” Bresler said. “The Alexander Muss High School program brings that all together.”
Additional information on the MYLE program is available on the organization’s website at www.myleisrael.com.
If you go:
An information session and fundraising dinner for the MYLE project will take place Sun., Sept. 21, at a private home on Mercer Island. Information and reservations are available by contacting Shaindel Bresler at israelmyle@gmail.com or 206-779-4373. The event will feature “unorthodox” motivational speaker Rav Gav, whose messages resonate with teens in particular.