Funding In-Marriage Out Of His Own Pocket

“You have to try to find Jewish love,” Momo Lifshitz, inset, told his Oranim trip participants, pictured here near the Syrian border. LEFT CREDIT: Sharon Udasin

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Tel Aviv — Tucked into the rocky thickets of Mount Carmel in northern Israel, 43 American 20-somethings gathered in a hotel conference room to play a simple game — using their bodies as place markers, they lined up across the room according to how important they found dating Jews, and Jews alone.

At first, only four people stood on the “date Jews” side of the room. But when the question changed to marriage, four soon grew to 15. And when marriage changed to raising children Jewish, a good 15 more shuffled over.

“If I were going to raise my kids with a religion, I would want it to be Judaism,” said Matt Lakind, 29, from Hoboken, N.J., who had joined the trip with his girlfriend, Erica Roth. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t want them to have any religion, that’s all.”

A week later, after touring Israel from top to bottom, east to west and back again, his opinion changed. “Now coming here I can see there’s actually a whole ethnic culture to Judaism that has been harder to find in the past,” he said. “Now I understand why when people ask where I’m from, I will tell them: ‘I’m Jewish.’”

Lakind and Roth were participating in an inaugural free 10-day trip to Israel, sponsored by Oranim Educational Initiatives, and funded personally by the owner of the organization, Shlomo “Momo” Lifshitz. Though their trip followed an itinerary quite similar to that of the better-known Taglit-Birthright Israel, this 10-day journey was under the auspices of Oranim alone.  Continue reading…

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

After about two hours of driving northward, we finally emerged from Highway 90 at the shores of a fog-blanketed Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, where a few rays of sunlight poked through the clouds and reflected off the waters on a chilly January morning.  

Positively unique adventures in the Golan Heights

Only two hours before, my boyfriend Lior had started up his mother’s Volvo as two of his closest friends piled into the backseat for the ride from Ra’anana to the mountainous region of Ramat HaGolan. Roni and I would be the only women with the four men — Lior and his army friends Raz and Zvika, with another army buddy, Eyal, driving separately. They were a band of brothers on a tour of their old army bases and we were along for the ride. The journey seemed possible only in Israel, where the personal and the political are so seamlessly braided.

I closed my eyes for the next 20 minutes as we lumbered along the small northern roads and tagged behind Eyal, who led the group through the Golan Heights in his European-sized Federal Express truck. Suddenly, Lior jolted me awake — we had arrived at a military base, where their friend Yuval was serving a few weeks of army reserve time. Though Yuval had served with them in the Israel Defense Forces from 2002 to 2005, the Gaza conflict had prompted a precautionary draft up north as well. Continue reading…