“Two shots went right into Shaare Zedek and the torpedo shells landed on the third floor. They landed right in the area where newborn babies and mothers were, but they didn’t explode,” recalls 75-year-old Pessin, who recently retired as associate director-general of the hospital. “We didn’t have elevators, we didn’t have anything, but two young soldiers took the shells from where the mothers were and walked down to the first floor with them because they were live shells – they just didn’t detonate.”

The sense of both relief and shock in Pessin’s voice is still evident, almost 44 years later.

“During the war I was considered the commander of the hospital – I was responsible to the military.

They sent in their own people just to augment our staff ,” he tells In Jerusalem.

Not only was Shaare Zedek affected by the surrounding battles, but so was the German-Evangelist Augusta Victoria Hospital, located on Mount Scopus in the area that had been in Jordanian hands. Pessin recalls that as soon as the Israeli victory was certain, Shaare Zedek’s head of surgery and the head of anesthesiology immediately drove through areas still riddled with gunfire to make sure that everything was okay at the second hospital.

“We captured Jerusalem on Wednesday,” Pessin says. “By noon they said, ‘It belongs to us; we conquered the city.’ Three hours later these guys got into a car – imagine, there were guns all over the place.

They drove up to the place, and the first thing they asked was, ‘Can we help you with anything?’ They said, ‘Yes, we need blood, plasma and powdered milkand penicillin.’ Two hours later, we sent them boxes and cartons with their request. What upset us is that we never got any formal thanks from them. Three months later we got a check from the evangelical church in California for $2,000 just ‘For your help,’ without the words ‘thank you.’” Dr. Falk Schlesinger, then director-general of the hospital, refused to accept the money because it was not accompanied by a word of thanks, Pessin explains, noting that $2,000 was quite a bit of money at the time, as the annual budget was only $1.5 million, compared to today’s $160 million.

Before his retirement a few weeks ago, Pessin was one of very few staff members left who had worked in that first Shaare Zedek building on Jaffa Road, which was opened on January 27, 1902, the birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm II – as it was founded and supported by German Jews. Pessin says the building had only 24 beds but was free to the public.

“When I started working at the hospital, we had under 200 beds,” says Pessin, who began his work as hospital administrator in 1965. “Today we’re considered one of the major medical centers in the country.”

Pessin had come to Israel from New York four years before – his family had emigrated from Russia to America in 1902 – and worked as the administrative director of a Bnei Akiva yeshiva. A friend recommended him to Schlesinger, who hired him first as hospital treasurer and then as administrator.

Other hospital administrators and staff members truly appreciate all the efforts Pessin has put into the institution over the years. “There is no doubt that Nachum Pessin is one of the most devoted, loyal, honest people whose services Shaare Zedek in its 109-year history has had the privilege to benefit from. He served with devotion, dedication and professionalism over a long period of time – half of it as a top administrator and half as deputy director of development,” says Shaare Zedek Director-General Prof. Jonathan Halevy.

“He can definitely take a lot of credit for the achievements that Shaare Zedek has made in our generation.”

Pessin has particularly fond memories of Schwester Selma Meyer, Shaare Zedek’s first officially registered nurse. She was brought in from Germany in 1916 by then-director-general Dr. Moshe Wallach. “I saw her every day until the day she died [in 1984]. She died on her 100th birthday. We had scheduled to make her a party, and we buried her that same day,” he says.

To Pessin, Meyer was a role model who devoted herself every day to the hospital’s welfare – a woman who dressed and appeared religious, even though she was not, to make her patients comfortable and who really gave back to the community. In 1935, she established Israel’s first nursing school so that nurses could receive their degrees in Israel.

AS THE old hospital site became too crowded and too old to meet a modern country’s needs, Pessin became chiefly responsible for bringing Shaare Zedek to its new home near Mount Herzl in Ramat Beit Hakerem, which officially opened in 1979 with 300 beds.

Schlesinger had wanted to be a part of developing the new hospital grounds, but he died in 1968 and was succeeded by Prof. David Maier from the US, who became instrumental in getting the new building under way – until he left in 1988 and was replaced by Halevy.

“Dr. Schlesinger had a very broad vision and felt that we needed to build a new hospital,” Pessin says.

“In the mid-1960s we even laid a cornerstone in Talbiyeh for the new hospital, on the grounds of a hospital called Hansen. But then the Six Day War broke out, so we decided this city was going to expand and we would find another place.”

Along with Maier, Pessin met daily with “doctors and nurses and builders and architects and God knows who” until they eventually figured out the ideal layout for the new site. The spacious plot near Mount Herzl would be perfect for these expanded needs, they decided, and Pessin’s continual efforts to attract donors have made the grounds into the 550- bed complex it is today.

“We keep building new areas and new departments,” he says.

Getting the new building under way was not an easy task, particularly when the administrative team realized that the Health Ministry did not picture the same product that Maier had envisioned for the grounds, according to Eliezer Rahat, who was the contracted programmer and project manager for the new hospital’s construction. But Maier and Pessin eventually convinced the ministry to grant approval of their plans.

“When Nachum says something, it is completely fulfilled,” Rahat says, emphasizing, however, that credit for spearheading the project goes to Maier.

Even during a crisis, Pessin’s contributions were crucial in holding their plans together, Rahat explains. The Yom Kippur War “paralyzed” much of their early site work, sending many of the construction workers and administrators to army reserve duty, and it made the site much less attractive to donors due to the instability in the region. But Pessin was able to perform “miracles,” somehow pulling the money together and leading them out of the financial crisis. ”The building went on,” Rahat says.

“We worked together much more than 10 years, until the hospital was finished and after,” adds the octogenarian. “Nachum was always reliable, helpful, very responsible, and it was very pleasant to work with him. I think his work accounts for many of the successes we had in the building.”

One of the hospital’s accomplishments that it is most proud of is its ever-increasing status as one of the hospitals that delivers the most babies in the country.

“Today we’re at 14,000 babies a year – the biggest in the country,” says Pessin, the father of six. “Until recently we were the second – Soroka was the first, and it was responsible for all the babies from the Negev to Eilat,” he says, noting that Soroka Hospital has about 800-900 beds in comparison.

He also boasts that “Today we have the biggest and probably the best heart center – Jesselson Heart Center with cardiology and cardiac surgery,” also highlighting its departments of pediatric surgery, stomach surgery, orthopedics, breast cancer and other types of oncology as first rate.

Pessin emphasizes not only the medical advancements Shaare Zedek has made during his time there but also the facility’s increased preparedness in matters of defense. Almost every year, the hospital holds drills in conjunction with the army to learn how to respond to chemical warfare.

“When we built this hospital, we built it withthoughts of the future and thoughts of chemical warfare. Thank God, to this day we haven’t had to deal with real chemical warfare.”

But just in case, the hospital was constructed with chemical “safe” areas, he says.

Aside from taking the lead in opening the new Shaare Zedek complex, Pessin was particularly pleased with a plan he initiated shortly after he came to the hospital in 1965. At the time, he says, there was no central morgue in Jerusalem, so families brought bodies to the “heder metim” (dead room) at the local hospitals.

“Every day you would see in the newspapers that there were 10 to 15 funerals [at Shaare Zedek],” Pessin says. “So it looked like so many people were dying at Shaare Zedek when it really was only two or three a week. You could hear all the crying and screaming going on, and the impression was that people came to Shaare Zedek to die. That bothered me a lot.”

So after speaking to Schlesinger, Pessin decided to reroute the funeral processions to the back of the hospital so that death didn’t seem as omnipresent to the patients. The problem was that he incurred the wrath of the neighbors.

“We did it one day and the people living across the street were annoyed, so they staged a big demonstration against me and Shaare Zedek,” Pessin recalls. “They said their children were playing Hevra Kadisha [burial society]. ‘Today I’m dead and you’re Hevra Kadisha. Tomorrow you’re dead and I’m the Hevra Kadisha.’ I understood but I didn’t give up, and the parents stopped demonstrating. A lot of people from that building moved out,” he says.

But perhaps one of his fondest memories was the time that former mayor Teddy Kollek came to the old Shaare Zedek building to visit a patient.“There was a short man there who was a guard and who would only let people come to visit between 4 and 5 p.m.,” Pessin recalls. “Teddy Kollek came in and said he wanted to see someone, but the guard said, ‘Come back between 4 and 5.’ He said, ‘But I’m Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem,’ and the guard said, ‘No, everybody tells me ‘I’m the mayor of Jerusalem.’” After a phone call to Schlesinger, who said he would escort Kollek in personally, the mayor arrived for a second time and was shooed away by the same guard, as Schlesinger was stuck on a phone call, Pessin remembers. “The guard said, ‘You’re here again? Go!” Ultimately, Schlesinger had to fix the situation himself.

“When he came out to speak to the guy, the guard said, ‘I just threw him out a second time.’ So Schlesinger got into his car and the driver took him [the guard] to Teddy’s office, where he apologized profusely.”

The hospital is in the process of building the new Wilf Children’s Hospital and has already opened its emergency pediatric center. “We expect our children’s hospital to draw a tremendous number of patients,” says Pessin.

In recent years, most of Pessin’s work has focused on fund-raising, particularly within Israel and among European nations, as well as some countries in Asia-Oceania, such as Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.

“We target mostly Jewish groups, but in Germany and Holland we have non-Jewish groups that are very helpful,” he says.

Today, Pessin continues to do a bit of the same thing, though he now goes in “whenever I feel like it” rather than every day.

But his office is still his, and he continues to communicate with his loyal clientele.

“Somebody called yesterday and gave us $100,000 and he wanted to speak to me – you build up a rapport with certain people,” he adds.

Impressed by Pessin’s continued commitment, Halevy says, “He volunteers and definitely contributes his time. He retired only last month so the exact framework is not set yet, but he definitely expresses his willingness to [continue here].”

As he leaves his position as associate director-general, Pessin looks back on his four-and-a-half decade term nostalgically and remains optimistic about the future. While calling the place a “traditional hospital,” he emphasizes that just as important as maintaining Jewish customs is the ideal of continuing to “treat people regardless of race, creed or tradition.”

“Shaare Zedek is a part of me. I enjoyed it,” Pessin says. “I am already proud of the hospital because I think we’ve come a tremendous way in the last 50 years. And there’s no doubt that there’s more we can do. But the more people we can treat and help and the more people who come out of here happy that they’re getting the right treatment, then to me that would be kiddush Hashem.”

“Right now we’re just meandering – tomorrow we’ll come back seriously,” says his wife, Marilyn, who joined him at the 25th Jerusalem Book Fair for a quick browse. The next day, she explains, they’ll devote “a good six hours” to the fair – this was just the warm-up.

Established in 1963, the Jerusalem International Book Fair takes place every two years, hosting more than 1,200 publishers from 40 countries and showcasing some 100,000 books. Fellowships are available to select emerging editors and literary agents, while authors and scholars speak at the Literary Café to packed audiences all week.

At any given corner on the bright green tarpaulin of the Steimatzky megastore, passersby can hear a cacophony of Russian, German, French, English and, of course, Hebrew. While the population seems slightly skewed to Jerusalem’s older segment, visitors vary from those pushing motorized walkers and haredi women rolling strollers to university students in trendy apparel.

The Flanzbaums, septuagenarians who live in Givat Olga near Hadera, decided to stay the night in Jerusalem for extra time at the book fair, held at the International Convention Center and organized by the Jerusalem Municipality.

“We realized we had to come back here,” says Gerry. “We’re people who just love books.”

“You can put it on your shelf,” he says to his wife, indicating the book on Antarctica, where they had recently traveled. “This summer we’re going to Mongolia,” adds Marilyn.

In the nearby scholastic section, Bracha Bender reads a colorful hardcover called Let’s Save the Animals to her three-year-old. Living in Jerusalem since she was nine, Bender says she goes to the fair every time it takes place.“I love it – I wait for it. I love to get lost in the books,” says the selfdescribed “ultra-ultra-Orthodox” Bender, who stresses that despite some common misconceptions, secular literature can be of interest in the haredi community.

“Judaism has historically encouraged study,” she says, noting that the haredim are just “selective” about what they expose themselves to. “We’re not into gratuitous violence or watching other people be intimate.” A book fair, however, is an ideal place for religious Jews, who tend to embrace lifelong learning, she explains.

As for the publishers participating at the fair, Steimatzky seemed happy with the number of people who showed up for the first full day of the fair. “Yesterday was the opening and there weren’t a lot of people, but today we are getting a lot of visitors,” a representative told In Jerusalem.

Similarly, publishers like Gefen Publishing were pleased with the turnout of customers at their stands. A popular book choice was Peace in the Making: The Menachem Begin – Anwar Sadat Personal Correspondence edited by Harry Hurwitz and Yisrael Medad.

“It’s too early to tell for sure, but so far it’s been much better,” says Gefen co-CEO Michael Fischberger, comparing sales to those two years ago, when Gefen had a much smaller number of books. “It’s a combination of the economy and the types of books we put out.”

Aside from the books themselves, many visitors enjoy being part of the multicultural atmosphere that is integral to the fair. “It’s an international environment. You can see people you wouldn’t see otherwise,” says Orit Klein, a Jerusalem resident who has been to the fair a few times before. “I also like the meetings between writers from Israel and abroad.”

One such public encounter was held between Israeli film director Anat Zuria and Iranian-Canadian Marina Nemat, author of Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir, who grew up Catholic in 1970s Iran.

Zuria interviewed Nemat about the dramatic period of her life that inspired the book, the period when she was “facing torture, facing death” as a 16-year-old political prisoner in Iran.

“I had grown up wearing a miniskirt and flirting with boys and dancing on the beach and loving it. I didn’t care about social justice,” says Nemat of the protests she became involved in after the revolution occurred and the Ayatollah Khomeini regime became more and more stringent. “Our teachers were one by one fired and replaced by fanatical young women who were there to give us propaganda and implement the Iranian Cultural Revolution.”

As a result of her protests, like so many other teenagers, she ended up in jail, where she endured two years of painful lashings and was forced to marry a prison guard or face the death of her parents. “At any given moment they could torture you; at any given moment they could kill you. You’re 16 years old, and you just want to live,” she tells the audience.

The torture Nemat speaks of is so far removed from the childhood that she enjoyed, watching the TV show Little House on the Prairie dubbed in Persian and immersing herself in literature and “into a world that was beautiful and funny and predictable.” From her childhood on, she says that “literature became a way of life for me.”

Eventually, this way of life allowed her to express her own story, which she relayed to a captivated Jerusalem audience at the fair.

Of her invitation to speak in Jerusalem, Nemat tells the crowd, “I was literally running around like an excited child… Who doesn’t want to see the Holy Land? And then all hell broke loose on the Internet. There were some people who criticized me and told me I shouldn’t be going to Israel; I should be boycotting Israel. I was so angry, I was so upset, I couldn’t sleep that night. I am not a politician, I’m a writer – it is my job to cross barriers, to cross borders.”

The audience members clearly appreciated her willingness to cross borders, as they voiced a collective “No!” when her 45 minutes were up. Some stayed on for the next speaker, while others went down to the convention hall, where they browsed through the wide selection of books that ranged from best-sellers, classic literature and religious works to children’s books like Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go. As Marilyn Flanzbaum notes, “There’s everything.”

Back on the green tarp, her husband continues to look through the magnificent images of polar Antarctica. “I bet this book is going back to Givat Olga tomorrow,” she says.

“In our community, we have a lot of celebrations where people eat all the time,” says gym regular Nava Eiznbach, a haredi woman who has been going to the Jump Health & Fitness Center in Binyenei Ha’uma four or five times a week for the past three months. “You should have the knowledge that exercise is healthy,” she says. “It gives me a lot of energy, it’s very healthy, and I’m losing weight now,” she continues, noting that the gym does wonders for women after pregnancy.

“They have a lot of courses: dancing, aerobics – the schedule is around the clock. I really can’t live without it; I look forward to it every day.”

Staff members at Jump and the men-only Kosher Gym in Givat Shaul – two of Jerusalem’s biggest gyms that attract sizeable religious populations – say that over the past couple of years they have seen a marked increase in haredi membership as the larger community shifts some of its priorities to focus more on bodily health as part of overall spiritual well-being.

As doctors and rabbis continue to advocate physical fitness, word spreads among friends about which places have comfortable workout facilities according to their religious standards. Meanwhile, memberships are becoming more affordable, as gym managements around the country are negotiating with health funds to find ways to subsidize costs.

“There is a large demand for haredi men and women to join because the gym addresses the separation between men and women,” says Michael Elgrably, the owner and manger of Jump for the past year and a half.

Elgrably comes from a family that owns two pharmaceutical companies where he serves as marketing manager, and owning a gym is part of his goal of “promoting people to live healthier” and integrate sports into their nutritional routines.

Since he took over the gym, Elgrably says that women’s membership jumped from 540 to 920, while men’s rose from 532 to 923, and he is certain that haredim make up a large portion of the over 70 percent membership increase.

“Doctors are motivating the men and women, especially yeshiva men, to start moving because they sit and eat, and sit and eat,” Elgrably says. “Their cholesterol gets high, and the food they eat is fatty. So for health reasons, their doctors are advising that they work out.

But they’re limited in terms of where they can go. And here is a place that meets their needs.”

BUT JOINING a gym wasn’t always popular within the haredi population – not only wasn’t it popular, but it was largely seen as taboo, something that would detract from learning and spirituality.

“Generally, this is a community that emphasizes the fact that man is made out of godly materials and has a godly origin and that man’s role in this world is to somehow unite with this origin,” says Dr. Yohai Hakak, senior lecturer and researcher on haredi society at the School of Health Sciences and Social Work at the University of Portsmouth in England, who completed his PhD at the Hebrew University and his post-doc at Ben-Gurion University. “And how do you unite with this spiritual origin? You do that through two ways – you minimize to a maximum your interaction with those earthly aspects, and you try to embed yourself in a spiritual environment.

“This earthly body is in a special and complicated tension. So the religious ruling tries to regulate it – on the one hand minimize the amount of energy and time that you’re allowed to spend on those bodily issues but on the other hand try to ensure this vessel will stay healthy and will continue to contain the soul in a healthy manner. So the only reason to deal with your body and to satisfy its needs is to keep it working as a vessel for your soul. This is why you’re not supposed to spend any extra time on ‘cultivating your body.’” And now, he says, haredim have become more open to “cultivating” their bodies – for health reasons and because they have adapted to modern Israeli society, which, for men, includes an increased emphasis on the “physical aspects of masculinity” from places like the military.

“Why can’t they avoid these influences? Because they are human beings,” Hakak says, But he adds that they too, in their “ability to delay gratification,” to discipline themselves to study for hours on end in yeshiva, also contribute “something that is very valuable in the wider Israeli context,” what he calls a “gentle masculinity.”

Among men and women alike, an increasing awareness about the importance of bodily and mental wellbeing has been quite a pivotal factor in changing the minds of rabbis and communities.

“Now they can claim that for health reasons you should and you need spend time on your body – and this is what many do. it’s not a coincidence in many instances that these gyms are called ‘health centers,’” Hakak says.

Tzvi Hendels, manager of the Bu’ot Center in Ashdod, provided a course last year that granted two certificates in fitness training to its primarily haredi graduates, based out of the Jerusalem Institute for the Blind in Kiryat Moshe. The course began with a 100-hour training preparation period because “simply not everyone from our community is in shape,” Hendels explains in a JPost TV video in December 2009. Currently, the Bu’ot center is working on opening a treatment gym in Ashdod, “for people who are overweight, who most probably would have heart problems if they go on like this,” an assistant to Hendels tells In Jerusalem. Meanwhile, they are planning to begin another fitness training course as well as a hydrotherapy course soon, probably in Ashdod this time.

“We have taken out the word ‘sport’ from swimming and from the gym and put the word ‘health’ in its place,” he tells JPost TV.

“Swimming is healthy, working out is healthy. The haredi community doesn’t like the word ‘sport’ and won’t take part in sports. The community does want anything that is connected to health.”

But meanwhile, back at Binyenei Hauma, Jump’s managers say they attempt to provide that feeling of safety and modesty to their customers by creating an upstairs floor for women only, complete with all the equipment available downstairs, which has mixed hours for most of the day but becomes men-only at night. There are zones with full cable television, areas with no television, and sections with educational programming only, to cater to all comfort levels.

The gym is not only a place for physical fitness for the haredi population, but it can also be an opportunity for socialization, Elgrably says. Some members participate in a special program where they come together from kollel or yeshiva as a group.

“They don’t go out to the cinema or parties – this is their outlet,” he says.

One particular incentive that has encouraged haredi women to join Jump is the availability of free babysitting services, says Elgrably.

“Often after giving birth, women suffer from postpartum depression, but they don’t have to stay home all the time. They can leave the baby with our babysitter and work on themselves and get in shape again,” he explains. “A husband may give his wife a gym membership as a gift after she has given birth. She’ll go work out and feel good, and he’ll feel good about that as well.”

Even the teachers take advantage of the babysitting feature: “I have a person here to take care of my son, and I can teach. I still want him with me,” Polsky says.

KOSHER GYM, the fitness center in Givat Shaul, limits its facilities to men only. In the near future, however, owner David Melki plans to open a women’s center nearby with equivalent features.

On the wall of Melki’s office is a certificate of approval for the gym from the haredi rabbinate, the only one of its kind in the world thus far, he says. Just inside the gym’s entrance is a kosher cafeteria, where members can also attend minha and ma’ariv services.

Like Jump, Kosher Gym is filled with top-of-the-line equipment. It also boasts a martial arts studio, as well as a climbing wall treadmill. Melki was a champion on Israel’s national martial arts team, which inspired him to open a studio in 1992 and then a haredi gym on Rehov Straus near Mea She’arim in 1997. He opened his current location in 2005.

One difference between the workout spaces at Kosher Gym and Jump is that there are no television screens, even though Melki says that some rabbis would approve channels likeNational Geographic, the news or daily Torah lessons. But Melki decided to have no televisions at all, which he says actually gives members a more personalized, interactive workout experience.

“When you’re in front of the TV on your treadmill, you’re by yourself. Here, we take care of you,” he says.

“Why should I let you be in front of the TV for one hour if I can help you and talk to you?” Another smaller gym – for women only – that emphasizes the personal approach is Curves, with seven locations in Jerusalem. Two are mainly used by haredi women, who make up 85% of the members at the Givat Shaul location, and 100% at Arzei Habira, says Givat Shaul manager Katherine Amrani.

At Curves, women can enjoy specialized, internationally patented 30-minute circuit workouts that feature intervals of high-speed exercise alternating with breaks, all performed in a circle around an instructor.

“It’s for women who want a support group to work out in,” Amrani says. “In regular gyms you’re kind of anonymous. Here at Curves, we have a community. We’re a circle. There’s always a coach in the middle supervising how you use your body.”

The Curves workout is quick and effective, making it perfect for “women who don’t have lots of time,” says Amrani. “A lot of [haredi] women have many children, and there’s more awareness now that taking care of yourself gives you a lot more energy.”

Nava Guetta, her counterpart at the second location, says she has not seen a large increase in membership since she moved her branch from Ramat Eshkol to Arzei Habira two months ago, but she is hopeful she will see one soon. “I see that more people are interested, and a lot of women are coming and asking; but I think a lot of them don’t have the money to pay for it,” Guetta says.

Another facility, Lady Giraffe in Romema’s Center One, is also supposedly quite popular among haredi women, but the management was unavailable for comment.

NO MATTER which of these gyms the men and women choose, the managers agree that fitness is a requirement for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

“I have a lot of haredi people who don’t know what it means to run on a treadmill,” Melki says. “They don’t know what the body is about. So we need to teach them and provide them with training.”

Some Kosher Gym members have gone on to compete and even win first place in bodybuilding competitions. “I’m not pushing them to do this,” says Melki. “If you want to be a champion, you will be a champion; but if you want to just work on your back, you do that. My goal is primarily health.”

Both Jump and Kosher Gym are influenced by Maimonides, who wrote a lot about the importance of physical fitness. “‘As long as a person works out, no sickness comes upon him’ – that’s one of our biggest mottos this year,” says Liff.

Similarly, a Maimonides quote is featured on the homepage of Kosher Gym’s website.

But recognizing how financially prohibitive it can be for local Jerusalem families to fulfill this need for fitness, many of the gym owners are talking to the health funds about partially subsidizing gym membership.

“We’re in the process of closing a deal with an insurance company to pay for part of the memberships. It’s the first time in Israel that something like this will happen,” Elgrably says, stressing, however, that Jump is not the only gym involved in such negotiations.

Because the deal is not yet final, Elgrably could not disclose which health fund he was closing with, but he says that any member of that fund who pays for the supplemental monthly insurance could join Jump for half the cost. He has also begun negotiations with another health fund, which he attributes to the “snowball effect.”

“Insurance companies checked out the population that came here, and they work with haredim a lot,” he says.

Guetta from Curves also says that her gym is about to close a similar deal with one of the health funds, and Melki says that he is in initial talks about partial subsidies. “Today you have stomach stapling – do you know how much it costs for a health fund to provide that?” Melki asks. “We approached the health fund and said, ‘Why wouldn’t you want to just pay a few hundred shekels a year here instead?’ The health funds have been putting their money in the wrong place.”

To ensure maximum health improvements among his Kosher Gym members, Melki has a physical therapist onsite, as well as a trainer and a fitness adviser who work with the clientele individually.

“On a monthly basis, we check how much fat a member has in his body, and then we take his measurements, compare them with his previous ones and check his weight and see whether this person is progressing,” says Michael Kiel, the club’s Wingate Institutecertified fitness adviser. If the man’s body fat percentage goes up, the trainers help him restructure his diet, says Kiel, 65, who served as a paratrooper in the Soviet military.

AT JUMP, one of Elgrably’s plans to further physical fitness is to offer satellite athletic training certification courses through Givat Washington’s physical education program. “They’ll be learning and practicing in the same place,” he says. “Also, the people who come to work out will benefit because people on the machines next to them will be learning how to be trainers.”

While he recognizes the need among Jerusalem’s haredi population to increase exercise, Elgrably and his staff stress that Jump attracts many secular members as well.

“You could come here in the afternoon and see a woman on a treadmill reading Psalms, another woman watching a rabbi’s speech and then, on the other hand, the girls who need MTV,” says Liff. “Everyone finds his or her place.”

For some, Liff says, the separation between the genders is just “more comfortable.”

Even Kosher Gym, with its haredi certification, welcomes secular male members who enjoy the serious workout atmosphere, notes Melki.

But religious or not, Jerusalem’s newest gym goers find that it’s just a matter of convincing oneself to integrate this necessary step into an already busy daily life.

“I was always health conscious, but I was jogging in the streets and I was starting to feel the wear on my knees. But now I’m doing a whole routine,” says Kosher Gym member Yehuda Fogel, 57, a grandfather of 16 who works in hi-tech. “Where I work, they’re all interested. It’s a matter of breaking the ice. Everybody has his routine; they’re all busy. I figured once you start something and you’re in a routine, you’ll keep doing it.”

Kiel recounts that a rabbi came into the gym in desperation a year ago – a 60-year-old yeshiva head who had always told his students that working out was a waste of time when they could have been learning. He had told Kiel, “If I saw a $100 bill lying on the ground, I wouldn’t be able to bend down and pick it up. Reality shows me that I need to invest in myself; otherwise I could reach the point of becoming helpless.”

The rabbi soon began working out with Kiel. “So we started to do exercises,” Kiel says. “After one month he could do one sit-up.

Then after three months, he could do five repeats in three sets. In eight months, he did 26 repeats in five sets.”

The first student to take the doctor’s chair, Jonathan Drew, was able to find out that the patient was from the Dominican Republic, but he got little information from him beside the fact that he has “no job,” he lives in a fourroom apartment with his daughter’s family and he plays guitar in Hudson River Park.

“Is anyone else sick like you?” Drew asked. “Yes I sick, not good here,” responded the actor playing Castro, who repeatedly referred to his abdominal pain as simply “fire.”

Drew and his peers, third-year students at Ben-Gurion University’s Medical School for International Health, were partaking in a cross-cultural workshop to prepare for the intense set of clinical rotations they will embark upon during their fourth and final year as medical students. Ben-Gurion’s program is one of three English-speaking medical school programs here.

The school primarily admits Americans and Canadians, and operates in collaboration with Columbia University in New York, selecting about 42 students for each class. After three years of studying and doing clinical rotations here, the students have the opportunity to expand their education elsewhere – serving thus far in two-month internships in Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Peru, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Vietnam and Nepal.

“Our students who come to us say they looked around the world and they couldn’t find anything else,” said Mark Clarfield, Israel director of the Medical School for International Health and a professor of geriatrics at BGU’s Faculty of Health Sciences. “A lot of medical schools now have international tracks, so if a student is interested he could go abroad. But the entire curriculum is not geared toward international health.”

Here, he said, students find “things you wouldn’t get at Harvard,” such as courses about water purity, malaria and medical anthropology.

His students, like Drew, 26, from North Carolina, testified to this. “The reason why I liked this program over others is actually being here in this country and the different perspective of living in this culture that’s different.”

Rory Spiegel, 29, formerly a physical therapist who was raised in a home that believed in both homeopathic and “inter-dimensional” medicine, agreed. “I always found Western medicine kind of alienating,” he said. “I was really interested in this program because of the human nature of it. I thought in some ways it would delay that loss of soul that comes with studying medicine.”

Beginning this year, however, the fourth-year students’ clinical rotation choices have become at least temporarily limited, because the US Department of Education suddenly stipulated that citizens who receive US government-guaranteed student loans can no longer attend internship programs outside the US and Israel. The students receiving loans are still able to do rotations among underserved US and Israeli populations, with opportunities here that Clarfield still deems “pretty exotic” in the Beduin, Druse, haredi and Ethiopian communities. Canadian students and those not receiving loans can continue to travel elsewhere.

“There’s cautious optimism that it will be better next year,” Drew said, noting that about 75 percent of his class would be affected.

BUT WHEREVER they end up next year, the students were able to learn from their experiences that day, which began with a morning meeting, led by course academic coordinator Dr. Agneta Golan, in which students presented objects or traditions from their own cultures.

One student, Shelly Theobald, 28, presented a tiny tattoo of a cross on her forearm. “I had a hard time because I don’t exist in a culture,” she told The Jerusalem Post. “I grew up in a tribe in Papua New Guinea but my parents were American. I basically have no culture. So this was something that I got – something they do all over their bodies, in random designs. It’s something all of us kids got when we left the tribe – they used to do it with charcoal and thorns but now they use battery acid. I got a cross because I am a Christian. No matter where I’d go or what culture I was surrounded by, religion has always been the same for me. It reminds me of my past.”

Though she left Papua New Guinea at 18 to return to the US for college, like so many of the other students, Theobald spent time traveling, including working extensively with an AIDS organization in Uganda.

Two other lectures followed that morning, “Language as a Cultural Barrier” by Prof. Miriam Shlesinger, head of the Language Policy Research Center at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Translation and Interpreting, and a seminar called “Truth Telling: A Cross-Cultural Odyssey,” with Prof. Ora Paltiel from the Hebrew University.

Paltiel spoke about her experience as a young doctor when she was once too blunt with a patient, who ultimately refused to come back for treatment and subsequently died from a tumor. Stressing how important it is to take the patient’s culture into account when delivering a diagnosis, Paltiel said, “In American medicine, autonomy takes precedence over everything and in other places beneficence takes precedence over autonomy.”

This warning is something the students would need to heed a couple hours later, when they’d act as doctors to patients from very diverse backgrounds, patients who would later provide them with feedback about how they did after getting through 45 minutes of often gritty conversations that sometimes would lead nowhere.

“This is the only opportunity in your lifetime that a patient is telling you how he feels about you,” Golan told one of the groups. “They might sue you, but they never tell you how they feel in the chair.”

BACK IN the classroom, Drew handed over his doctor position to Tali Okrent, 28, who determined that Castro had been sick for four or five weeks, and while his apartment building was “old,” the paint on the walls didn’t seem to be the cause of his lead poisoning.

Okrent decided to take Clarfield’s advice and follow a protocol they had learned earlier that day from Golan, using the “CHAT” method – or cultural and health belief assessment tools – which includes simple questions like how do you think your disease started, what does the disease do to you, how bad do you think your illness is and what have you done to treat your illness? Golan had instructed the students to use these questions to improve communication and “negotiate a treatment plan,” along with reading body language and finding a way “to politely enter somebody else’s culture.”

Okrent chose to ask, “Why do you think you started to feel sick?” and received only the frustrating response, “I not doctor.” But after a few more questions, the man identified that his feeling of “fire” had moved from his legs to his stomach after he had attempted to treat the leg fire with a powder from a local pharmacy.

“Another student, Liz Morgan, 26, was able to determine that friends of his have also used this powder but are not sick as far as he knows.

“I can give you something else instead of the powder for the fire,” she said. But she and the other students still struggled to communicate that he must use a new “powder” that they would provide to cure his athlete’s foot.

“You knew he had lead poisoning,” Clarfield said to them. “How do we help this poor gentleman? It’s not hard medically, but it’s very hard linguistically and culturally. He might have a PhD or a second grade education – he just doesn’t speak English.”

Clarfield instructed them to make compromises by doing things like “use the little Spanish you have – fake it,” “dumb down your English” and use key words, like “powder, no good. Good for the feet, not good for the stomach.”

Meanwhile, the actor, Miguel Orbach, who has been doing medical acting for more than six years, suggested that the students try speaking with their hands.

“We’re lucky here because this particular patient seems very respectful of you doctors,” Clarfield said. “He thinks you know everything. This means he’ll be very compliant.”

The two other patients were not nearly as cooperative, though their command of the English language was not a problem. The students were introduced to a young man named Rick, to whom they had to deliver a positive diagnosis for HIV.

“Your results came back and your white cell blood counts are low,” said the first student, Prakash Ganesh, 28. “Whatever that means,” Rick responded.

After struggling for some moments to tell Rick the truth, Ganesh finally said, “We ran some tests and we found out you have HIV.” But the patient refused to accept the results and even became aggressive.

Since Rick clearly wasn’t going to cooperate with Ganesh, Frayda Kresch, 25, took over. But as soon as she attempted to speak with him about his diagnosis, he resorted to flirting with her.

Aptly acknowledging his compliment but reinforcing her role as a doctor, Kresch quickly went on to explain how “HIV is a very different disease than what it was 20 years ago.” But Rick just responded, “The girls I go out with are from Tel Aviv, you know. And if I pick up a tourist here or there, I’m talking about quality girls. You can tell.”

Only when Kresch decided to ask him what would possibly get him to listen to her did the patient become slightly more willing to accept and discuss his diagnosis – his answer, after nearly a minute of silence: “Maybe if my holistic doctor came.”

The medical school professors in the room were very impressed by Kresch’s patience.

“You asked him what would convince you, and there was total silence for a while,” said Shimon Glick, one of the instructors and professor emeritus at the school. “Most people who interview are afraid of silence. But in a way it forces the other person to react and you don’t have to do anything.”

Kresch explained that after observing Ganesh handle the patient, her goals immediately became to make sure the prognosis seemed positive and “trying to figure out what his bible is” – in the end, his homeopathic doctor.

Meanwhile, Ganesh said, “I felt really uncomfortable breaking the news that he had HIV. I didn’t know how to throw that out there.” But he added, “The funny thing is I used to work with HIV patients.”

“The great thing you both were doing the same with more or less success was that, in this terrible situation, you were looking for a point of common ground – who he is, what would work for him, how does he understand that it works,” said Golan, noting that it was important to demonstrate to the patient that they respected his belief system. “The second time you’ll have an AIDS patient like him, it will be easier.”

The third scenario the students faced was perhaps the most challenging – a haredi woman named Ruti was experiencing bleeding between periods and was convinced that this was a punishment for something bad she did in the past.

After hearing Ruti say, “I did some very bad things when I was little,” Namita Rokkam, 25, asked her why the bleeding began now rather than a long time ago. But she would only answer, “Because I have a bad thought – I am thinking about bad things,” and then mentioned that she needed to protect her daughter, with no further explanation.

The students actually were never able to uncover what the “bad things” actually were, but Rachel Dunham, 24, was able to get her to speak about her childhood and her family relationships – discovering that her bond with her five sisters had always been strong but only receiving muted grunts at the mention of her five brothers. “I tried talking to my mother but she didn’t listen,” she said, but ultimately wouldn’t talk to the doctors.

The students ran out of time before they were able to get any farther through Ruti’s seemingly impenetrable wall, causing the actress to later tell them, “I didn’t feel that you really tried to come close to me.”

Despite the frustrations they experienced, the students overwhelmingly thought the day’s experiences were invaluable in preparing them to face real-life clinical situations in environments that might be less than friendly to their Western, English-speaking approaches to medicine.

“I definitely enjoyed the chance this morning to hear pieces of people’s cultures from the class and I think it worked,” Dunham said. “I was just thinking about where we started three years ago – it worked because we trust each other a lot.”

“As a religious person, there are two parts of me practicing. One is what happens between me and God,” the 33-year-old Jerusalemite tells In Jerusalem. “The other 50 percent is what do I do for the community. I think that Zionism today is much to do with how can we make Israel a state worth living in and worth being the only Jewish state in the world. There’s a lot to change.”

Banner’s most recent venture in serving the local community is Hotam: Teach First Israel – a program modeled after those in the Teach for All Network, such as Teach for America and Teach First UK – which encourages the best and brightest students to teach in Israel’s most underserved populations for at least two years.

This month, Teach First Israel is in its second year of recruitment, and has already received 710 applications for 110 places, with an ultimate goal of reaching 1,200 by the end of this season. This year, Teach First Israel is particularly seeking English, science and math teachers, and is actively recruiting graduates of top universities and colleges throughout Israel.

But Banner’s inspiration for establishing Teach First Israel came from years of community service and a drive to improve other people’s lives.

Born and bred in Jerusalem, where he has lived all his life, and active in the religious scouts here, Banner left the city only briefly for a South American tour after the army and then two or three months of living in New York. “But basically I’ve been here,” he says, noting that he did both his undergraduate degree in psychology and business and his MBA at the Hebrew University.

“Everything started when I finished my army service,” Banner says. “We were a couple of friends looking into where we could do good. And we found the results of the social security report from the year 1999, and then we started to deliver food packages to people in need.”

This group of friends – “three guys and a girl” – ended up starting the organization Shachen Tov (The Good Neighbor Association) which today distributes meals to about 1,500 families around the country through the hands of thousands of volunteers, Banner says.

In addition to providing food to those in need, Shachen Tov hosts “coffee shops on wheels” for battered women, seniors and at-risk youth, and also runs learning centers and a textbook-sharing library. With a yearly budget of $261,000, the organization’s functioning is based solely on private donations.

“We were doing this for a couple of years and then we thought we needed to do something to get to the core of the problem and not just to the symptoms of the problem. So we thought about starting with social justice, mainly in terms of handicapped individuals, workers’ rights and disabilities rights. Another angle was that we understand that the State of Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, but this ‘Jewishness’ was mainly being expressed through laws about the holidays and kashrut. But it’s not related enough to the core of Judaism” – which Banner describes as dealing with social justice from a Jewish perspective.

Anxious to explore this “core” of Judaism, Banner and his friends decided in 2004 to start another new organization – Bema’aglei Tzedek – which serves to engage thousands of young Israelis in social change, in the classroom, youth movements and the army.

The organization holds biannual conferences – on 17 Tamuz and 10 Tevet, days of fasting and soul-searching – in the city’s center. The first conference, in 2005, attracted over 1,000 people, and since then, the conferences typically offer some 25 simultaneous lessons from different experts on Jewish social justice, such as prominent rabbis and academics from the field.

“Every conference people went out with homework – saying this is what you can do about accessibility for people with disabilities and workers’ rights,” Banner says.

The goal of Bema’aglei Tzedek continues to be a twofold vision of defining the Jewish identity of the State of Israel in terms of social justice and by pinpointing the roots of the country’s community issues, rather than just treating the symptoms. Thus far, the organization has gotten these missions under way through practical social justice projects. The first, he says, is providing a social kashrut certification called Tav Hevrati, a free certificate earned by about a third of Jerusalem’s restaurants, which have demonstrated that they are accessible to the disabled and treat their workers ethically.

A SECOND project, called Employment Watchdogs, focuses on making sure security guards and custodial workers are not exploited by their employers, by teaching high school students to advocate on their behalf. “They’re going to be the poor of the next decade – no one is paying them as they should be paid,” Banner says.

Bema’aglei Tzedek also brings educational programming to the country’s various youth movements, building up their social justice curriculums and enabling group members to partake in the organization’s larger projects and ideas.

“Now Bema’aglei Tzedek is working toward creating cities of justice. The idea is to take a city and work really hard with the municipality and youth movements and educational organizations and to work on the city in order to change it into a city of justice,” he says. Jerusalem is the pilot city in this project.

In the midst of getting Bema’aglei Tzedek on the move, Banner meanwhile worked with a group of friends approximately three years ago to establish a fund called Keren Psifas, which provides funding to individual families for services like psychologist visits, transportation and additional schooling. Each of the 10 friends initially involved soon brought in additional donors, and the group now provides about NIS 25,000 per month to families all over the country. Last year, the fund was dedicated to the memory of IDF soldiers Yosef Goodman and Eliezer Globerman.

“The idea is that we met families’ needs to take a significant step in their lives, with not too much cash, that can change their life trajectory,” Banner says.

“For example, we help kids who need to be examined by psychologists to know they have ADHD. If your parents don’t have NIS 2,000 for psychological tests, then you’re not going to do it.”

While one of his friends was visiting a child he had been working with in Ramle, he found an awful smell in the family’s apartment. “They said that every month all the sewage of the building comes up in their bathtub – they just lived with this awful smell in the house, and they had little kids.”

In the end, Keren Psifas was able to help pay for a plumber to fix the pipes.

“We don’t give the people themselves the money, but we pay for the service,” Banner explains, noting that another service the fund provides is vocational courses for battered women, so that they can move on with their lives as best as possible.

Until about 18 months ago, Banner remained CEO of Bema’aglei Tzedek, and though he still serves on the board there today – and was on the board of Shachen Tov until two years ago – he decided that since this organization was up and running on the right foot, he’d move on to the next thing.

THIS, OF course, was Teach First Israel, which is now operated under the joint administration of the Education Ministry, JDC-Israel, the Naomi Foundation and Hakol Chinuch, an organization that works to advance the Israeli educational system. The Naomi Foundation is named after the late wife of the donor, who Banner says has supported the organization from the beginning. But the name of that foundation bears additional significance to Banner because his own mother, who was responsible for so much of his interest in social action and who died last year, was named Naomi.

“A lot of times when people want to start something, they have no funding,” Banner says, stressing how raising money has presented so many difficulties along the way. “If you start on a small scale and you can show you are really doing things, then it’s a great help. And I had a lot of luck.”

The 110 places available to interested applicants this year is a sizable increase from only 70 spots last year, and students have the opportunity to simultaneously earn their teaching qualifications through programs at the University of Haifa and Beit Berl College, so that they will be able to then teach in any Israeli high school. Currently, the students teach in 22 underserved schools across the country. “

I met a guy who told me about Teach for America and his idea for bringing it here,” Banner says. Simultaneously, he continues, a friend working in London met with Brett Wigdortz, the CEO of Teach First UK and the cofounder and president of Teach for All, who as a New Jersey-born Jew was really passionate about getting something like this started in Israel as well.

With these connections, Banner was able to start meeting with representatives from Teach for All, the global umbrella group, which held a conference in Mumbai earlier this month that a couple of his teachers attended.

Banner gives a huge amount of credit to Rabbi Shay Piron, executive director of Hakol Chinuch, for the progress he made getting Teach First Israel started. Before launching the program, Banner worked at Hakol Chinuch with Piron for about six months to develop the program, and then met with former director-general of the Education Ministry, Shlomit Amihai, who also wanted to encourage new, young teachers to join the system.

“Then we started to work together, and here we stand today,” he says, noting that Amihai is now the chairperson of Teach First Israel, while he is the CEO.

The first round of students began teaching this September.

“They are in the battle zone for five or six months, doing some amazing stuff, from creating a library in a school and fostering among other teachers the idea of reading five or six books a year,” Banner says. “They are working with kids who nobody really believed in” – building and organizing new activities like basketball teams, soccer clubs and bands.

“We started recruitment for the second cohort six weeks ago,” he says. “This year our goal is to reach 1,200. I think we are going to break it.”

Banner says great care was taken to avoid stepping on teachers’ toes by suggesting that graduates who are not trained in education would make better teachers than those with certificates.

“First, all of our teachers go through an accredited teaching program provided in collaboration with our partners Haifa University and Beit Berl college and earn a teaching certificate by the end of their first year of teaching. Secondly, we realize that there are so many great teachers within the education system and our young teachers can learn from them. That is why each participating school selects a veteran and excellent teacher to support our teachers. As a mentor they have weekly meetings with each teacher, observe their classrooms and provide feedback,” he says.

“While there are wonderful teachers in the education system we believe that not enough of the highest achieving university students and Israel’s most talanted young people are selecting a career in teaching and we want to be part of the effort that seeks to change this. After only a few months we have seen that Teach First Israel participants have been well received at their schools. They have entered the schools with a lot of humility and eagerness to learn and others have responded well to it – principals, mentors and other teachers alike.”

While the program really needs English teachers, Banner warns that applicants must be fluent in Hebrew, because all of the training is in that language.

In addition to improving the lives of their students, the student-teachers are growing themselves and are witnessing a revitalization of the teaching profession’s prestige.

“The teaching profession’s prestige went lower and lower and lower. Now there’s a momentum driving it. If a country doesn’t put its best and brightest in teaching, then what does that mean for the next generation? There is a global concept of being a teacher and how attractive that is, and this doesn’t relate only to salaries. It mostly relates to social status – how the environment will treat you.”

Repeating a comment of one of his new teachers, who prior to this year would never have admitted to teaching, Banner says, “I’m out of the closet; I choose to be a teacher.”

While Banner finds the new excitement over teaching to be encouraging, he still believes that there’s a lot of room for improvement in Israel’s educational system.

“I think that as the people of the book we can be much, much better,” Banner says, noting that Israel’s international rankings are far lower than they should be.

“This is one of the biggest challenges Israel has, if she wants to keep her advantage,” he says.

IN ORDER to maintain that advantage, however, Israelis must also involve themselves more in social action and in donating money where they can, according to Banner.

“I think at volunteerism we are doing much better in terms of volume. In terms of donations, we are not there yet. As a nation we have the demand that’s harder than many other countries – being the chosen people means we are chosen to do more good. We need to do much more in this field.”

And Banner predicts that more and more Israelis will become interested in pursuing this goal. “People are looking for Zionism today – how can I build the country today? And I think people are seeing this as a path to how they can really do it.”

Though he does enjoy starting up new social justice organizations, Banner sees himself staying here at Teach First Israel at least until it’s stabilized.

“You evolve from what you do,” he says. “You start from a food package and then you go to the core of the problem. Now the idea is to create a group of people and influence in education in ways that no one thought about – to create a virus, a mob of people.”

Banner’s advice for budding young social justice entrepreneurs? “Do only things that you are passionate about. You won’t be able to make people go after you if you’re not really, really passionate about [what you are doing]. Pick the thing you really want to change. Don’t listen to the skeptics and the cynical remarks, phone calls, e-mails, that say ‘It’s never going to work, no one will come.’”

And as for his own family, Banner is already encouraging his two children – particularly his eldest at two and a half years old – to get involved with the local community. “He learned how to give tzedaka, so he’s [going] in the right direction,” Banner says.

“I put Stars and Stripes stickers on my haj bags,” he said. “The religious guards would say ‘American, American,’ and say ‘Come, come’ and give us all kinds of things. They look so stern but because we had Stars and Stripes stickers they left us alone.”

The audience of about 20 laughed unanimously, some visibly wearing black velvet kippot and others hailing from Israel’s Christian and Muslim communities – but almost all students and professionals involved in interfaith discourse and education. Ibrahim, a Muslim American chief executive officer of a US-based credit risk management company who is active in promoting interreligious dialogue, came to speak at Jerusalem’s Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel about his personal journey to Mecca, which he has made twice.

“The only mosque in the world where men and women can pray together is the holiest mosque in the world,” Ibrahim said. “The crowds are so fierce that I had my arms around Nina,” he added, gesturing to his wife in the audience.

“There’s no country in the world that’s not there.”

This was Ibrahim’s first visit to Israel. He had already been heading to Egypt to speak at a US State Department-sponsored entrepreneurship workshop, the third in a string of such sessions held by the US State Department in honor of US President Barack Obama’s historic June 2009 Cairo speech – which Ibrahim had been part of as well. Since he’d already be in the area, Ibrahim decided to stop by Israel at the encouragement of his friend Rabbi Dr. Ron Kronish, director of the ICCI, whom he had gotten to know about two years ago in conjunction with interfaith student trips to the Middle East that Ibrahim sponsors.

“I had to come and see the great work he does in working with people of different faiths, in person,” Ibrahim told In Jerusalem after the lecture that evening.

Kronish added, “The reason he came to Israel was that he is a big believer in building bridges and bonds of friendship of people of different religions. He wants to help those of us who are doing this in Israel to do it better.”

Meanwhile, Jerry Wind – a favorite professor from Ibrahim’s alma mater, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania – had encouraged him to come see the progress on campus at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, which he had cofounded.

“Being a strong believer that success and prosperity come through great education, I had to come and see this fine institution,” Ibrahim said.

The trips that Ibrahim began sponsoring two years ago, called the Ibrahim Leadership and Dialogue Project in the Middle East, bring a group of select Jewish, Muslim and Christian students from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University on an interfaith journey to the Middle East.

Now held annually each June since 2009, the group is led by Dr. Steven David, vice dean for undergraduate education and professor of political science at Johns Hopkins and former professor of Ibrahim’s son Winston. Expenses are entirely paid for by Ibrahim, and the project is administered by the Institute of International Education (IIE), a nonprofit organization founded in 1919 to promote the exchange of ideas among different peoples.

“As a very patriotic American Muslim who loves my country, I thought, How can I help my country? I would create an activity that breaks down the wall in these faiths,” Ibrahim said.

Both last year and the previous year, after a dayand- a-half orientation in Washington, DC, the students spent approximately three days in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Israel, explained Mike McCartt, program director of Global Exchanges at the IIE. This year or in the future, Ibrahim and the other organizers hope to expand the trip to another Middle Eastern country.

“My whole goal in life is to promote tolerance and goodwill among these people and showcase something very special about the United States,” Ibrahim said. “These kids from the US, by doing nothing on this trip, are sending such a powerful message to people they meet in Israel, Abu Dhabi and Jordan. Religion is not a barrier.”

David, the trip leader from JHU, added, “The trip itself is a worthy endeavor. Unlike other interfaith efforts, it does not simply concentrate on hearing like-minded voices but deliberately seeks out passionate views on all sides of the spectrum. So, we talk to radical imams, Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees and others who feel passionately about their views, to get an accurate sense of what’s going on in the Middle East.”

While in Israel, the students spend two days in Jerusalem with Kronish and one day in the Tel Aviv area – the morning at IDC Herzliya and the afternoon at the beach in Tel Aviv, Ibrahim said.

“He is exactly the kind of person that is needed to help deal with all the strife and rancor that surrounds Middle Eastern issues,” said David, who is accompanied on the trips by Ibrahim’s son Winston. “Mr. Ibrahim is a wealthy businessman who is committed to interfaith dialogue and who expounds a moderate view of Islam that is tolerant and committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes.

We need many more like him.”

During Ibrahim’s own four-day whirlwind trip to Israel last week, in between speaking at ICCI, delivering an entrepreneurship lecture at the IDC and meeting with an adviser to the prime minister, he was able to get in a few visits to the country’s major sites. On Thursday, his last day, “he insisted on going to Yad Vashem in the morning,” according to Kronish.

“I could go on forever about the things I liked,” Ibrahim said of his time here. “Experiencing the places where so many important religious events related to the great Abrahamic faiths happened, visiting them and feeling awed and inspired.

Spending a day at the IDC and finding that its reality was even more impressive than what I had imagined and experiencing the warmth of the people I met. More than anything else, meeting the caring and daring members of Rabbi Kronish’s board and seeing their commitment to building respect and goodwill among people of all three Abrahamic faiths.”

But Ibrahim made sure to mention one last favorite of his trip to Israel. “Oh yes, I enjoyed the humous,” he said: “Jewish-style at lunch with the IDC team in Herzliya and Palestinian-style at lunch with Rabbi Kronish and two of his colleagues in Jerusalem in the Old City. I thoroughly enjoyed both.”

And he would love to share that ability to “enjoy both” with those who are not yet inclined to do so.

“We all reach a stage in our lives where we want to say what are some things about the world that bother us,” he explained. “For me, I have seen people from different faiths as my friends and connected to me. And when I see people separated by religion, it bothers me. In my book it’s the same religions.”

As to what the viable solution might be to breach these separations and contribute toward a peace process in the region, Ibrahim didn’t pretend to have an answer – though he was hopeful that there would be one soon. “I do not feel that I have the insight or expertise to comment on the Israeli-Palestinian solution,” he said. “My hope is that there will be a solution soon that brings peace, prosperity and security to all the people in the region.”

But in the meantime, he remains passionate about bringing people together and getting them one step closer to achieving that sort of mutual understanding.

“We don’t make distinctions between these books,” he said, referring to the Koran and the Bible. “But today we don’t live that way. It bothers me because I view all of them [Jews, Muslims, Christians] as my people. I genuinely find that I feel equally warm about all three of them.”

A devout American Muslim, Ibrahim and his wife left IJ with a quote from the Koran as they hurried to fit in one last prayer session at Al- Aksa before their flight to Cairo: “We believe in God, and in what has been revealed to Abraham, Ismail, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes, and in [the books] given to Moses, Jesus and the prophets from their Lord: We make no distinction between one and another among them and to God do we submit in Islam” (Koran: Surah al- Imran 3:84).