For over 50 years, rising high school seniors in Colorado have been visiting Israel as a group, learning about the Jewish connection to Israel, about the country’s diverse culture and exploring and developing their Jewish identity.
This year promises to be no different.
While the annual Joyce Zeff Israel Study Tour will see some logistical adaptations due to the Israel-Hamas War, the group is heading, as always, to Poland and Israel this July for four weeks.
“It’s such an important trip in these teens’ lives,” says Jillian Feiger, JEWISHcolorado’s director of Jewish Student Connections and IST. “It would take a lot for us to cancel.”
For security reasons, the trip this year is limited to one bus that will have two dedicated security guards with it at all times. Four staff will join the trip from Denver.
In Poland, the group will meet its Israeli staff. After visiting sites including Auschwitz and spending a Shabbat in Cracow’s revitalized Jewish quarter, the whole group will head to Israel.
The trip is fully subscribed with 41 participants.
“If planes are going and other trips are going, we’re going,” says Feiger, who will mark her 10th year with IST.
According to Feiger, the idea of cancelling the trip never really came up. “It’s such a stronghold in the community . . . people want to go, and [parents] trust us to keep their teens safe.”
IST takes fulfilling that trust seriously.
Prior to departure, Secure Community Network will conduct situational awareness and scenario training with all the participants — staff and students, as well as their parents.
Counselors will also receive enhanced mental health training, to help participants process some of the difficult scenes and emotions they may encounter.
The events of Oct. 7 and since then will likely add more layers to what is always a trip that challenges students and staff, Feiger says.
Following the visit to a concentration camp, for example, there is a framework in place for processing as a group and as individuals. In Israel, the students are exposed to people who may come from a very different background or have a different point of view. Those experiences, says Feiger, are ones that prompt IST participants to reflect and discuss.
She anticipates that Oct. 7 will expand those conversations.
“The Holocaust has been more forefront on people’s minds, so teens may react differently to sites like the concentration camps,” says Feiger. On past trips this may have felt historical; today the Holocaust “feels more relevant than it has.”
Feiger feels prepared not only due to her long experience with IST, but because she has led three volunteer missions to Israel since January. She will not encounter the post-Oct. 7 terrain for the first time.
While visiting sites of Oct. 7 are not specifically part of the agenda, Feiger says that if it is safe the group may visit some of the kibbutzim and the site of the Nova musical festival, but only if people who experienced it are on site to share their story.
That type of on the fly planning, while possibly accentuated during a time of war, is typical to any IST trip, says Feiger. In a normal year, the itinerary may change 15 or 20 times she says.
“I think [this year’s trip] will have the same mission, vision and values, but with a little more meaning to it.”
Follow IST this summer on its Instagram, @JZ_IST
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