| |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | |
Samuel and Evelyn Linden Scholarship Recipients2007
Staci Raab: Staci is finishing her third year at UVA, majoring in Anthropology and Music. She has been a Chabad volunteer doing relief after Hurricane Katrina, served as a Hillel intern, participates in the Jewish-Arab Sustained Dialogue, and is a member of the Hoos for Israel. She also is a member of the UVA marching band. Staci requested a scholarship to support her research in Israel on the cultural effects of popular music in Israel. More specifically, she wants to explore the ways that popular music shapes culture, and culture shapes popular music. She is interested in Israeli hip hop music, which uses elements of both Arabic Israeli and Jewish Israeli music. She will interview several dozen Israeli musicians, both Jewish and Arab, to study such questions as: Who listens to Israeli hip hop? Does Israeli hip hop affect the listeners in terms of their views of each other (Jew and Arab)? What impact, if any, does this music have in the politically charged Israeli environment? She plans to tape record her interviews, and write a thesis that summarizes her research and findings. Staci plans to give something back by giving a presentation on what she learned to UVA groups such as Hoos for Israel, and leading a discussion after a showing of the movie "Channels of Rage," which describes the Israeli hip hop culture. Her work in Israel this summer will be part of an independent study she is doing with a UVA professor of ethnomusicology. She also is working with another UVA faculty member to plan a conference on Israeli music (to take place in 2008), and believes that her research in Israel will support that work.
2006Yarden Batson: Yarden is a senior at Charlottesville High School. She’s been involved in a variety of Jewish youth group activities including Jewish summer camps, the USY Jewish youth movement, Jewish summer camps (as a CIT), and teacher’s assistant at the Cong. Beth Israel religious school. She also volunteered at the religious school for several years before taking the paid position. In the community she has volunteered at the local SPCA and at CHS activities. Yarden will be participating this summer in the Israel Seminar, which is a program of Camp Ramah (which she’s attended before). This Seminar includes hiking through parts of Israel, meeting with Palestinians, interacting for a day with Bedouins, going on a dig, living on a kibbutz, engaging in community service, and having multi-cultural experiences through the Seminar’s non-Jewish Minorities and Coexistence activity. She plans to give something back on her return by making presentations in her CBI classes about her experiences.
Rebecca Klimpl: Becca received her BA (’05) and MS (’06) degrees from UVA’s School of Commerce. She was an active member of the UVA Hillel throughout her college life, serving as committee chair, treasurer, and finally president. She created the first annual Hillel-Muslim Student Association Shabbat, which won an award from the UVA Student Council as the best collaboration of 2003. As an officer she helped in a wide range of activities, from fund raising and the marketing of Hillel to Jewish students, to creating a religious service for Shabbat observance. She volunteered frequently at nursing homes and at a Jewish preschool while in school. Becca will spend the 2006-’07 year studying at the Pardes Yeshiva in Jerusalem, learning about classical Jewish texts, philosophy, and spirituality. Pardes requires weekly community service from its students. She plans to fulfill this requirement by participating in an interfaith program in Israel, one that helps its participants engage in active dialogue with one another. She plans to contact Rabbi Ron Kronish, who leads an inter-religious organization in Israel and has offered to help Linden Scholarship recipients design interfaith programs for themselves.
The following is a note from Rebecca Klimpl who is studying at Pardes, a progressive yeshiva in Israel. She contacted Rabbi Ron Kronish, a friend of the scholarship program who runs the Inter-religious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI). Rabbi Kronish created an internship for Rebecca and Nicole Luna, another scholarship winner:"I absolutely love living in Israel and experiencing the culture. Through Rabbi Kornish, Nicole Luna and I are working on an ICCI project which brings Arab and Jewish high school students from Jerusalem together to learn about each other. The students meet frequently for discussion groups and then spend a week together in a US summer camp with other groups of students from problematic areas of the world. The program is very similar to Seeds of Peace except that it places a greater emphasis on religious understanding as a necessary step towards political resolutions. The program is extremely selective and attempts to choose students with the leadership potential to effect change in their home communities. Nicole's and my task is to help the ICCI create and conduct and survey to determine what effect the program has had on the lives of past participants and how the program could more effectively achieve its objectives. (This task fits particularly well with the marketing research classes that I took at the Commerce School!) Currently, we are still in the process of developing the survey. A few weeks ago we attended a reunion event where we had the opportunity to meet many past participants and their parents. We heard their reactions to the program and watched a video that they had created about the experience. This gave us a much better idea of how to formulate the survey and conduct the interviews. Additionally, the meeting helped me understand the difficultly and importance associated with this program."
Nicole Luna: Nicole graduated with a BA in Jewish Studies from UVA in 2006. She has been active with the UVA Hillel since she arrived, leading committees and serving as vice president and then president. She coordinated interfaith activities including a Jewish and Muslim joint text study and an interfaith Shabbat service with the Muslim Student Association, She helped coordinate a Week of Conscience of Darfur, which included working with other student religious groups. Nicole also was involved in a Hillel initiative that encouraged students to advocate for important public policy issues including hunger, and equal rights for same sex couples. Nicole is a founding member of the Children of Abraham group, which brings together Christians, Muslims and Jews for cultural and religious exchange through scriptural study. In high school she participated in a program called Operation Understanding, which promotes dialogue between African American and Jews. Through this program she traveled to the South to study the Civil Rights movement. Nicole has been accepted at the Rabbinical School of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and will be living and studying in Jerusalem during 2006-’07. Part of her rabbinical program includes community service. She applied for the Linden Scholarship to help her find a program in Jerusalem that promotes interfaith and intercultural dialogue among Jews, Arabs and Palestinians. She believes that one of her future responsibilities as a rabbi will be to promote peace and social justice among people of different faiths. Like Becca Klimp, she will be contacting Rabbi Kronish to get his assistance in designing an interfaith program that meets her interests.
2005Jill Dietrick: Jill is a third-year student at UVA, who will spend eight weeks this summer learning Arabic at Yarmouk University, in Jordan. She also will study Arab and Muslim culture, and receive 9 academic credits. She has taken several classes to learn Hebrew, Israel and Israeli culture, and has begun learning the Arabic language. Now she wants to learn Arabic more intensively, and gain more knowledge about the Arab and Muslim perspectives of the conflict in the Middle East. She plans to meet with Arabs this summer to better understand their views, and to learn about the conflicts on a more personal level, as a way of improving her insights into all sides of the issue. She is considering a career in the foreign service after college.
Alina Khurgel: Alina, who is graduating from Western Albemarle High School this spring, will live in Israel 10 months during 2005-2006. Some of that time will be spent at Neve Shalom, a village in Israel made up half of Jews, half of Arabs. She will be there as part of a Young Judaea academic and cultural program. She wants to learn about the bridging of cultures by studying the children of Neve Shalom. Alina's experience teaching children in the Cong. Beth Israel Religious School has shown her that children have no inherent prejudices. She believes children who experience friendship and positive relationships with children from different cultures will maintain those positive feelings throughout their lives. She will work part time in the Neve Shalom elementary school, and use her photographic skills to document the relationship building process among children of different peoples. She also plans to teach English to children from low-income families in Tel Aviv for one semester. When she returns to Charlottesville she plans to create a "photo journal" of her experiences, and show it to children and adults in our community.
Juliana Ochs: Julie is a graduate student currently pursuing a doctorate in social anthropology at Cambridge University. She has had numerous personal and academic experiences that involved dialogue with Arabs and Muslims, and since 2001 has observed the great decline of dialogue on an everyday basis between Jews and Arabs/Palestinians in Israel (because of the Intifada). She will be conducting research for a month in Israel this summer, observing and interviewing Jews and Arabs/Palestinians in Israel to learn about their current perceptions of each other. She will focus specifically on signs of fear and lack of empathy that they exhibit toward each other, as well as points of commonality and signs of understanding. On returning from Israel, Julie will complete her dissertation (which she hopes to publish as a book). In addition, she plans to use her past experiences as a museum curator to create a museum exhibition of photographs from her trip, depicting Jews and Arabs/Palestinians as they encounter each other in public spaces.
2004
Samuel Brody: He and a Palestinian-American colleague are going to Israel to interview a number of Israelis and Palestinians to learn their views of the peace movement, and learn why it has changed so radically since the summer of 2000. They have funding from other sources, and asked for money for incidental and helpful expenses (e.g., taking cabs instead of buses). His interviews may or may not give him and his colleague useful insights into the peace movement's changes; however, their time in Israel and their interviews with knowledgeable Israelis and Palestinians will be a powerful experience, one that should result in important contributions to their home communities when they return. In my letter I'm asking Samuel to spell out more clearly how he (and his colleague) will communicate what they've learned when they come back.
Aaron Kurman: Has been accepted as a counselor for the Seeds of Peace summer camp in Maine, where he will be paid and given room and board. He asked for a small amount of money for transportation costs, food on days off, supplies for his campers. This decision is, in part, an investment in his follow up activities after the camp: he'll be returning to UVA, and has a number of creative ideas on how he can educate others about Seeds of Peace, how it helps young people who are in conflict to listen to each other and seek common ground, and about his experiences with the campers.
Cari Bricklin: She has been accepted to rabbinical school at HUC, and the first year is spent in Israel. She doesn't have a plan for engaging Arab/Palestinian youth in dialogue, but is open to it. The dean of HUC in Israel informed me that such dialogue will be relatively easy to arrange.In my letter to her, I'm asking her to work with the dean and the Interfaith Coordinating Council of Israel (which is headed by Rabbi Kronish), to design opportunities for interfaith dialogue. While Cari's main interest is in receiving support to offset the tuition costs, we are investing in her education as a way to broaden her knowledge of Arab and Palestinian perspectives in Israel. We think this is especially important given the fact that as a rabbi she'll have an opportunity to speak to and influence a large number of people over the course of her career.
Matthew Rubin: He designed a program involving interviews with Bedoins in Israel; he wants to learn their views on living with Israeli Jews and Arabs, and find out what it is that has led to peace coexistence between Israeli Jews and Bedoins. He will create a film documenting some of those interviews and his experiences. He wants, in part, to give a voice to Israeli Bedoins and their hopes/experiences, and also to show one positive example of people from different faiths living together in the Middle East. His is a fascinating project and he doesn't seem to have other funding. He plans to create a presentation on his return that will include his film, a talk, and a question/answer session about his experience and learning. He will live in New Jersey, near New York City, an area he describes as having the largest concentration of Jews and Arabs in the country. He anticipates taking his presentation to temples, mosques, high schools and other community settings.
The Samuel and Evelyn Linden Scholarship Fund is a new program for Jewish youth from the Charlottesville area. Its purpose is to promote peace and social justice among Jews, Arabs and Palestinians. It does this by providing financial support to young Jewish adults ages 15-24 who want to go to Israel and learn about the needs and aspirations of Israelis and their neighbors. Scholarships will be in the range of $1,000-$3,000.
Encouraging dialogue among Jewish, Arab and Palestinian youth is an important aspect of the Fund. There are many programs open to Americans that involve such dialogue. Those applying for a Linden Scholarship may use it for a summer program in Israel, or to study in Israel for one-two semesters.
For more information, contact Russ Linden (o) 434.979.6421; (h): 434.978.7775.