My Nonprofit Reviews

I had already been to Israel three times before going with my husband and teenage daughter on my stepdaughter Leah Green's Compassionate Listening Project trip. One prior Israel adventure was 22 months long, including studying at a program for foreign college graduates and then working in Israel's educational television yet never had I experienced the depth and breadth of education, the profoundly powerful sharing of stories, the intensity of learning what is really happening on the ground in the various communities that make up the Holy Land. Hearing from an Auschwitz survivor visiting her daughter in an Orthodox Jewish kibbutz, a Palestinian family living in a refugee camp in Gaza, a Jewish civil rights attorney , a representative of the Israeli government, a member of the Palestinian Authority, an Arab family whose home on land on which they had a deed of ownership had been bulldozed down seven times and rebuilt each time with the help of sympathetic Israeli citizens, an administrator of an Orthodox Yeshiva on the Mount of Olives...it wasn't your Federation Mission, I'll tell you that! It was, instead, the trip of a lifetime that forever changed my, my husband, and youngest child's understanding of the right way to listen to others, and how conflict can be defused with the simplest human interaction: compassionately listening.