This week in Szenes House

• Years 7 and 8 spent the week at Camp Somerset with their Szenes Tutors, Ms Lara Ephron (7), Ms Miranda McMahon (7), Ms Helen Philp (8) and Mr Christian Bell (8). Year 7 students were also accompanied by their Year 11 Peer Support Leaders. We look forward to hearing about their experiences.

• We welcome our new Kol Szenes reporter Natasha (Tasha) Gering (10) who will keep us up-to-date with Emanuel School and Szenes House news.

Tasha wrote:

The Madrichim of 2017 are very pleased to welcome back E-TV!!! ETV is a fun video sequence that is shown to students as an engaging way to inform students about fun up-coming events and is something everyone looks forward to in assemblies.

Not only that but the Emanuel School Film Fest is being held in the MPH on 7 March at 7 pm. The Film Festival is a brilliant way for students to express their creative talent and exercise their video-making skills. Students were to create a video incorporating an umbrella. So come and enjoy some popcorn, relax and watch future directors and actors exercising their cinematographic abilities.

The week that was:

Photo: Southern Courier

For several years now Talia Rubinstein (12) and her father have been brightening up the day for patients as Prince of Wales Hospital on Valentines Day by handing out red roses.

“On Valentines Day my dad and I handed out roses at the Prince of Wales hospital to the staff and patients. It is just really wonderful to watch their faces light up, with many of them commenting: ‘This is the only rose I’m getting today’. It is a tradition that we have kept up since I was in Year 6 and I hope to continue in the future.”

By Talia Rubinstein

Thank you to Liron Smith (11) who volunteered to run the Year 7 Peer Support program in the absence of the Peer Support Leaders who were attending an excursion.

Jade Reuveny – Year 11

Chavayah 2016 report

In Hebrew, Chavayah translates to ‘experience’ and I can confidently speak on behalf of the seventy-five Year 10 students, that without a doubt, it lived up to its name. Chavayah was an adventure which pushed beyond our physical, emotional and social comfort zones in ways that no one saw coming. We were shaken out of our familiar Bondi Junction to Bondi Beach weekend routine and thrown into one of elbow shoving and shwama eating in a desert rich nation.

I do not recall the last time I was found searching for a well secluded space, in an vastly open desert, to empty out the 4 litres of water in my system from our seven and a half hour hike. Nor have I ever named a camel I just rode or yelled a mish-mash of wrong Hebrew-English lyrics at a Hadag Nahash concert.

Chavayah saw us crawling through thousands of year old makhteshim and then through the modern streets of Tel Aviv, guided by our fantastically knowledgeable teachers and accompanied by our favourite Israeli locals – our Madrichim. We spent three days living, learning and socialising like Haifa teenagers on the Leo Baeck student exchange and the majority of us came back with a small, yet valuable vocabulary to use to (partially) order dinner on the streets around our favourite alleyway, Ben Yehudah Street in Jerusalem.

Our three incredible teachers, Akiva, Miriam and Maor, all filled our eager-to-learn beings with the dense history of the numerous water tunnels and caves we (literally) crawled through, whilst echoing the ancient walls with soulful Israeli and mellow Australian songs. We heard many different political views which, with our new knowledge, helped us formulate our own opinion, initiating great, controversial conversations on the bus afterwards. Our group developed a stronger bond day-by-day, which may be the reason our love for one another spread gastro faster than Moshiko could make six acai bowls; regardless we were still up and ready to begin the next day’s adventure. Together we wondered through the Kabalistic streets of Tzfat, learning beyond the realms of any classroom and on shabbat sung traditional songs in one big circle on the grass overlooking Tel Aviv beach.

Every day was a new adventure and within every adventure there was something to learn, along with a great laugh. The adventure we took part on, that was our Chavayah, was an incredible journey which we each experienced in a different way. However, we all experienced it with 75 of our new best friends along for the ride. 

By Jade Reuveny (11)

Quotation of the week

“Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.” Francis Bacon 

Enjoy the weekend

Szenes House