Daniel Samowitz – Jewish Life Teacher

A tribe of brothers and sisters

This past Tuesday, our High School came together to celebrate Yom HaAtsma’ut/Israel’s Independence Day. Like most of our learning, now, we engaged on E-Manuel online to celebrate Israel’s 72^nd year birthday.

This year we watched an Emanuel made news report in which we spoke to Israelis, made hummus with Shmulli (Yotam Otelengis distant relative) and connected with our Emanuel alumni on their Israel gap year program. We had fun celebrating and remembering all the aspects that we love about the Jewish homeland.

We then crossed over to a live news feed from our Informal Jewish Life team, through which we followed the journey from the prophet Isaiah to Herzel to David Ben Gurion and then to Golda Meir. We then put our Emanuel students and ourselves at the centre of this historical narrative and asked questions such as: Why is Israel important to us? What are the values that should underpin the nation-state of the Jewish people? How can or should we be an ‘Or La-Goyim’/A light unto the nations?

This Yom HaAtsma’ut we celebrated like no other in the history of the modern state of Israel, we celebrated united … apart.  We finished with promising to be a part of shaping the future of the Jewish state and the Jewish people to help forge a homeland that would be exemplary for all of humanity. In our video celebrating Israel, we shared this beautiful song released last year for Israel Independence Day by famous Israeli artists. It is a celebration of Israel and we invite you to join as we celebrate another birthday and the promise of a Jewish state. To view the video click here

יום העצמאות שמח/YOM HAATSMA’UT SAMEACH