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Long journey from California to Minsk
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BY: MARGI HERWALD ZITELLI City Editor
New Wolf Fellow Aliyah Phillips will aid Jewish community in Belarus
When California resident Aliyah Phillips first applied to spend a year abroad living, working and planning programming in a developing Jewish community, she requested an assignment in warm climes, such as Turkey, Morocco or India.
The 23-year-old was surprised when the Jewish Service Corps returned with the decision to station her in Minsk.
“They thought it would be a good match,” Phillips says brightly. “So, I said, ‘Great! Sounds good to me.’ Then I ran to a map to check where Minsk was!”
As the Roslyn Z. Wolf Cleveland-JDC Fellow, Phillips will spend a year in the rather chilly capital of the former Soviet republic of Belarus. The Wolf Fellowship, established by the late Amb. Milton Wolf in memory of his wife, is managed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)’s Jewish Service Corps. However, unlike other Jewish Service Corps volunteers, the Wolf Fellow also works closely with the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, which helped establish the fellowship and holds the endowment that funds it.
While visiting Cleveland in August prior to departing for Belarus, the poised and outgoing Phillips met with various Federation staffers to brainstorm ways of tying her work in Minsk to Cleveland-based initiatives.
Her primary goal, however, is devising programs she can bring to Minsk’s Jewish community.
“I don’t have a sharp idea yet,” admits Phillips, whose olive skin and waves of dark curls make her look more Israeli than California girl. “But, I know the focus of my work is Jewish education.”
After spending three years as a Hebrew kindergarten teacher, Phillips is eager to work at the Mazel Tov early childcare center in Minsk. In addition, she will also help out with programs that aid poor and needy elderly Jews living on the outskirts of the city.
“I’m also interested in the Hillel-age crowd,” she says. “They’re my own age. I can help them connect to Judaism and make friends as well.”
The World Union for Progressive Judaism, supporting pluralism or inclusion of all Jews regardless of level of observance, has a strong presence in Minsk. Phillips, who attended a pluralistic Jewish high school, is “excited” to work alongside an organization that is “willing to help anyone who feels they are a Jew n with no background check.”
She’s also been investigating the possibility of starting a Moishe House in Minsk. Funded by the Forest Foundation, Moishe House is a program in which several adults, age 22-28, move into a house together and create “their vision of an ideal Jewish communal space.” They also open their home to host activities such as Shabbat dinners or game and movie nights. Phillips has already received several applications from young Belarusian Jews interested in being her Moishe House housemates.
Phillips graduated from New York’s Columbia University in May with bachelor’s degrees in science and religion. “I was having a hard time choosing between a humanities or a science major,” she confesses. So she customized her own major through Columbia’s joint program with The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). It combined bioethics, philosophy of religion, and science courses with seminars on the relationship between various faiths and the sciences. JTS is now considering making Phillips’s academic creation a standard major.
During her college years, Phillips met several students in the Columbia-JTS joint program who had participated in the Jewish Service Corps, which first sparked her interest in applying.
“My (Jewish) experiences have mostly been in the States or Israel,” says Phillips, who plans to someday make aliyah (move permanently to Israel). “I thought, if I really have an interest in world Jewry, I should see some of it.”
Learning Russian is imperative for Phillips as she embarks on her year as the Wolf Fellow. Fluent in English and Hebrew, she also speaks some French, thanks to her Moroccan Jewish grandmother. “I understand half of what she says,” Phillips admits with a laugh.
Phillips grew up in California, where her parents, Marion and Ralph, sent their daughter to Jewish day school for elementary grades. “It got the whole family more involved with Judaism,” she says.
A birthright israel alumna who also studied in Israel through Ramah in high school, Phillips deferred her acceptance to Columbia for one year to study at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
While attending college in New York, Phillips kept up her Jewish involvement by applying to teach kindergarten in a religious school. “I thought at first: It’s kindergarten; it’ll be relaxing. Oh, no, no, no, no!” she laughs.
The challenge, she says, is “extracting what are the real core values (of Judaism) and transmitting them to children. It’s the exact opposite of what was expected of me in college n where they wanted me to complicate my thinking and write eloquently about it. Here, I had to simplify my thinking and verbalize it to the children.”
She returned to Israel for summer 2006, arriving in Jerusalem shortly before the recent war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Despite the risk to her personal safety, Phillips resolved to head to northern Israel with a grassroots group to help children affected by the war. As part of a “summer camp on wheels,” she traveled to bomb shelters with books, coloring supplies, molding clay, and yoga instruction cards to help entertain the children there.
To get a sense of what Minsk was like, Phillips asked “anyone and everyone” she encountered if they or anyone they knew had ever been to Belarus. She also read the “laugh-out-loud hilarious” blog of the current JDC volunteer in the Minsk office, which inspired her to set up her own blog to record her Minsk experiences.
“I’m leaving for a year; how do I prepare emotionally?” she asks. “I’ve just now started thinking about the goodbyes I want to say.”
Quickly, she corrects herself: “Not goodbye. Like they say in Hebrew, l’hitraot, see you later!”
mherwald@cjn.org
When California resident Aliyah Phillips first applied to spend a year abroad living, working and planning programming in a developing Jewish community, she requested an assignment in warm climes, such as Turkey, Morocco or India.
The 23-year-old was surprised when the Jewish Service Corps returned with the decision to station her in Minsk.
“They thought it would be a good match,” Phillips says brightly. “So, I said, ‘Great! Sounds good to me.’ Then I ran to a map to check where Minsk was!”
As the Roslyn Z. Wolf Cleveland-JDC Fellow, Phillips will spend a year in the rather chilly capital of the former Soviet republic of Belarus. The Wolf Fellowship, established by the late Amb. Milton Wolf in memory of his wife, is managed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)’s Jewish Service Corps. However, unlike other Jewish Service Corps volunteers, the Wolf Fellow also works closely with the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, which helped establish the fellowship and holds the endowment that funds it.
While visiting Cleveland in August prior to departing for Belarus, the poised and outgoing Phillips met with various Federation staffers to brainstorm ways of tying her work in Minsk to Cleveland-based initiatives.
Her primary goal, however, is devising programs she can bring to Minsk’s Jewish community.
“I don’t have a sharp idea yet,” admits Phillips, whose olive skin and waves of dark curls make her look more Israeli than California girl. “But, I know the focus of my work is Jewish education.”
After spending three years as a Hebrew kindergarten teacher, Phillips is eager to work at the Mazel Tov early childcare center in Minsk. In addition, she will also help out with programs that aid poor and needy elderly Jews living on the outskirts of the city.
“I’m also interested in the Hillel-age crowd,” she says. “They’re my own age. I can help them connect to Judaism and make friends as well.”
The World Union for Progressive Judaism, supporting pluralism or inclusion of all Jews regardless of level of observance, has a strong presence in Minsk. Phillips, who attended a pluralistic Jewish high school, is “excited” to work alongside an organization that is “willing to help anyone who feels they are a Jew n with no background check.”
She’s also been investigating the possibility of starting a Moishe House in Minsk. Funded by the Forest Foundation, Moishe House is a program in which several adults, age 22-28, move into a house together and create “their vision of an ideal Jewish communal space.” They also open their home to host activities such as Shabbat dinners or game and movie nights. Phillips has already received several applications from young Belarusian Jews interested in being her Moishe House housemates.
Phillips graduated from New York’s Columbia University in May with bachelor’s degrees in science and religion. “I was having a hard time choosing between a humanities or a science major,” she confesses. So she customized her own major through Columbia’s joint program with The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). It combined bioethics, philosophy of religion, and science courses with seminars on the relationship between various faiths and the sciences. JTS is now considering making Phillips’s academic creation a standard major.
During her college years, Phillips met several students in the Columbia-JTS joint program who had participated in the Jewish Service Corps, which first sparked her interest in applying.
“My (Jewish) experiences have mostly been in the States or Israel,” says Phillips, who plans to someday make aliyah (move permanently to Israel). “I thought, if I really have an interest in world Jewry, I should see some of it.”
Learning Russian is imperative for Phillips as she embarks on her year as the Wolf Fellow. Fluent in English and Hebrew, she also speaks some French, thanks to her Moroccan Jewish grandmother. “I understand half of what she says,” Phillips admits with a laugh.
Phillips grew up in California, where her parents, Marion and Ralph, sent their daughter to Jewish day school for elementary grades. “It got the whole family more involved with Judaism,” she says.
A birthright israel alumna who also studied in Israel through Ramah in high school, Phillips deferred her acceptance to Columbia for one year to study at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
While attending college in New York, Phillips kept up her Jewish involvement by applying to teach kindergarten in a religious school. “I thought at first: It’s kindergarten; it’ll be relaxing. Oh, no, no, no, no!” she laughs.
The challenge, she says, is “extracting what are the real core values (of Judaism) and transmitting them to children. It’s the exact opposite of what was expected of me in college n where they wanted me to complicate my thinking and write eloquently about it. Here, I had to simplify my thinking and verbalize it to the children.”
She returned to Israel for summer 2006, arriving in Jerusalem shortly before the recent war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Despite the risk to her personal safety, Phillips resolved to head to northern Israel with a grassroots group to help children affected by the war. As part of a “summer camp on wheels,” she traveled to bomb shelters with books, coloring supplies, molding clay, and yoga instruction cards to help entertain the children there.
To get a sense of what Minsk was like, Phillips asked “anyone and everyone” she encountered if they or anyone they knew had ever been to Belarus. She also read the “laugh-out-loud hilarious” blog of the current JDC volunteer in the Minsk office, which inspired her to set up her own blog to record her Minsk experiences.
“I’m leaving for a year; how do I prepare emotionally?” she asks. “I’ve just now started thinking about the goodbyes I want to say.”
Quickly, she corrects herself: “Not goodbye. Like they say in Hebrew, l’hitraot, see you later!”
mherwald@cjn.org
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