Julie
Wiener
Staff Writer
Holmes, N.Y. — Lounging with a
friend in a hammock on a hot, muggy day, 14-year-old
Yonatan Mangistu was a picture of relaxation.
But less than two months earlier he had
witnessed a Jerusalem bus explosion from his school
window. The suicide bombing at the Pat intersection
killed 19 people. One of them: Mangistu’s 11-year-old
cousin.
“I saw everything, I was so afraid,” he
recalled, wiping a tear from his eye.
Mangistu, who moved to Israel
from Ethiopia when he was 2, was one of 60 Jerusalem
kids at Camp Edward Isaacs, the Central Queens Y’s camp
in upstate Holmes, this summer.
Like the others,
Mangistu — who likes swimming and soccer — was enjoying
the three-week respite from “the situation,” Israel’s
term for the almost routine terrorist attacks since the
intifada began two years ago.
For three peaceful weeks in the
foothills of the Taconic Mountains, about an hour from
New York, the days were consumed with swimming, boating,
trips to water parks and games of soccer. The only
battles were color wars and water fights.
“Nobody can hurt you here,” said Amir Sharon,
13, sitting at a long table in the camp dining hall,
where laminated Israeli flags hung from the rafters.
Accustomed to constantly being on alert for
suspicious packages and would-be bombers, most of the
Israeli campers said that had they stayed in Israel,
they would have spent most of the summer inside, with
television and computers.
Three weeks in tents
and cabins, surrounded by tall trees, mountains and a
lake, was considerably more fun, they agreed.
“The Israelis come here and first they’re just
really overwhelmed by the green,” said Bill Frankel,
director of Camp Edward Isaacs.
“They feel like
they’re in a jungle somewhere because Israel doesn’t
have that rich carpet of green. Then they go to the lake
and sit there, their mouths drop and sometimes they
start crying.”
Many used words like “heaven” and
“paradise” to describe camp life.
“It’s really
calming here,” said Shoki Cohen, 14, wearing an “I Love
NY” T-shirt. Cohen, a fan of the camp’s Saturday night
discos, lives in Gilo, the target of periodic shootings.
“Everything is so calm,”said Maya Weiss, 15, who
said Israel’s high-pressure culture — and her schedule
crammed with school, volunteer activities and a Zionist
youth group — gives her frequent stomach aches.
Weiss and other Israeli teens are coping with
the terrorist threat in different ways.
“I’m
trying to live normally,” said Tal Sabbah, 15, who was
clad in a Washington, D.C., T-shirt, shorts and
flip-flops.
“It’s kind of hard and my mom
worries, but she’s letting me go because she knows
there’s nothing we can do about it,” he said, munching
on a chocolate-frosted doughnut. “I’m going to parties
and going to friends’ houses, trying not to be in
crowded places. It’s kind of hard but we’re doing our
best to have fun.”
Alice Shteinberg, 15, a
gray-eyed girl with a long braid down her back, said her
mother won’t let her go to discotheques or take a bus
downtown.
“Every time you have to take a bus
it’s something you have to argue about with your
mother,” said Shteinberg, who emigrated from Russia when
she was 4. “Every [terrorist attack] blocks another
place to go. If you have friends in other cities it’s a
disaster because you can’t meet them.”
However,
after almost two years, many say they have adopted
almost fatalistic attitudes.
“It’s not that
bad,” Shteinberg said. “It’s something you can live
with. Teenagers don’t really take it that seriously.
Their parents worry. We just want to go out and have
fun, so we don’t really care.”
Weiss said she
tries “not to get too scared, because these are my best
years of life and I can’t waste them.”
Mangistu
said, “You can’t be scared all the time. I’m not afraid
because God says who is going to die and who is going to
live. If God wants me to die, so I’ll die.”
The
Israelis — who called and e-mailed home regularly — were
hardly able to put problems out of their mind
completely.
“You think you run away from the
troubles at home,” Weiss said. “But you think about your
family you left there. You can’t just forget home.”
Bad news from home frequently intruded,
particularly after a bombing at Hebrew University killed
nine people. Several campers had parents who worked at
the university, but were not injured.
Frankel
said that after the counselors notifed the Israelis of
the bus bombing in Safed, one Israeli said, “Why are you
telling us this? You’re breaking our peace.”
The
camp program, subsidized by UJA-Federation of New York
and coordinated through its Partnership 2000 program,
also aimed to forge friendships between young Israelis
and their American Jewish peers.
“On the one
hand this is an emergency program, and a lot of people
had questions about it,” said Bob Friedman, associate
executive director of the Central Queens Y.
“It’s not in the Zionist tradition to send Jews
from Israel to America. But I hope the relationships
established at this camp mean someday the American
children will be more than willing to go with their
families to Israel.”
Israeli and American
campers said they liked each other and were learning a
lot.
Cohen, who said he was impressed with how
good the Americans were at sports, was pleased to learn
baseball — a new game for him.
Helaina Stein,
13, of Goldens Bridge in Westchester, said she thought
the Israelis “would be really different because they’re
far away—-but they’re just the same.”
“There’s a
brand of clothes there called Fox — it’s just like Old
Navy and the Gap,” she added, impressed.
Sitting
on the grass with Stein and helping her string beaded
friendship bracelets, Ilana Hochman, 14, of the Midwood
section of Brooklyn, said the Israelis are “more
outgoing” than Americans and “the boys are less snobby.”
“And they’re all good dancers,” Stein chimed in.
Matt Geller, 13, of Centerport, L.I., said his
Israeli bunkmates taught him that the Dead Sea is the
lowest point on earth and that American news coverage of
Israel is not always accurate.
“They didn’t make
it sound half as bad as the news makes it seem like,” he
marveled.
Sitting at a picnic table outside his
cabin where his counselors played chess, Geller showed
off one of the Hebrew sentences he learned: “Ani rotseh
ledaber ivrit yom echad — I want to learn Hebrew one
day.”
The adjustment between the two cultures
was not always smooth, however, especially because by
the time the Israelis arrived — midway through the
summer — the Americans had already settled in with
routines.
Israelis complained that Americans are
self-absorbed and ignorant about the Middle East, while
the Americans found some of the Israelis too aggressive
and blunt.
“In Israel, you say whatever you
want,” Sabbah said. “You can say your opinion, whatever.
Here, people get hurt all the time [even] if you only
say, ‘What you did was not good.’ ”
Many of the
Israelis marveled, a bit enviously, at how apolitical
the American kids appeared.
“Americans, they’re
less mature because they don’t have to deal with
decisions about whether to take a bus or not,”
Shteinberg said. “They talk about fashion, blow-drying
their hair and some of the girls practically live in the
bathroom ….”
Weiss said she was surprised that
none of the American kids asked her about the situation
in Israel.
“They are so busy with themselves,”
she said.
“It’s OK, it’s 100 percent OK,” she
added vehemently, as if trying to convince herself.
“It’s supposed to be like that. You’re a teenager,
you’re supposed to be busy with yourself, how you’re
looking, who loves you and all that. The fact that we’re
dealing with something else doesn’t really play into it.
Let them live their lives. Just because we’re having bad
times, I don’t want the whole world to have bad times.”
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