100 Years Later, We Begin Again
There is something wonderfully Jewish about the way we finish the Torah.
After a full year of reading, we finally reach the last pesukim of Devarim on Simchat Torah. We celebrate. We dance. And then, almost immediately, we open the Torah again and return to the first words of Bereishit: “In the beginning.”
There is no long pause to admire what we have completed. We simply begin again.
I have been thinking about that idea this year as AMIT marks its 100th anniversary and prepares to open a new educational campus in Ra’anana on a piece of land with a remarkable history.
In 1939, plans were approved for a children’s village in Ra’anana under the auspices of Mizrachi Women, now AMIT. War and uncertainty delayed the project, but by 1945, Kfar Yeladim Ra’anana, later known as Kfar Batya, opened on approximately 100 privately acquired acres of land.
When AMIT founder Bessie Gotsfeld visited the new property — barren, rocky ground and grassy fields — she envisioned buildings, palaces even, where children would live. So many children, she insisted, that they would need to expand, because more would come.
And, they did.
In 1947, Kfar Batya welcomed its first 80 children, young Holocaust survivors who had been detained in Cyprus. Another group soon followed, children who had endured displacement and loss and needed a place to begin their lives again.
Providing refuge was only the beginning. AMIT gave these children an education, skills, and the tools to build lives for themselves. In time, they used those tools to help build up the country they now called home.
Nearly 80 years later, we find ourselves back on that same ground.
This September, AMIT’s Gabel & Straus Family Campus will open at Kfar Batya. Students will once again fill classrooms on land set aside generations ago for Jewish children. Educators will come to teach and to learn. Ideas about the next generation of Israeli education will take shape on the same spot that provided the foundation of learning for so many children.
There is a beautiful symmetry to it.
The prophet Amos speaks of a day when the Jewish people will be planted in their land, never again to be uprooted. Nearly 80 years ago, Bessie planted on that rocky ground without knowing what she herself would live to see. It is an act of faith to build for a future that belongs to someone else, to plant a tree whose shade another generation may enjoy.
This year, we have the rare privilege of seeing something planted long ago reach maturity.
In November, as part of AMIT’s Centennial Mission to Israel, we will return to Kfar Batya to dedicate the new campus. But the mission is about more than marking a milestone. We will explore the challenges facing Israeli education, hear from leaders and scholars, and see what our students are creating in their classrooms. As we turn from one century to the next, the focus will be not only on how far we have come, but on the work that still lies ahead.
Every year we arrive at the end of the Torah, having read every portion. Completing what we set out to do, our response is to roll the scroll back and begin again.
Perhaps that is because in Judaism, there is always more work to do — another child to teach; another generation to prepare.
AMIT is 100 years old. That is worth celebrating. A century of educating Israel’s children is worth looking back on with enormous gratitude.
Then we roll the scroll back.
And we get to work.
