News

    Each January, Wagner College’s “Expanding Your Horizons” program sends faculty and students around the globe for educational, cultural, humanitarian and religious encounters in foreign lands. This year’s EYH trips included visits to Israel and the West Bank, Kenya, France, Spain and Bangladesh.
    On March 27, the group of Wagner travelers who visited the Middle East this January — a trustee, two professors and seven students — held a seminar for members of the college community and Wagner’s Chai Society.
    All 10 travelers described their journey, billed as the “Wagner College Interfaith Mission to Israel,” as a transforming experience.
    First to speak were the Wagner professors and trustee who had led the 10-day trip: Walter Kaelber, professor of religion; Jeffrey Glanz, chairman of the Education Department; and the Rev. Stephen Bouman, a member of the Wagner College Board of Trustees and bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church’s Metropolitan New York Synod.

    “This was the finest group of people — not just the finest group of students, but the finest group of people — I have ever spent 10 days with,” said Bouman, pictured at right.
    “They were excited, and inquisitive, and relentless,” said Glanz. “Never once did they say, ‘We’re tired. Go back.’ ”
    The trip included visits to Jerusalem, Masada, Bethlehem, the security wall or barrier between Israel and the West Bank, the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth and Tel Aviv.
    Part of the trip’s impact came from the group’s encounters with the mélange of cultures represented in Israel and the West Bank, Bouman said, recalling “a comp’d meal of Palestinian shish kebob, and the sensual richness of the Orthodox Christmas in the Church of the Nativity.”
    “It was almost overwhelming,” said Alex Jacobs, a senior English major, “this layer upon layer of history, of religion, of culture.”
    Jacobs recalled one particular moment that typified this for her.
    Prof. Glanz was singing Shabbat prayers for the group one Friday at sundown. Shortly after he began, the muezzin’s musical call to evening prayers sang out from the nearby mosque. The two melodies continued together, “back and forth, one echoing the other,” Jacobs said.
    The group also encountered the conflicts — and the struggles toward reconciliation — that characterize the social and political environment of the Middle East.
    “All three religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — coexist within a stone’s throw of one another,” said Kimberlea Karper, “which I guess is evidence of God’s sense of humor.”
    Stephanie Burnett recounted the group’s visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, museum and research institute, in Jerusalem. Particularly impressive, said Burnett, was the Children’s Memorial, hollowed out from an underground cavern on the site.
    The darkened chamber of the Children’s Memorial is lit only by candles, whose light is scattered throughout the domed room by an array of mirrors, “reflected infinitely in a dark and somber space, creating the impression of millions of stars shining in the firmament,” as the Yad Vashem Web site describes its. Hanging from the ceiling are photographs of children murdered in the Holocaust.
    “They told us that if we became overwhelmed when we were down there, we could step outside to collect ourselves,” Burnett remembered, “but I wasn’t going to need that!
    "Then I read a poem on the wall, written by a 13-year-old boy, ‘When I Grow Up to be 20’,” she said. Burnett’s 20th birthday, she recalled, had been a depressing event for her, “but this boy never made it that far. He was killed in Auschwitz a year after he wrote that poem.
    “I completely broke down.”
    Several of the students remembered that, when they first announced their travel plans, their peers had been concerned for their safety.
    “The PG version of what my best friend said was, ‘Dude, you have guts!’,” said Deanna Bay, a freshman.
    “My boyfriend said, ‘You’d better bring a flak jacket!’,” Jacobs recalled.
    One of the primary purposes of the trip, at least for Angela Kahres, a senior English major, was to experience the Israeli/Palestinian conflict “in context, not just as something we see on the 11 o’clock news.”
    One of Kahres’s most memorable encounters was the group’s visit with members of Seeds of Peace, an organization that brings Israeli and Palestinian young people together to learn the skills of healing their lands and peoples.
    “These were people who had been raised to hate one another, to want nothing more than to kill one another,” Kahres said, “and they were learning how to talk to one another.”
    As a Lutheran student, Bay was particularly impressed by the group’s visit to the Augustus Victoria Hospital, in Jerusalem, a project of the World Lutheran Federation.
    “It is the only hospital in Israel that also treats Palestinians ‘on the other side of the wall’,” Bay said.
    The “wall” to which Bay referred was the notorious security barrier that had been erected several years earlier by Israel to separate it from the Palestinian territory on the West Bank.
    Lindsay Lucas had some strong impressions already in place concerning “the wall” before the Wagner group left for Israel.
    “I spent the weekend prior to the trip with two Palestinians in Seattle,” Lucas said. “One of them told me tales of being strip searched when she crossed the border into Israel. … I was already a little angry when I got there.”
    Once on the ground, however, Lucas heard the other side of the story — there is always “another side to the story,” the students all said — from their Israeli guide, Ronit Nahman, when one of the students asked her about the wall.
    “That is a security fence,” Lucas remembered Nahman snapping. “It is not a wall.”
    The Israelis credit the barrier with vastly reducing the number of attacks on civilians by Palestinian suicide bombers, Lucas said.
    Some Jews, however, are now becoming aware of the barrier’s negative impact on the lives of ordinary Palestinians — Jews like Danny Seideman, a lawyer the group met, who is pressing a lawsuit to reunite a Palestinian farmer who lives on one side of the wall with his crops on the other.
    During the question-and-answer period at the end of the March 27 seminar, a Wagner College administrator recalled an opportunity she had foregone in her own college days to visit the scene of world events then unfolding. The administrator, Vice President for Institutional Advancement Teresa Karamanos, had been reminded that morning of the trip she hadn’t taken as a student, to Northern Ireland. Her reminder had been a newspaper photograph of Catholic and Protestant politicians sitting together for the first time at the same table in Belfast to announce the brokering of a power-sharing agreement — a prospect that would have been beyond belief a quarter century earlier.
    Karamanos congratulated the Wagner students for stepping forth onto the world stage to see events unfold for themselves, saying, “I predict that 25 years from now, you are going to open the papers and say to yourself, ‘I was a part of history’.”
    Wagner College Provost Devorah Lieberman closed the seminar by thanking Bishop Bouman and the Metropolitan New York Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, whose contribution to the Wagner College Interfaith Mission to Israel helped defray costs for the seven student travelers.
    The March 27 panel presentation was part of Wagner College’s Faith & Life Series of lectures, supported by the Qualben Fund. The seminar was co-sponsored by the Chai Society of Wagner College and Wagner’s ACE Event Series.