Page 26 - Issue 33

Alfie Showman, a current

British Shnattie, shares his

experiences from the first three

weeks of Shnat 21/22.

Oct 20, 2021

As of this moment, I am sitting on a computer
wondering how to summarise the craziest three
weeks of my life into three paragraphs, but I think
it’s best to start at the beginning – which, in our
case, was the thirteenth of September.

Shnat officially started at a crisp summers morning
at Manchester airport’s terminal one. All the
shnatties who didn’t live in South Manchester
(which is ironically half of us) stayed in the village
the night before, apprehensive about their next
stage of travel. You can probably imagine the
rough mix of emotions, crying, paparazzi, baggage
problems and excited teenagers which set the
scene, but what you are probably surprised by is
that the airport pilgrimage actually ran quite
smoothly, until we got on the plane that is. For
anybody who’s been on an England to Tel Aviv
flight, you can immediately picture the scenes. The
flight included the usual: millions of children,
davening in the aisle and general noise level which
is far above where it should be. But after an
‘interesting’ five hours, us fresh shnatties landed in
Ben Gurion airport, and after being intimately