Page 8 - Issue 8

neighborhood with Civic Works, a Baltimore-based non-profit service affiliated with Americorps.

On a Wednesday in late May, THE BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES caught up with the Habonim
Dror group, hard at work on converting a vacant lot into a garden at the corner of Lanvale and
Holbrook streets.

Yonah Meiselman, 19 and a University of Maryland, College Park sophomore, said that this
program exemplifies the Habonim Dror ideals of responsibility, social action, education and
community. Mr. Meiselman has been a Habonim member since age 9 and he is the incoming
regional co-director of Habonim, Maryland.

“When we get together throughout the year we do a lot of talking, a lot of critical discussions
of issues. This is doing, this is tikkun olam, this is what we most love to do,” said Mr. Meiselman.
He and his peers helped clear the remains of the vacant lot, put down topsoil and planted trees,
flowers and shrubs.

The Habonim group spent its afternoons speaking with community activists, touring the area and
volunteering at Oliver’s Bernard Harris Elementary School. JFSJ has been sending Johns
Hopkins students to volunteer at the same school one afternoon per week for the past year and
this year they will extend the program to Goucher College students too, for more than one day
per week.

“We visited an after-school program and saw their community in
action, helping themselves. We’d been hearing about the drugs,
the gangs and the poverty. It was important for us to see these
kids in a safe place, in a positive setting,” said Mr. Meiselman.
“We can take this experience with us throughout our lives and be
more sensitive to poor communities in need. I know I will,” he said.

This was Habonim Maryland’s second annual service learning trip,
the first having taken place in Biloxi, Miss. “We wanted to do
something closer to home, and this seemed to be a place with possibility for doing a more
sustainable project,” said Jamie Beran, youth leadership director with Habonim Dror, who lives
in Brooklyn, N.Y. and works in the Habonim national office in Manhattan. Her fellow Goucher
College alum, JFSJ Program Associate Adam Rothstein, cued her in to the Oliver idea.

Ms. Beran grew up in the movement, and she said the Oliver trip supported Habonim’s ideals
because it is all about “service in a responsible way… We’re getting to know the community we’re
working in…It’s important for us to challenge our place of privilege and to get our hands dirty,”
she said.

The Habonim student volunteers were so inspired by the service learning project in Oliver that
a number of them organized a sequel to the trip. A group of incoming high school seniors who
are also the leaders of their local Habonim chapters came to Camp Moshava in Silver Spring
from five different Habonim Dror camps around the country for a 3-day seminar, and they
toured the group’s original Oliver project and worked on a nearby garden for their one day
devoted to service learning.