Young Magen David’s Leadership Weekend

What brought an apparently random group of 40 high school seniors and college-age individuals together for a weekend? It wasn’t just the skiing and snowboarding, but the desire to take an active role in leading and bettering our community.

A leadership weekend, organized by Deal’s Young Magen David (YMD) in conjunction with the Center’s Leaders in Training (LIT) program, took place recently in the Poconos. Joey Mizrahi (better known as “Stick”) coordinated and ran the weekend with the help of Louis Jerome, Harry Tawil and Mariel Kassin. The weekend involved skiing, snowboarding, skeet shooting, snow tubing and just plain hanging out.

Most important that weekend, however, were the sessions. The seminar participants were broken up into four groups, headed by Morris Mizrahi, Charles Anteby, Michael Mishaan and Victor Gheriani. The sessions led us to think about the community at large: the positive, the negative, and the specific characteristics that make it so unique. 

Our community is extremely unique and special, to say the least.  The fact that we have so much in common culturally, religiously and ideologically caused us to become such a tight-knit community; we eat in the same restaurants, we get married in the same places and we vacation on the same islands. Acting like a large family, we all feel the need to give back and support each other.

Our community has a record amount of organizations, each one specially created to support one group or another in the community: the unemployed, the widowed, the aged, the young, etc.  Over the years, despite the fact that we’ve grown at a tremendous rate in numbers, we’ve managed to stay together through the supportive infrastructure we have built.

However, we have run into some negatives over the years. In discussing some of them, each group chose a problem in the community and attempted to form a solution. My group, led by Morris Mizrahi, decided to tackle a problem we dubbed “the invincibility complex.” Although we take care of our own, many of us don’t care what is going on around us in the outside world.

We believe that this began as  a way of protecting ourselves from the bad habits of the outside world.  Maybe when the community relocated to America from the Middle East, it encountered values and lifestyles that were very different from their own. As a result, the community maintained its close-knit culture and instilled in their children a special deep pride in being Syrian Jews.

Let’s not forget our humble beginnings. When our grandparents and great-grandparents came from Syria, Lebanon and other countries in the Middle East, most came with literally nothing but the shirts on their backs. They worked hard to earn the dollar in their pocket as well as the respect given to them by others. Today, many have the misconception that being a member of our illustrious community, they deserve that same respect—without working for it.

As a group, we decided that something must change. We realized that before attempting to inspire and change others, we must first focus on ourselves. In the following weeks, our group made a conscious effort to try a little harder: remembering to say “please, thank you and excuse me,” helping a classmate after school, holding the door open for others, and in general, attempting to become more polite and respectful of others.

On the macro level, we believe that the biggest change can only come through the younger generation. Much of that includes inspiring our friends to act appropriately. But more importantly, parents should be sensitive to the fact that they are raising the future of the community.

But not only parents have an influence on children and young teens; other channels include our community schools, shuls and youth programs.

Though our ideas are still in the making, we hope to gain your support in establishing programs through our community institutions in order to better the next generation and the future of our community.

Our hope is that our actions will affect those around us and one day will turn around the public image of our community. Our request from you? Try it out—for the sake of our community, for the sake of your family, and most importantly, for you. “Respect: Give it today—earn it tomorrow.”
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Lisa Arking is a junior at Baruch College, majoring in mathematics.