To Alex Senator, one of the participants in Montreal’s first Birthright trip since the Oct. 7 attack, being at the front of every hike was more important than nursing his torn ACL. He did it in memory of his late grandmother, a warrior who fled Germany during World War II and settled in Spain, then France, and finally England. He was not missing anything during this trip, he told himself, not even if it meant watching his knee swell to twice its size.
“It was really painful to walk, and one day we had two hikes, with one up Masada. But my grandmother was seven years old when she started fleeing,” he says.
To the Israeli people, Senator’s resilience was about much more than pushing through pain. Many Israelis were shocked to see people on the Birthright trip at all, and he recalls some people approaching the participants to give them hugs. It proved one simple fact to Senator: Montreal’s Birthright trips, despite having undergone many changes, are more important than ever.
While staple experiences in Yad Vashem and the Ben Yehuda market were both present on this year’s trip, the Montreal delegation was one of the only groups to visit the site of the Nova Music Festival near Sderot, where almost 370 civilians were killed. According to Stephen Rabinovitch, Federation CJA’s director of Israel Experiences and Leadership Development, several factors made this experience more relatable to participants, creating a stronger link between them and Israel.
“The innocent Israelis who were murdered at the Nova festival were, for the most part, the same age as the participants. As well, it’s a music festival, and the vast majority of 18- to 26-year-olds have gone to or will go to some festival,” Stephen says.
Such was the case for Senator, one of roughly 300,000 people who attended this year’s Osheaga festival in Montreal. He says he’s not an emotional person, but after a few steps through the Nova festival, he found a memorial photo that broke his heart.
“It was a picture of an Israeli man with his friend. The friend had on a t-shirt with a printed picture of both of them, and it started making me cry right away,” Senator says. “The Nova festival is what I told my friends about when I came back. I told them to imagine terrorists arriving from Longueuil with trucks and automatic rifles. It’s terrifying.”
Federation CJA enlisted the help of several rabbis this year to bridge the gap between these experiences and the participants’ Jewish identities. Rabbi Getzy Markowitz of The Family Store, who has done three Birthright trips with Federation CJA, says his spiritual perspectives complemented the cultural and historical contexts provided by the tour guides.
“We had late night conversations, debates, and talked about all the good questions someone would ask a rabbi. The tour guides, who were next level, were excited to hear what I had to say,” said the rabbi. “They told me that blend was very powerful – they have their lines, and it was incredible to have another perspective.”
This particularly impacted Rachael Jaffe, who reflected on the history of Jewish oppression and its modern connotations while at the Holocaust Museum. She connected the fact that the original Nazi book burnings were carried out by college students to the ongoing anti-Israel protests on Canadian college campuses.
Jaffe, who moved to Montreal from Toronto a year ago, says Birthright helped her make strong connections in a community undergoing unprecedented hostility and discrimination. Though she had already been to Israel in the late 2010s, Birthright gave her a space to meet Montreal Jews and freely discuss her perspectives on Israel. “It’s really important for me to make new friends, so it was refreshing to be on a trip with basically 25 Zionists,” she says.
Rabbi Markowitz says Birthright breeds these kinds of longstanding connections. On the Friday before flying to Israel, he officiated a wedding for a couple who had met on Birthright eight years ago. And since returning from this year’s trip, several participants have asked to hold Shabbat together, volunteered at The Family Store, and attended his Monday night Torah classes.
Senator returned from the trip wanting to use the knowledge of his heritage to stand up against misinformation and antisemitism. While he previously felt disconnected from his Jewish identity, actively hiding it from his coworkers, he says this first trip to Israel has inspired him to use his resilience to defend his people.
“My sense of community and being a Jewish person in Canada is much stronger,” he says. “It’s important to be a voice to defend people back in Israel. I want to stand up even more to people.”
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