Halfway Around the World
Rachel Elias brought home skills from her cultural journey
by Emily Green

Graduate architecture student Rachel Elias knows much more than how to build structures. This University of Florida student also has become a pro in forming the infrastructure for organizations such as Gators for Israel (GFI) on her campus. So, where did she learn this trade? Not in design class—in Israel.

Like many middle and high school kids, Elias was very involved in a local youth group, Young Judea. This Jewish group isn’t as focused on religion as it is on Israel advocacy. Young Judea’s program culminates in an optional but very popular one-year study abroad program in Israel for high school graduates prior to attending college. Elias chose to participate in this program, spending the first four months in the northern city of Carmiel.

During the day, she worked with Russian immigrant middle school children, tutoring them in English. At night, she and the other group members studied in an Ulpan, an intensive Hebrew immersion program. When springtime rolled around, the group went into the old city of Jerusalem, lived on Mount Scopus, and took classes at Hebrew University. When classes ended, the group spent an additional three weeks in the north living with host Israeli families. Rachel spent the time with her host family learning how to farm, even how to milk a cow. The last two months, the group lived on various kibbutzim, communal farm/settlements in the Negev Desert. Because of the lack of water in the Negev, each kibbutz dedicates its work to water conservation. Elias worked on manufacturing leak-proof faucets and learned how to grow sunflowers for their seeds using recycled water.

While none of these are skills directly related to starting up an organization on a college campus, Elias gained an amazing perspective on the cultural exuberance of the country. When she returned to the States to begin her studies at UF, she found a group called Gator-Pac that focused on Israeli political activism but lacked cultural programming. “The reason why I thought that there was a need for it was that there were a lot of Israeli students on campus as well as students, Jewish and non-Jewish, that had been to Israel and enjoyed themselves and wanted to ‘keep up’ culturally,” she says. So Elias created Gators for Israel, establishing programs like an Israeli Independence Day Celebration and a night in Beit Café—a Mediterranean style coffeehouse. After a couple of years, Gator-Pac and Gators for Israel joined forces, and the group is now the largest umbrella group in the Jewish Student Union and one of the most influential groups on campus and in the state of Florida. This alternative path of taking a year to learn and grow further solidified her bond with the country and gave her the drive to create GFI. “If you have something you want done, it's not going to get done unless you do it.” And that is exactly what Elias did.

Contact Elias at rkelias@ufl.edu.

Copyright © 2006 Oxendine Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved