Abe Besser Senior Israel-Poland Experience

The Abe Besser Senior Israel-Poland Experience is a hallmark of senior year at The Weber School. This three-week travel education program offers a one-of-a-kind opportunity for extensive learning about Jewish history and contemporary Jewish communities in Poland and Israel. Now that our students have returned, we are excited to share the full scope of their experience.

Over the course of the trip, students engaged with Israel in several ways. They explored the archaeological and historical foundations of Jewish life through sites such as the City of David, the Davidson Center, the Kotel Tunnels, and Masada. They confronted questions of memory, loss, and responsibility at Yad Vashem, Mount Herzl, the October 7 memorial sites in the south, including a meeting with a survivor of the Nova Festival and his Bedouin rescuer, and Hostages Square. They also encountered contemporary Israeli society through experiences that introduced them to the diversity and complexity of the people who make up the region, including members of Jewish, Bedouin, Druze, and Palestinian communities.

One of the most distinctive educational components of this year’s trip was the (triple) track day, which allowed students to explore contemporary Israel through three equally meaningful areas of study: innovation and entrepreneurship, culture and cuisine, and political and social complexity. In the entrepreneurship track, developed with support from Weber’s ELI and Business, Finance, and Entrepreneurship program leaders, students examined Israel’s startup culture through sessions in Herzliya and Tel Aviv focused on venture capital, cybersecurity, leadership, and innovation. In the culture and cuisine track, students explored Israeli society through food, beginning in the shuk and continuing with hands-on cooking that connected them to culture and daily life. In the third track, students traveled to Gush Etzion, where they toured the area with a Palestinian guide and later met with both a settler and a Palestinian through Shorashim/Roots. This “Only at Weber” encounter is not typical of high school travel, and it speaks directly to what makes this experience so distinctive at Weber: our students had the extraordinary opportunity to engage directly with the region's lived reality and complexity.

Students who continued on the optional leg to Poland studied Polish Jewish history across its full breadth. In Krakow, students explored the depth of Jewish communal life before the Holocaust through Kazimierz, its synagogues and cemetery, and present-day Jewish institutions, including the JCC in Krakow, where they spent Shabbat with the local Jewish community. They then confronted the destruction of that world through Podgórze and through careful preparation for their visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After touring Auschwitz I and Birkenau, students visited the Auschwitz Jewish Center, taking time with Weber staff to reflect on the day’s experience. In Warsaw, students visited the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the former Warsaw Ghetto area, and the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, where they examined why documenting history, even at great personal risk, was a powerful form of resistance. The Poland portion of the trip concluded with a pierogi-making workshop, and the finished pierogi were donated to an organization serving people in need.

“Programs like ABI(P)E give students the opportunity to engage directly with the people, places, and questions that shape the modern Jewish experience,” said Dr. Rachel Rothstein, Director of Israel and Global Education. “By connecting what they’ve studied in the classroom with the realities on the ground in Israel—and, for some students, Poland—the learning becomes far more personal and profound.”