Tell Everyone

I got into the car after my final interview with the Bronfman Youth Fellowship in Israel with a grimace. My meeting with executive director Becky Voorwinde just felt weird. After asking me to reflect on a recommendation given by my history teacher, she said, “No, I think you mean…” and proceeded to assert her own interpretation as if it were mine. I remember thinking, no, I already told you exactly what I meant. Something about that correction felt unsettling, and I resolved to not go on the program, that is, until I got accepted.

The Bronfman Youth Fellowship in Israel, or Bronfman, is a highly selective Jewish organization that brings rising high school seniors from all over North America together on a free, five-week getaway to Israel. Many students accepted to Bronfman go on to Ivy League universities, and it is well-known for its alumni pool with vast connections in a range of industries. I grew up as an Orthodox Jew in San Diego where there was not much of a Jewish community, and my family heard about the program through my mother’s friend. The website did not have much information about it; it was marketed as an intellectual and academic program that would host speakers and take its members on trips around Israel. It was as if we had stumbled upon this hidden gem that would open me up to a future of success and stability.

Once on the program, it did not take me long to realize that there was something very strange about Bronfman. On one of the first days, Becky explained that we were there to build a community through vulnerability. Vulnerability? Community? I thought this was going to be a fun summer in Israel. Nowhere on the website did they mention vulnerability.

Soon after, Bronfman turned from strange to uncomfortable. On our trip to the south of Israel, we all sat in a circle and one of the counselors, Marni Loffman, passed a rock to the person next to her. She asked us what we felt our role was in the group and what we had to offer. Many of the people who took the rock said that they felt closer to the other participants than anyone in their lives, but when it was my turn to hold the rock, I burst out crying. It is day four of a program meant to educate me on political activism in Israel; was I meant to have a role? I shared that I felt out of place. The tone of the evening shifted, and others started to share the difficult feelings they had in common with me. Some cried, others just looked down at their laps solemnly. We felt that we had failed. Something was wrong with us because we had not yet found our role in this group.

When we returned to our home base in Jerusalem, the summer resumed with structures to maintain the original goal of a vulnerability-based community. One of those structures was journal groups, times when we were meant to share our private reflections based on our experiences during the program. There was one time during which the conversation was so sensitive that we sat on floors in dark rooms facing away from each other. Everyone had to speak before moving on to the next question.

At a certain point in the summer, it was clear that there was no way to opt out of the community that Bronfman was constructing. The time I realized that was during our round-circle conversation on intermarriage, a topic that threatened the most basic beliefs that constituted Jewish identity in which we were raised. I had a controversial opinion about intermarriage at the time, and I did not want to share it because I did not want to upset people unnecessarily. When I told one of the Orthodox boys about my plan to not speak, he turned to me and sternly replied, ‘Well, then, what are you even doing here?’ There was nowhere else I could go.

A major aspect of the program is the diversity of religiosity among the constituents in order to create an environment based in religious pluralism. I was told by my family friend that I needed to come armed with facts, ready to defend my practices. I felt pressured to have all of the answers, and that insecurity led me to reach out to Jon Levisohn, one of the faculty members on the program, who along with his tenure in Jewish Philosophy at Brandeis University, is also an endowed Associate Professor of Jewish Educational Thought. Early on in the program, when he was on his way out for the day, I asked Jon if he could give me some answers to basic questions about religious practices so I could better defend myself in the anticipated arguments I would have with my peers.

Instead of giving me an answer, he put on a soft smile, took a deep breath, and asked me why I felt I needed to have all the answers. I was dumbfounded. I had never been asked that question before. I felt like I always had to know all the answers. We walked far away from everyone and sat for hours into the night discussing my insecurities regarding the program. He listened, smiled, sometimes even chuckled, and offered his reflections, including his own insecurities. His charisma lessened my anxiety. These types of conversations continued over the five weeks. Instead of spending time with the other students, I would talk to Jon, far away, late into the night. There was a level of closeness that I would not understand until years later. It made me uncomfortable, especially when he talked about his marriage, but I ignored my feelings for the sake of the continuity of our conversations.

I developed severe separation anxiety about halfway through the program, so on the last day, I went to see Bronfman’s mental health advisor, Caryn Green. I told her that Jon and I resolved to continue emailing after the program finished, but she recommended that we call each other, since that was more similar to the way we had been talking so far. And we did.

For the next several months, from August 2017 to the end of December 2017, Jon and I emailed each other and called on the phone for hours at a time. The official definition of our relationship was ‘friend-mentorship’ but as time went on, I would call him my mentor and he would call me his friend. Around the High Holidays in September, he texted me via SMS, and we continued to correspond over WhatsApp along with our regular emails and phone calls.

I was unable to reintegrate into my home environment. I withdrew from every person who I thought would judge me, including two of my siblings and my parents. I went through the motions, but I was completely disengaged. I would go to sleep at 6pm because he probably was not going to email me that day and would wake up uncontrollably every morning at 4am because I had once received an email from him at that time. I had no control over my body. I vividly remember a conversation expressing my concerns where he responded with, “If you want to pull out, that’s your prerogative, but I’m in this.” I did not even understand what ‘this’ was. Any time I was distressed, it was because there was something wrong with me that I had to change in order to be right for him.

Bronfman also hosts a winter and spring retreat before welcoming the constituents into the lifelong alumni pool. It was at the winter retreat where Jon told me that we would not be calling each other anymore. I had a series of conversations with Becky Voorwinde where she convinced me that the inappropriate relationship between me and Jon was my fault. Becky urged me to call the program’s mental health advisor who claimed that she never told me to call Jon on the phone and reminded me that she worked for Bronfman. After the retreat was over, the organization developed a report about me which included testimonies from my friends at the time, likely to safeguard against legal action, and I was officially kicked off the program for flirting with a boy my age during the winter retreat. My “fixation on Jon,” as Becky put it during one of our many phone calls after the retreat was over, was not at the center of my removal from the program. I did not know who knew about me and Jon; I had no control over my narrative. I was removed from the program, and Jon was brought on as a faculty member the next year.

I was alone. I told my parents and my siblings, yet I felt completely alone, and it was all my fault. For the next four years, I painstakingly developed a new self that had not gone on Bronfman. This version of me was untrusting, unsociable, dissociated, and afraid, all the time. It took me a year of counseling to say my story out loud, and I was utterly surprised when my therapist told me that what happened was not my fault. I did not believe her; I did not believe anyone who told me so, because then that meant I was a victim which did not make sense because I was the perpetrator.

In his 2016 essay, Eros and (Religious) Education, Jon Levisohn discusses the role that he believes eroticism must play in teaching. He asks, “Can we not simply rule out the erotic as inherently inappropriate, inherently dangerous and unstable?” (Levisohn 2016). Levisohn goes on to say that the problem begins when the, “Student remains in an erotic relationship to the Teacher,” as if willingly. After reading this paper years later, I realized that the closeness I felt at seventeen years old with Jon was more likely consciously employed eroticism by the forty eight-year-old faculty member. And while the essay is peppered with assurances that he is only referring to “healthy” relationships, Levisohn ultimately resolves that it is inevitable to introduce eroticism in a student-teacher relationship, “with all the danger that that implies,” (Levisohn 2016). I met Jon less than a year after he published this paper.

In 2017, Levisohn published another paper called Theories of Transformative Learning in Jewish Education: Three Cases, where he describes the intentionality behind Bronfman’s selection process. Regarding the students who are not “ready for the destabilizing effect” of the program, Levisohn quotes a faculty member who admitted that, “This kind of experience could be detrimental to [the constituents]. Or could be painful for them in a way that’s not recoverable,” (Levisohn 2017). It is true; there are parts of me I will probably never recover.

In any organization where adults have unmoderated relationships with children, whether that be extracurricular programs like Bronfman or summer camps, or even educational institutions like Jewish day schools or seminary and Yeshiva programs, there is the potential for abuse. Because this abuse is being done by powerful institutions to vulnerable individuals, it is rare that survivors will ever step forward: my reputation is at great risk by publicizing the abuse I experienced by a renowned organization and respected educator. The people in my life whom I love and trust would rather I simply live in the happiness I have finally found than publish my story to the world and open myself up to being painted as crazy, obsessed, delusional, or dangerous. Yet that fear only lasted while I believed I was the predator rather than the survivor, and now I feel that I must speak out. It is my sincerest hope that finding my voice can protect others from being given the grueling task of having to recover theirs.

Author’s Edit: I want to personally invite anyone who has experienced any form of abuse by Bronfman, Jon, Becky or another Jewish organization or person to please email me confidentially at emailshaynaaboutthings@gmail.com with anything they want to share. I am also happy to get on a Zoom call with anyone who would rather not or isn’t ready to write down their story.

Believe me, I spent a long time feeling like my story wasn’t important enough — but no one should ever be made to feel uncomfortable in this way, especially by an adult in a position of power. However small your story may feel to you, it is worth telling, and I would be honored to hear it.