By Adam Stone

Kotel. She’d seen pictures of the Western Wall for years, throughout her Jewish education, but being there was something else entirely.

“It just made it so much more real,” she recalled.

Adrienne spent an extraordinary month last summer traveling Israel from north to south, as part of a program sponsored by the Baltimore Zionist District. She was one of 22 high school students – 17 guys, five girls – to participate in the trip.

The daughter of Robin Weiss, a past president of Aleph Bet, and Michael Dink, the dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Adrienne is in her senior year at Annapolis High School. An ABJDS alumnus, she went on to attend middle school at Beth Tfiloh in Baltimore.

All that Jewish education sparked in her a profound connection to the land and the people of the Jewish State. “I had studied about Israel, and about the whole journey the Jews have taken together,” she said. “Now I wanted to experience it for myself.”

That’s much in line with what she told the Baltimore Zionist District, in an essay she penned in advance of the trip.

Beyond just visiting the historical landmarks, “I also want to encounter the people of Israel first hand, and do something to benefit them and their land,” she wrote.

This desire was very much an outgrowth of her experiences at ABJDS. “While I did not live in a Jewish neighborhood, I attended a Jewish elementary school where I made my best friends and enjoyed learning about Jewish customs, rituals, and beliefs,” she wrote. “Since I grew up with Jewish friends and families, my Jewish identity was very strong from the start.”

A week spent in Jerusalem was a highlight of the trip for Adrienne. She had come eager to see the Wall, the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, and the graves of fallen Israeli soldiers. These sites all captivated her, and yet there was something else within this ancient city that she had not expected to find: A sense of old and new meeting each other in an almost magical continuum.

“Jerusalem was very beautiful, with all the stone buildings. It was a very old city,” she said. “But at the same time it had a lot of the sense of a normal city life. It was busy, it had all the shops, everything I think of as a city.”

While the urban landscape showed her one side of the Jewish state, Adrienne says she was equally moved by the natural landscape, as her group took numerous hikes across the countryside. Some of these were real hikes, more than just mere strolls, but it was worth the effort, she said. “It was rewarding just to be able to see everything that way, just to walk on the land,” she said.

Five days with a host family on Kibbutz Beit Hashita showed her yet another side of the Israeli experience. There she saw a diverse group of families all coming together on common ground. “All the people’s houses are completely different sizes, some were so wealthy and some were smaller places. It was weird to see all the differences, and yet all the teens know each other, they all go to the same school and then they go off to the army together,” she said.

The best part of the trip, Adrienne said, is the prospect of someday going back to further explore this aspect of her Jewish identity. “It went by really fast and I was also having a lot of fun,” she said. “So I feel like there is still a lot I could get from going again.”