Melbourne Diller Teen Fellows

After experiencing our amazing first Shabbaton together, we were finally back for another exciting workshop!                 To start we had a hilarious icebreaker where we had to introduce our Israeli counterparts with out stuttering, umming or erring. It may seem simple but it seemed no one could complete their full introduction without an um or an err. It was a great way to start as everyone was laughing uncontrollably and got comfortable within minutes! Following this,  we had Nadia and Dahlia lead our Peer led sessions, which are always interesting and fun, and they didn’t disappoint! Each person was given 4 sticky notes on which they had to devote two to fun things that happened in December and two fun things that happened in January. When that was completed we moved to the other side of the room where a circle divided into two, for the two months, were set out. Each person stuck their two pie...

Our first Diller Shabbaton began a week prior to boarding the bus, at Beth Weizman, on a hot Sunday afternoon. We planned how we would cater to all the different streams of Judaism in our group. Little did we know how challenging and yet ultimately fulfilling this experience would be. When we finally arrived at Creswick, we were ready to give our all in every program and discussion that would follow. There were 4 main activities within the program; -        Exploring values as a Jew and Jewish values -        Discussing today's equivalent of the 10 plagues, such as the suffering in silence (darkness) and the curse of technology, based on the three final plagues which featured in Parashat Hashavua, Parashat Bo -        Learning about the different streams of Judaism, focusing on the Women of the Wall. -        “Hour of power” discussions, cantered on Jewis...

After our summer holiday break, it was great to be back together again! After hearing about everyone holidays, we were very lucky to have an eye opening Peer Led session from Talia and Victoria. The cohort was confronted with a difficult idea of balancing our time each day to include all the essential activities, activities we wanted to spend our time doing, and activities we would like to spend our time doing.  The Peer Led session began with the cohort being split into two groups. Using 24 jelly beans which represented all the hours in the day we had to divide them up into cups which were labeled with essential activities. One group divided them as an ideal day and the other as our realistic day. The discussion was based around mostly the time in a day we put towards community service. The ideal side had a substantial increase of jelly beans compared to the realistic side of our lives. We discussed the ideas regarding balancing time and we came to the conclusion that it ...

As the week came to a close and the weekend began to set in, on the lips of every member of  our cohort was excitement yet uncertainty. We all knew we started early at the Jewish Museum and would make our way to the city to embark on some form of scavenger hunt, nothing more. We arrived at the Jewish Museum of Australia at 10am on Sunday morning and were ushered into a small meeting room. After going around a circle and speaking about events in our lives since our last meeting (I’d be lying if I said the majority wasn’t about the US election), we briefed about our activity in the Jewish Museum. We began in the “Standing Up” exhibition, showcasing influential people who stood up for a cause and made a difference. Most were Jewish, others were not. We each chose an individual with whom we connected, whether it be the cause for they have dedicated themselves to or for their morals and beliefs. Above each individual was a quote of theirs, hinting further at their personality a...

Workshop 2 Today we, the second Diller cohort embarked on the journey that was workshop two. For many of us it had been over a month since we had seen each other and others, we were meeting for the first time.  We did the classic Jew shmooze for a bit then got stuck into the program. Our first activity was to go around the room and tell the group which emoji represented our past month best and why.We call this a ‘check-in’ and do it so that we as a group know where we are all coming from emotionally and so that we have a space to inform each other of any major life events that have occurred. This is an important part of the program that we will do every time we have a workshop. We moved on to a discussion about how we relate and connect to Israel and what it means to us. We learned a bit about Shimon Peres and his life and incredible stick-to-it-ness as a leader in his various roles.  Our next activity was a game (yay!) We each created an action with a sound and on the...