Israel 2025 – May 9-10: Yossi Mond

Hi everyone, it’s Yossi and I hope you are having a great day. To begin our last Friday in Israel, we started by driving to Netanya, which was about an hour drive. When we arrived at Netanya I said to myself, “wow this place looks like Miami.” As we made our way toward the beach our tour guide Hillel explained that Netanya is very diverse. Hillel said that there are a lot of American people living there as well as French people living, which surprised me a lot. 

After a short drive in the center of Netanya, we arrived at the beach and it was amazing. It looked so beautiful and everyone had so much fun in the ocean and playing volleyball and soccer. We even had Pizza Hut delivered to the beach.  

Once we were all tanned (and a little burnt), we boarded the bus to Jerusalem for OUR LAST SHABBAT. When we arrived at our hotel, we were very surprised to see how close it was to the hotel last time we stayed in Jerusalem last time we were there. A  couple hours later, after we got ready for  OUR LAST Shabbat, we went to a shul. This ship was such an amazing experience because everyone sang for Shabbat. We all enjoyed it. 

At the hotel, we had a wonderful dinner and it was very delicious. Our madrichia Ofri organized our last Shabbat oneg and we played games and had snacks before going to sleep very late. 

On Shabbat, we woke up and had a great breakfast before walking to a Sephardic synagogue and everybody loved it. It was such an amazing experience because the way they spoke and prayed amazed us; some of our friends even got to hold the Torah and got an Aliyah. 

After almost 3 weeks, we were so tired that we got to spend some time napping and just relaxing, which was really nice. We also went to Gan Sacher, and let me tell you it was a very ginormous park and everyone was so surprised. A lot of the classmates wanted to stay for more time because everyone had a great time. After we got back to the hotel all sweaty we went to our last dinner in Jerusalem. 

Following a beautiful Havdaleh, the last thing we did in Jerusalem is we went to Ben Yehuda and we bought our last minute goodies. And we also saw a group from Korea there singing and showing their support to the Jewish people, which made us feel a sense of pride knowing that people from the world would come to Israel to celebrate the Jewish culture, even though they were not Jewish. Finally, we got back to the hotel so we could have a good sleep before the plane ride.