what is the helix?
Yiddishkayt’s newest initiative the helix project creates young global ambassadors bringing an expanded vision of Jewish heritage and of Jewish peoplehood to their communities at home, at school, and throughout the world to become the next generation of leaders in Jewish education and culture. Each year, Yiddishkayt selects 36 students for a summer of intensive exploration of Jewish history, culture, and heritage. The project provides these students with a series of innovative educational experiences first at Yiddishkayt’s headquarters in Los Angeles, followed by the core part of the program — an adventure to the historical heartlands of Jewish life abroad. Based on students’ genealogical research into their families’ histories, students are divided into three groups of 12 that travel to the areas in Central and Eastern Europe that their forbears called home for centuries prior to their immigration to America and before the destruction of European Jewish life in the Holocaust. After the trip, Helixers return to Los Angeles for a full debriefing about their collective experiences in Europe and for workshops exploring the past, present, and future of Jewish culture and identity.
why the helix?
The overwhelming success of Holocaust education over the past two decades has amplified a serious absence — students know about the loss, but not what was lost. Young Jews (and non-Jews) throughout America learn quite a lot about the obliteration of European Jewry during the Second World War: they learn about the murderous ideology of Nazism, about the stripping of the basic rights of Jews before the final solution, and more than anything else, they study the mechanisms of torture and murder that annihilated 6 million Jews. Most Jewish students enter colleges and universities able to name more Nazi leaders than they can name major Jewish writers and more sites of mass slaughter than cities that once flourished with nearly majority Jewish populations.
why now?
Currently, more courses at major colleges and universities throughout North America teach about the destruction of European Jewish culture than about the culture that was destroyed. As a result, young Jews (as well as many older ones) see the experience of Jews in Europe as a never-ending history of constant despair and sadness. Yiddishkayt sees this situation—so far from the truth of actual, lived experience—as a tragedy. Seventy years after the murder of so many Jewish lives, the Holocaust now continues to obliterate any memory of the richness of Jewish life throughout the world before the modern period. The Helix actively fights against this erasure by allowing young Jews to witness first-hand just how alive Jewish life once was by exploring the landscapes Jews called home and the cultural treasures they produced there. The voices of great Jewish authors and poets resound once more when Helixers visit the cities and towns these authors called home, read their works, and trace their footsteps through the sites described in their masterpieces of Yiddish, Russian, and Polish creativity. Yiddishkayt shows a richer, more pluralistic, more remarkable Jewish life than ever imagined. The ease of travel to the former Soviet Union and its surrounding countries, as well as the flourishing of local Jewish organizations in the FSU and Poland greatly facilitate tourism to the region and the ability to link up with a sector of world Jewry historically disconnected from mainstream American Jews.
who participates?
Over 85% of American Jewish families have historical roots in Central and Eastern Europe; the vast majority arrived in the United States in the last decades of the 19th century until the Quota Acts of the 1920s ended the flow of immigrants to the haven of American shores. Helix takes the descendants of this huge and vibrant population back to the places that Jews lived, loved, created, and thrived before the calamities of the modern period. The program is open to all students aged 18–22 who wish to explore their family history in the most creative, direct, and personal way possible—regardless of financial status—to become the most knowledgeable and visionary leaders in their communities at home and at school.
what happens next?
The core part of the experience is the annual Helix symposium, which gathers current and previous cohorts of Helixers together in Los Angeles for a three-day conference. Each day the symposium includes individual presentations by the current year cohort, leading scholars of European Jewish culture, and creative workshops led by leading innovators of Jewish culture.
how can you make this life-changing experience possible?
Bringing this life-changing experience to our engaged future leaders in Jewish cultural life requires your help. Opportunities are available to fund or endow individual students, trip leaders, workshop faculty, and a host other program facets that create the Helix experience.
