On a Sunday morning in early March, the senior management of Kol Israel Haverim-Alliance boarded a direct flight from Tel Aviv to Paris for a five-day seminar . When we arrived, the sun was shining - a rare occurrence in Europe during March.
From the airport in Paris we drove to Rosay en Brie After arriving at a big iron gate, we entered the house of Marc Eisenberg, president of Alliance Israelite Universelle, who graciously hosted us. After lunch , we moved to a building that formerly served as a stable and servants' quarters, and that today houses a collection of various toys.
The seminar took place against the amusing backdrop of toy planes , trains, revolving carousels and children's posters from the beginning of the last century. Over the next five days, together with staff members of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris, we shared a vision for one organization with a common goal - to create work teams and to get to know each other's work in depth.
First, we became acquainted with each other at unique introductory workshops that used the team building method. We then broke into teams according to common areas of expertise - Beit Midrash, training and schools, media and communications. We studied together, we discussed the treaty between the schools in the European network and we learned about the vision of Marc Eisenberg and Sam Pinto for the Alliance and Kol Israel Haverim-Alliance in Israel and abroad .
Between workshops , getting-to-know-you exercises and joint learning, we heard distinguished visitors like Mr. Roger Cukierman, president of the CRIF, the umbrella organization of Jewish organizations in France, and Mr. Dov Zerah , member of the Alliance board of directors, who spoke about relations between Israel and the Diaspora.
We visited schools in Paris, we met students, we entered classrooms, we spoke with principals and educators from European schools, who came to meet us at the largest Jewish library in Europe. We also shared in the excitement of Eli Alaluf, the strategic advisor of Kol Israel Haverim-Alliance , who discovered in one of the books a picture of his father as a child in an Alliance school in Morocco. A link to the "Media – Tech", the digital branch of the library, will soon be posted on the Kol Israel Haverim-Alliance website.
We were guests at a meeting of the Alliance steering committee, at which the activities of the Darca network of schools were presented, along with challenges facing the Alliance in the near future.
The seminar was fast-paced, time was stretched to the limit and there was an exhilarating sense of common action and shared goals . We reached significant understandings about the vision of the "united organization" and the importance of working together, based on the 153-year history of our important organization, with a view to the future. We succeeded in getting to know the staff in Paris on both personal and professional levels, and to enhance our shared inner workings.
There was a feeling that we created connecting links between France and Israel and between the two cultures. We built personal relationships that will contribute to and promote collaboration in the future.
