My name is Emma Green and I am from Eisner Camp. This is my first time in Israel and I am on Bus 5. My first day of Israel, despite being thoroughly exhausted from the flight, was nothing but spectacular. When we finally got to the hotel around 9am, I slept until 2pm, which was needed.

By Rachel Schwartz, NFTY in Israel Participant, Bus 4 Bug spray is your new best friend Doing your business in nature is how you’re going to make all your friends Pack tissues...and lots of them (dude wipes if you’re a cool dude) Don’t be ashamed of singing songs as a...

I’m a city kid, and, if you were to ask me a week ago, the last place I’d want to spend my summer was the desert; sleeping on dirt and rocks, hiking up mountains, and living in the grueling heat, miles away from civilization. And yet, it was there that I found myself, spending four days with my camp friends on our trip to Israel.

The teens have been exploring the Desert. Tuesday morning the group travelled to Kibbutz Grofit, a town located on a small hilltop in the middle of the world’s longest and deepest valley that extends over three thousand miles from Syria all the way to Mozambique, Africa and is therefore called the Great Syrian-African Rift Valley.

On Sunday the teens visited the Orcam labs in Jerusalem, where they got to test out their next generation product. Orcam develops cameras that attach to glasses in subtle and sleek way in order to help people with visual impairments read, recognize faces, and tell time. Following Orcam, the teens took a culinary tour of Jerusalem’s largest open-air food market known as Macheneh Yehuda, and participated in a food science workshop with the startup Stellarnova.