Interview with Beth Uval,
writer and guide at Neot Kedumim

Tell us a bit about your background––where you grew up, where you went to school, your family, etc.

I grew up in Pleasantville, NY, where my father, Paul Steinfeld, was for many years director of the Pleasantville Cottage School, a residential treatment center for children. This name will be familiar to many readers as my father was a founding member of American Friends of Neot Kedumim and for many years Secretary-Treasurer. I graduated from Barnard College in 1968 and came to Israel, "for a year," a little over a year later.

After six months in a kibbutz ulpan in the Galilee, I came to Jerusalem and began to feel, in a very vague way at first, that this "year" was going to much longer than I'd envisioned. At Congregation Mevakshei Derech in Jerusalem, I met a wonderful Israeli, Ezri Uval, whom I married at the end of 1971. Ezri, who died six and a half years ago, was a gifted and beloved teacher and a great believer in Neot Kedumim. His students at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem were among the first Christian groups to visit NK.
I am the very proud mother of Ephrat, Aviad, Eliav, and Amitai and grandmother of Ya'ara, Gil'ad, and Ofer.

What made you decide to make aliya (move permanently to Israel)?

There were no doubt many factors. Being Jewish was always an important part of me. As someone who grew up as the only Jewish kid in the class, I was completely captivated by the sense of sharing and community I felt during that first year in Jerusalem, especially during the holidays. I wasn't celebrating alone, but with the whole country. We were all living by the same rhythm. Walking with a river of people to the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Simhat Torah, standing silently together with the whole country when the sirens sounded on Yom Hashoah [Holocaust Memorial Day] and Yom Hazikaron [Memorial Day for the Soldiers]––these were very powerful experiences for me. As a friend of mine who worked with the Shoshones in Wyoming and then went to rabbinical school said, "I wanted to pow-wow with my own people." Though I may not have put it in such a colorful way, that is a big part of why I'm here.

I came to Israel straight from New York in the sixties. I was tremendously impressed with the Israelis my age––their involvement with their society and their country and not just themselves, their directness, their rootedness. These things felt right to me, felt refreshing, felt like something I wanted to learn and be part of. I felt that every person could make a difference here, that it was important to be part of this small country.

And I'd like to add that despite all the well-known problems of living in Israel, I have never for a moment regretted it.

How did you first become involved with Neot Kedumim?

I first heard of Neot Kedumim through my parents, Lillian and Paul Steinfeld, who were very active in American Friends of Neot Kedumim from its beginning in the early 1970s. Every time they visited us in Jerusalem, they would go to NK and come back glowing with enthusiasm––Helen, Nogah, trees, Bible. I really had no clue of what they were talking about, and it was only when I finally got there myself that I began to understand.

When I began to emerge from ten years of full-time motherhood and started doing translation and writing and editing, I began to work freelance for NK and became more and more involved in the material. Helen would periodically ask me to do the NK guides' course so that I could guide in English, and I always said, no, I've never done that, I don't know how, that's not me, I'm not this, not that. Then one day I looked at the cramped corner under a stairway where I sat at my computer, and, before I lost my nerve, picked up the phone and said to Helen, OK, I'll do it––one of the best moves I've ever made. My friend Judy Labensohn and I did the guides' course together with six 18-year-old soldier-teachers who were younger than most of our children, five days a week in a particularly scorching August and September. That was the beginning.

What do you like best about the job?

The chance to work with truly gifted, creative, wonderful people––with Helen Frenkley (who will always be my dear friend and mentor) until her retirement last year, with Nogah Hareuveni, with Incoming Tourism Coordinator Ronit Maoz, with many members of the Hebrew guiding staff who are fountains of inspiration and enrichment, and, recently, with the new AFNK president Paula Tobenfeld.

The work is a never-ending process of learning and growing––not only learning the vast and rich material, but learning how to present it to people of hugely differing backgrounds. When I started guiding at Neot Kedumim 11 years ago I did not have a clue about how to stand in front of a group and speak to them, and I'm very grateful to NK for giving me the chance to learn.

The work is endlessly stimulating to the mind, enriching to the spirit, and warming to the heart.
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What do you like best about guiding?

The chance to connect with people in a significant way, the energy that flows when you find the way to reach a group. I have found that the material of Neot Kedumim has such powerful appeal that it can touch people deeply and create a meaningful bond even within the time frame of a short tour.

We have the privilege of dealing with ideas in the Bible that speak directly and deeply to what it means to be a human being. For example, one of the things that is very powerful for me is the idea of cycles of death and renewal that we see both in nature and in human life and human history. My favorite olive tree with its dead trunk surrounded by living shoots, the first green that comes up with the fall rains, the fruit trees that come to life after the winter––these things have become very important to me. It is exactly now, between Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha'atzma'ut [Israel Independence Day], that we are very aware of these cycles of death and new life in our history. And we all experience such cycles in our personal lives. I love being able to share these ideas.

I also love doing activities with children. Sitting on my desk are not only various translations of the Tanakh and the New Testament, concordances, Nogah's books, and plant guides, but also bits of sheeps' wool, clay for making oil lamps, wheat kernels for grinding, and dried hyssop leaves for crushing. (I always win the messiest desk contest.)

It is this combination of ideas and sensory experience––the synthesis of mind, heart, spirit, hands, eyes, taste, sound, fragrance––that I find compelling.

What do you like least about being a tour guide?

Logistics. Figuring out how six groups each get off their buses at different points, reach the restrooms and the relevant areas on the trails, and return to the buses waiting at different spots, all within the same two hours, without stepping on each other or any of the other groups out there at the same time. My sense of spatial orientation is actually very defective and this is not my strong point. There have been bus drivers who would have gladly hung me from the nearest tree. But I have made progress even in this area-another example of growing in this job!

Does the job ever become routine or static?

Never. Every season is different, every group is different. Each group represents its own challenge––whether it's tourists who are exhausted from a 14-hour plane ride, or 35C (95F) heat, or children who were promised the beach, or teenagers who want the mall. Our job as guides is to find the ways of connecting to them, of meeting them where they are. It's a people job, and people are endlessly fascinating.

Even though there are things I've said by now hundreds of times, it's still exciting to share them with people––whether they are Jews from New York, or Evangelical Christians from Texas, or Catholics from Singapore, or Protestants from Taiwan, or ultra-orthodox teachers from Jerusalem. It's wonderful to be able to cross these cultural and religious boundaries and share ideas that speak to what is universal in being a human being.

What are some of the most unusual groups you've taken through the reserve?

Last January, we had a group of Inuits, some of them from Baffin Island, on the Arctic Circle, where the temperature was -35C (-31F) when they left. To get here, they flew to Montreal, then to London, then to Tel Aviv. Nothing grows on Baffin Island; they eat caribou, walrus, seal, and fish. Anything else has to be flown in at great expense. When they heard the gunfire from our neighboring army base, they assumed it was hunting!

Most of the people spoke Inuktituk. The woman who translated for them is the mayor of Resolute Bay, the second northernmost town in North America. This is her sixth trip to Israel.

A couple of the young men put on their regalia, including a "bustle" made of eagle feathers, and showed us their traditional "grass dance," swaying like grass in the meadow. While they were in Israel, they performed their dances for children in hospitals.

Their Bible is in Inuktituk and mine is in Hebrew, but we knew the same texts-a fantastic experience.

What was one of your favorite guiding experiences?

One that immediately comes to mind was helping to plan and implement the Bat Mitzva celebration of Ariana Goodman of Middlesex, UK. What made this experience truly inspiring was working in partnership with a wonderful family to create the celebration they wanted. We exchanged dozens of e-mails dealing with content, with ideas, with technical details, and of course food. Based on material I sent, Ariana spoke beautifully at the grapevine-planting ceremony and at a lighting ceremony we created. I love being able to help a family celebrate an important event in their lives.

Another was a group of Catholics from Singapore, who were so enthusiastic that we ended up singing and dancing "mayim, mayim" ("water, water," a classic Israeli song and dance based on Isaiah 12:3, "You shall draw water with joy from the springs of salvation") outside the shop.

And there have been many more.