Last summer, a group of students from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin met up with Ben Packer, a fringe, far-right nationalist, in Jerusalem. Their trip leader, then-Hillel Rabbi Moshe Trepp, says the meeting was unplanned, a happy accident. He asked Packer to show them around.
“The great guy that he is, and so selfless that he is, said sure, and he just took our whole group on a short tour around the Old City,” Trepp said.
Packer took the group to the Hurva synagogue, which was reconstructed and reopened in 2010 to intense criticism and backlash. He also brought students to the Kotel Hakatan, or “small Kotel,” a controversial site in the Muslim Quarter that is connected to the Western Wall.
Jordan, a 2018 graduate, remembers this stop well. He prayed at the wall, along with several other students. What he remembers best, though, was a moment that gave him pause.
“There was some vendor within the market that actually seemed to charge at [Packer] with a wagon…charged at him and at the last second veered away. It seemed to be an intimidation measure,” he said. “It could have just been because it was Ben Packer. It could have been because we were Jewish, I do not know.” Either way, he said, he would have felt safer traveling alone.
Ben Packer is well-known in Jerusalem as a leader in the settler movement and an outspoken supporter of Meir Kahane, the late ultra-nationalist who founded Kach, and its offshoot, Kahane Chai. Kach is listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. The groups are described by the Council on Foreign Relations as “two marginal, extremist Israeli groups that have used terrorism to pursue their goals of expanding Jewish rule across the West Bank and expelling the Palestinians.”
In 2017, a Haaretz report revealed that a hostel Packer runs, the Jerusalem Heritage House, is a popular destination for young backpackers, especially those extending their trips after Birthright. The hostel is adorned with photos of Kahane and offers day trips to West Bank settlements, including outposts deemed illegal by the Israeli government.
Guests are also encouraged to attend religious classes at local yeshivas, including an Aish Hatorah yeshiva, where Packer regularly leads classes.
Jordan stayed at the Heritage House after the JLF trip, which he says Trepp offered as an option to the group. While Trepp says he didn’t discuss the Heritage House with the group, he does often connect UT students with Packer, whether they are finishing his trip or are in Israel for other reasons.
When asked about the day trips Packer leads to settlements, Trepp said, “If there are students that are very passionate about [the trips] and like doing them, then them and Ben Packer are good shidduch.” He added, “No one has been asked to do anything they don’t want to do.”
Jordan did not participate in any of Packer’s day trips, but he left with a good impression of his host. “I didn’t talk to [Packer] that much, but he seemed to be a nice guy when I was around with him,” he said.
“I know many people don’t like Ben Packer… and I don’t see that as a reason not to let students be with him or not to be his friend,” Trepp said.
When asked to comment on Packer’s support of Meir Kahane, Trepp said he knows nothing about his friend’s affiliations. “[Packer is] a person that loves the land, he would die for it, for the land of Israel, and the people of Israel.”
When reached for comment, Packer hung up on a New Voices reporter.
Ben Friedman, who encountered Packer on the JLF trip in the summer of 2018, had never heard of Kahane until questioned by New Voices reporter Ben Sharp. When Sharp mentioned Kahane’s political party, Kach, and its connection to terrorist activity, Friedman expressed surprise.
“There’s a Jewish one? We have a terrorist organization?” he asked.
Once Sharp explained that Packer has expressed support for Kahane, Friedman said, “I believe it. He was so aggressive towards all Arab people. Every single one of them.”
——————————————————————
Trepp knows that the trip he offers is different from other programming available to UT students. On a public Facebook event page for “The Israel Trepp Trip!,” hosted by Jewish Learning Fellowships – JLFTexas, the description reads: “You’ll visit many places off the beaten track (i.e. places you don’t get to go while on birthright).” This promise echoes a similar statement on the website for Olami Inspire: “Been on Birthright Israel? Come back with us and explore Israel even more!” (Trepp is funded by Olami, an international organization supported in part by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs).
Jordan decided to join the JLF trip because he knew he could visit parts of Israel-Palestine that he couldn’t access through other trips. “I purposely chose Trepp’s trip because I understood that I could explore East Jerusalem if I wanted to. There were no limits on it,” he said.
The trip event page encourages students to sign up through the website for Odyssey Israel, an “Israel Experience” program that is an affiliate of Olami. Odyssey’s website includes a sample itinerary that Trepp says he wrote himself, which includes sites in the West Bank like Hebron and “Kever Rochel” (Rachel’s Tomb). Trepp says that Odyssey handles all of the logistics on the ground for his trip, including transportation and lodging, and has some limited input into the itinerary.
Olami representatives did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
On Jordan’s JLF trip, the group spent time in Gush Etzion, a large collection of settlements in the West Bank, where they went to a winery and ate dinner at a kosher dairy restaurant. While the trip as a whole was more religious than political, he says “we did have some discussions regarding visiting Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, however you refer to it. We did have some discussions pertaining to the political implications and political climate of Jewish and Palestinian relations.”
Trepp says this isn’t true. “We don’t speak any politics on the trip at all…It’s a Jewish learning trip, that’s what it is.”
According to Trepp, he often brings his groups to a winery in the Golan, and an excursion on the Jordan River. “Yes, it may be in land that [for] some people may be controversial – that’s never a conversation on our trip. It’s not. It never comes up…,” he said. “We’ll say, like, today we’re going to go white water rafting in the Jordan River – there’s never a conversation, where is it, can we go there.”
When asked about his choice to take students into the Occupied Territories and settlements deemed illegal under international law, Trepp told a New Voices reporter, “The United Nations condemns Israel every single day. That doesn’t mean anything to me. I support Israel before the UN and I hope, if you’re a Jew, you do the same thing.”
Trepp sees his honesty about entering the West Bank as the main difference between his trip and Birthright. “I think Birthright does go over the Green Line…they tell people they don’t, but they definitely do. I’m very open about this – Hevron and everything…I’m not telling people one story and doing something else.”
The Texas Hillel Birthright trips he’s staffed, though, have not visited West Bank settlements. Those trips, he says, “would make all the Arabs in the United Nations very happy.”
Trepp’s trip offers something else, but that something else, he maintains, is not political.
“Even when I bumped into Ben Packer in the Old City and asked him to take us on a tour, there were no political conversations, just show us some of your sites…show us something off the beaten path. Take us somewhere interesting.”
——————————————————————
For Rachel Sasiene, visiting Hebron was a new and heightened experience.
“I know a lot of people were afraid. [Trepp] did have to talk to everyone because a lot of people were scared. They didn’t know what they were getting into. They knew we were getting a special bus that was bulletproof. I remember him having to calm fears about that,” she said.
“We only go to safe places. I’ve never, ever put anyone in danger,” Trepp said. “I tell the students the entire time – if there’s ever a time you don’t feel comfortable getting off the bus, for any reason, you don’t have to.”
The group visited the cave of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs, a site holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Sasiene also remembers walking around an area where Jews were massacred in 1929, but Trepp denies ever taking students there.
“There were soldiers there interacting with Arab children on the streets. That was something that I had never seen right in front of my face before,” she said.
Sasiene’s group did not speak to any Palestinian residents of Hebron, but they did make a stop to speak to soldiers in a “little rest house or break room” near the Gush Etzion Junction, the entry point to the Gush Etzion settlements.
She remembers hearing from their tour guide “that no one’s even allowed on foot in [the Gush Etzion Junction] because of all the violence and terror attacks that occur there. I know a lot of other people were feeling uneasy about that.”
Ben Friedman also felt unsafe during the day his group went to Hebron. “I did not like being there,” he said.
He and his fellow students spoke to members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in Hebron, and Friedman said he learned a lot. “They’re not supposed to shoot to kill. They’re supposed to shoot to harm or debilitate. And so it makes me mad when [people are] like, ‘the IDF is a terrorist organization.’ They are protecting the lives of Israelis that live there. Arab, Jewish, Christian, everybody.”
Before coming on Trepp’s trip, Friedman says he was “very pro two-state solution…not necessarily pro-Palestine but pro-all-equality.” Being on the trip made his politics do a “180.” In his words, “I have lost sympathy for the Arab population after being there, if I’m being honest.”
——————————————————————
Now that Trepp is no longer a Texas Hillel employee, he describes himself as “my own boss.” He is no longer under supervision by any Hillel staff, or by the University. In addition, the foundation that funds him, Olami, doesn’t have any oversight over his day to day work, he says. “My funders are very good to me, they trust me, they give me my space. They let me do my thing,” he said.
Trepp plans to continue leading the JLF course and his trips to Israel and Poland. He is still making the same salary he received through Hillel, he says, but he receives it directly now through Olami. He will continue to fundraise to pay for his annual trips.
“The only difference is that it’s not all going to be running out of the Hillel building, and it doesn’t have Hillel’s stamp on my programming,” he said.
Since he can no longer use Hillel space, Trepp plans to use other buildings near campus, like sororities and fraternities, to meet with students. “Instead of working out of Hillel, I’m working out of my car,” he said.
That’s the way he likes it, he says. “I’m not an office person, I’m not a suit and tie person…Instead of working with a big organization with laws and presidents and staff meetings and stuff like that, I work much better just with my own laid-back, easy way.”
Because Trepp no longer works for a campus organization, there are no official channels in place for UT students to report concerning actions or comments he might make, such as those highlighted in Part 1.
When asked what course of action a student could take to report such actions or comments, Shilpa Bakre of UT Austin’s communications department wrote, “The University encourages students who experience any Title IX related incident to make a report so that we can provide them with resources and support, even if the incident is outside the jurisdiction and purview of the University. Students are also encouraged to report any potentially illegal activity to the police.”
(Title IX covers discrimination based on sex. New Voices interviewed students who experienced comments Trepp made during the JLF as sexist. New Voices did not report on any incidents of sexual harassment or assault).
After Ben Friedman took the tour of Jerusalem’s Old City with Ben Packer, he was angry and decided to confront Trepp.
“I do not think [Packer] should be able to work with students at all. And I was mad at Rabbi Trepp. I told him… like, ‘Why did you bring this person?’” According to Friedman, Trepp was “receptive, but did not take action.”
When asked what students should do if they have a concern with him or his programming, Trepp responded, “It doesn’t happen. I’m their best friend…If someone doesn’t like who I am, they don’t have to come to me, they don’t have to take my classes, they don’t have to attend my programs.”
As of February 6th, 2019, Texas Hillel has not announced plans to hire another staff rabbi.
Sarah*, the recent graduate from Part 1 of this series, has been moving away from the Texas Hillel community since she experienced elements of the JLF and final Shabbaton that made her uncomfortable.
The role of a campus rabbi comes with a lot of responsibility, she says. “Students face so many issues and a rabbi is almost by default a person that a student should be able to go to and get support from.” There shouldn’t be “political messages” that come through in a campus rabbi’s programming, she thinks.
Friedman has found his own politics changing as he learns from Rabbi Trepp, who he feels a close connection to.
“Listen, I’m not here to say I have not been swayed or influenced by the people I prioritize in my life. [Trepp], I’m sure, influences a lot of my politics. Can I tell you he’s been the nicest rabbi I ever had?…I’ve dealt with a lot of rabbis, liberal and conservative, who haven’t prioritized my time as much.”
Friedman also admits that his experience on Trepp’s trip was complicated. “Is he flawed? Absolutely. And that experience… was it flawed? A little bit.”
In the end though, Friedman chose to join the trip because “I wanted to go to Israel and see [it] from his perspective,” he says. “Which, I will tell you, was a much better trip than Birthright.”
This is part 2 of 2. To read part 1, click here.
Ben Sharp contributed reporting to this series. Ben is a native of Teaneck, New Jersey and a student at The University of Texas at Austin, pursuing degrees in the Plan II Honors Program and International Relations and Global Studies.
*This student’s name has been changed.
Featured image credit: 12019/Pixabay.com.
