Just came back from Limmud FSU, which took place this time in London. And would like to share some impressions from the event.
Let’s start from usual routine, like in those ancient times, when I worked in Jewish summer camps and kids gave us feedback on the whole camp:
– Food was good
– Rooms are nice
– Everything was OK.
So, now we can speak about Limmud itself.
First impression, which I got before the event – a really professional organization. Even small issues could not spoil the whole attitude. I was going to speak on Limmud about our social start-up KosherDev and it turned out to be, that it will in Shabbat. So, I could not use my laptop and projector. Organizers made all possible to lower to impact of this. And I really appreciated support.
More than 700 people attended Limmud in London and it is difficult to avoid any possible organizational issues. But the work of organizational board and volunteers was absolutely incredible. Everybody knew where to go and what to do. I have learned quite a lot from this gathering.
Talking about people, who came there, it was also a quite interesting experience. Many of them knew each other from previous events in students’ age – camps, seminars etc. There was something very common in all these people – they are Russian-speaking living in Europe, emigrated from Former-Soviet Union. My friend Marina Goutman called it a “Emigrant Limmud”. Many topics raised on Limmud referred to emigrant life – famous Soviet actor, famous writer from Russia, lecture about bilingual kids and discussion what does it mean to be Jewish nowadays out of Israel.
I met a lot of people, whom knew from gathering with ROI community and even some of them, whom I met for the first time offline, but knew very well virtually. Knaan Lifshits is one of them. I got acquainted with him several years ago – some of ROI’ers connected us. Knaan wrote a wonderful article about our project in Jerusalem Post and I had no chance till Limmud to say him how much I appreciated the work he did for us.
And since I touched my connection with ROI, I’d like to thank ROI community for micro-grant, which made it much easier to come to such a wonderful event. By the way, whole the system now works just perfectly – reminders, newsletters. I like it 😉
