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Nuance Educational Tours

Name: Nuance Educational Tours
Address: Jerusalem, IL
Telephone: +972539187361

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Nuance Educational Tours

Nuance Educational Tours provides an independent guided experience throughout Israel/Palestine for groups, families and solo travelers.

Each adventure is intentionally planned and aims to provide a fuller picture of this complex land.

03/05/2024

The best Fridays are Fridays with bougie brunches and hammocks and nature and picnics and hate-listening to Unorthodox and other silliness with friends who are family❤️

24/04/2024

Today, a couple friends and I went hiking at Shvil HaMayanot in the Aminadav forest. It was a beautiful day, complete with Jamila (my pup) clumsily falling into a מעיין (a natural spring), soaking up the early summer sunshine, and trying Kosher4Passover ice cream at a Golda branch that’s open on Shabbat & holidays (talk about pluralism!)
Then, I came home, opened up Instagram and immediately saw a post by the of a baby born via C-section to a woman killed in an airstrike, along with her husband and older child.
My gut reaction was: what in the world was this graphic video doing, with no trigger warnings, on Instagram? Was this catastrophic moment consensually filmed to educate the world or was this family’s tragedy being exploited for social media?

And my second thought was: while I was biting into my first watermelon of the summer, a baby came into the world as an orphan, her family and world destroyed mere miles from me.
On days like these, my heart doesn’t have enough space to hold all the pain in this world, to see the empty Seder tables laid out for the hostages in the streets, to hear the newly drafted Israeli teenagers swimming near us turning their fears of serving on the Gaza border into jokes, to hear the silent screams of a baby born with no mother and father. Who will hold her, who will hold us, who will take responsibility for the slaughter of innocents? And perhaps most importantly, who will lead us out of this tortured reality?

22/04/2024

This morning, I walked out on to my balcony and found three blossoming pansy flowers. I’ve only planted herbs and succulents in my garden so they appeared to have flowered out of thin air. Funny thing is, since I was little, pansies have been my favorite flowers. In Russian, they’re called “анютины глазки”, which I understood to mean “little Anna’s eyes”. I always wondered who Anna was and how pretty she must have been to have these delicate bright flowers named for her.
Now, these extraordinary pansies growing out of the cracked dry earth symbolize more than just the coming of Spring, but my own personal rebirth. After 18 months of struggling in darkness, I’ve found how to let in the Sun. I’ve figured out where I end and the world begins. If only the world around me could reflect the inner wholeness I now feel, if only our shared promised land was at the brink of peace and not the precipice of catastrophe. Thousands of lives lost, millions of hearts broken, 129 families still living in purgatory. I have no answers, no healing magical spells, but I’m stepping back into the world and dedicating myself to sprinkling the Earth with seeds of forgiveness, love and hope.
🪷Chag Pesach Sameach🪷

06/10/2023

Such an honor to guide my first dual narrative tour with and ! It’s been my dream to do Israeli-Palestinian guiding and it was just as complex, nuanced and meaningful as I imagined🇮🇱🇵🇸 .

04/10/2023

Some tours are intense, filled with heavy duty facts, narratives and tales of conflict. But food tours are always a good time! Great stories, lots of snacks and getting to meet guests from all over the world🥙🥗

11/09/2023

Hi everyone!
Do you have family or friends visiting Jerusalem for the chaggim? Are you a local who has always wanted to know more about the mystical neighborhood of Nachlaot? Join me for a Selichot tour of Nachlaot!
First tour this *Thursday at 8pm*, 60 NIS per person
WhatsApp me to reserve your spot!

06/09/2023

Such a lovely day guiding a sweet family from Switzerland all around Jerusalem. Old City☑️ Mahane Yehuda Shuk☑️ Nachlaot☑️

27/08/2023

Been back for only 48 hours and I’m already back on the food tour game🌯 so happy to be back and can’t wait to share the exciting tours coming up!

14/08/2023

August in Israel is peak tourist season. There are lots of family groups and independent travelers, which are known to be great paying gigs. But back in May, I was given the opportunity to go back to Eden Village for the August session and peak tourist season be damned, I jumped on it. I might not be guiding everyday but I sure am soaking up the love, sunshine, music and seriously good vibes of camp. Eden Village follows a sanctuary model, meaning we create a little bubble of utopia and then hope that we can take what we learned out into the big wide world. I can’t wait to come back to Israel rejuvenated and refreshed, ready to hit the ground running for the autumn and chaggim. See you soon, Jerusalem!

01/08/2023

Here’s to bopping around Europe for 10 days🥾 Thank you to Paris, London and Edinburgh for an amazing honeymoon. (Two years after the wedding and three canceled trips later…thanks Corona!)

19/07/2023

The staff behind all the Eden Village magic✨ thank you for 3 weeks of adventures, singing and laughter in the holy land.

17/07/2023

Today was HOT. The type of heat where you feel sweat dripping down your back and you keep drinking water but it never seems to be enough. And yet, I did a beautiful and magical tour of Ein Kerem and Nachlaot, two Jerusalem neighborhoods that are full of stories and history. Anything is possible with a little bit of shade, laughter, and enthusiasm✨

14/07/2023

Instagram only shows the highlights of your day, so I haven’t shared that I’ve had a really hard time guiding this trip. I’m not sure why, but it felt like all my storytelling skills and guiding expertise just went out the window and instead, I was just word vomiting information at my campers. I simply have not been on my A game. Until yesterday, when I led an hour long intro to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict & something just clicked. Even though it’s was 10:30 at night, all the campers were super engaged and asked a ton of questions, and we had an amazing discussion about the idea of “One Homeland, Two States”. For the last two weeks, I had been so hard on myself that the guiding wasn’t going well and then, suddenly, something magical happened, where I stepped into the zone and was able to teach with the enthusiasm and love that I aim to bring to my campers. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of time✨✨

10/07/2023

Last year when I guided in Tzfat, it was a 100 degrees and I felt like I was going to melt all day. Today there was a cool breeze and it was simply a joy to talk about Kabbalah, Isaac Luria (HaAri), and the history of Jewish mysticism with my campers. Can’t wait to come back to this holy city!

09/07/2023

Industrial farms and pluralistic mikvahs? Sign me up! Eden Village has the best days. Can’t wait for Tsfat tomorrow!

07/07/2023

Today, I woke up and found out that I needed to fill two extra hours in the Old City. Usually, I’m not any good at being spontaneous with my guiding, but Jerusalem makes it easy. Check out the Cardo, the Madaba Map, and the Jewish and Armenian quarters🥾😍

03/07/2023

What a full day! We started with a hike in the Red Canyon, snorkeled in Eilat and then did an EcoKef tour in Kibbutz Lotan. Traveling with Eden Village is the best because we do things our own special way, like singing camp songs on the hike or love pranking the bus 🥾🌞🌊

30/06/2023

Eden Village is back in Israel! Amazing first day hiking in Ein Avdat and celebrating pride in Mizpe Ramon. We even saw a mama and baby ibex drinking from Nahal Kzin🦌🦌(check out photo 3!)

01/05/2023

Running a class a second time means you get to perfect it, right? Sometimes! Today, my HerStory class had our session about modesty and last minute, I added a new speaker, who talked to the students about the politics of wearing hijab in the Arab world. All went well-the speaker was wonderful and we had a great conversation. However, our bus came early and couldn’t wait for us, so we couldn’t do the text study or sikkum I had prepared. Was the session perfect? Nope, but it was close!😝

01/03/2023

A big perk of my job as an educator is that I get to build my own experiential classes from scratch. This semester, and I designed a class called “AlterEco: Imagining a Greener Israel”, where we explore environmental issues,sustainability and climate change.
Check out today’s class about the dilemmas of kashrut and factory farming!

12/12/2022

Do you have have family or friends visiting Jerusalem for Hanukkah? Or are you a Jerusalemite looking for the most beautiful candle lighting? Join me to celebrate the festival of lights with a festive tour of the magical neighborhood of Nachlaot!

23/11/2022

Guiding in Lod is the best type of guiding😍
My Israel story begins in Lod, since I spent my first year here living, learning and volunteering with Lod has such a special place in my heart and I feel such joy sharing the story of this deeply beautiful and complicated city❤️

15/11/2022

Sometimes it’s just impossible to capture the magic of a moment in a photo, especially when you’re a crappy photographer😂 But I couldn’t resist sharing this amazing experience I had with my Machon students yesterday in preparation for our Poland journey.

Channeling our inner child, we drew a map of the world with chalk and then followed the roots of our families as they wandered the world looking for safety and prosperity.

As each student hopped across the “world”, they shared family stories, introduced themselves as their family members, and connected moves across oceans and continents with colorful squiggly lines.

At the end of the peulah, all of us were connected with color and a shared story. Sometimes, especially in divided times like ours, Jewish unity and peoplehood can feel so out of reach, but perhaps we just need a bit of creativity to remind us of the profound shared history that connects us all✨
food

08/11/2022

Just keep flowing with the mikvah journey! Last week, my HerStory class drove out to Kibbutz Hannaton, which has the only community mikvah in Israel. We learned with Rabbi Haviva Ner David about how mikvah is being reclaimed as a ritual for progressive Jewish communities and about the quite literal connection between ancient times and modernity. Nothing like a selfie in a 2000 year old mikvah!!! (Check out slide 3) .

31/10/2022

Prepping tours can look different- some days it means hitting the library, other days it means pre-hiking a national park to find out where the bathrooms, water fountains and shade are. But the best prep days are deciding on a whim to follow a article about the emerging food scene around the Gaza border with . In just a couple hours, we sampled an entrepreneurial kibbutznik’s food truck, tasted some incredible knaffe by a Muslim family’s cafe in Sderot and enjoyed the best artisan ice cream in the world on a sleepy kibbutz. Can’t wait to share these gems with future travelers, all while learning about the dynamics of life on the Gaza border.

26/10/2022

Social media is hard. Remembering to take pictures in the moment is difficult, and remembering to upload them is even harder. But for better or worse, insta is also the best place to share the incredible educational experiences I’ve gotten to create and be a part of lately. Last week, I took my “HerStory” class to the beautiful mikvah of Alon Shvut, where we explored how we can use the mitzvah of mikvah to connect to Jewish women throughout history. My incredible students discussed the complexities of niddah & tumah, grappled with egaltarianism & halakahah, and the realities on the ground in the West Bank. Check back in next week for our immersive (pun intended!) visit to the Hannaton Mikvah. .

22/08/2022

Check out my journey from being a fellow on to becoming a tour guide & educator, informed by the Yahel values of social change & community engagement🌞

07/07/2022

Today, we embarked on a tour day called “Diversity in the Galilee”. We started off with meeting some high school students in Kfar Manda, an Arab Israeli town near the kibbutz we are staying in, then were hosted by a Druze family for lunch in Isfiya (right outside Haifa), then went and learned about fair trade organic olive oil at , and finished off our day with visiting the city of Nazareth. It was a long but beautiful day, with the morning focusing on all the ways in which differing groups in the North work on living together peacefully & respectfully. By the time we arrived in Nazareth, we were tired, a little silly, but ready to learn and explore. I’ll confess- Nazareth is one of my favorite places in Israel. From the incredible story of the Fauzi Azur, the first of the & the process of community driven urban regeneration it sparked to the beautiful old stone homes, I simply cannot get enough of it. Just last week, I spent all day in the old city , building a tour about the social & infrastructural effects that sustainable tourism can have on urban spaces. At one of the stops of the tour, as I was explaining the complex history of Nazareth as a large Arab city, especially during the War of 1948, two passerbys stopped to listen to my guiding. They were about my age, mid-twenties, stylish, chatting in Arabic amongst themselves. As I came to the end of my guiding at the stop, out of the corner of my eye, I saw them start talking to a couple of my campers. At first, I thought nothing of it- whenever groups walk around, locals always ask where we’re from and who we are. To my surprise, it turns out that this couple actually had told my camper to “look for another guide, one that wasn’t selling Zionist propaganda, and truly, to just leave the city, because this was Palestine and we didn’t belong”.
My first read thing was fine burst into laughter- I had just spent almost 30 minutes explaining the Nakba/War of Independence and how many residents of Nazareth were descendants of expelled Arab refugees of nearby towns. The majority of Jewish Israelis that I know would have freaked out at my guiding and here was this Palestinian couple telling me I was “promoting Zionist propaganda”. My immediate though was “oh well, can’t please everyone!” But as we sat on the bus ride home, and I processed the day, I felt a twinge of sadness. What could have happened if the couple had come up to me and instead of my camper? Could we have a meaningful conversation? Could it have led to some more understanding in this little land of ours? Or am I too optimistic, and they had judged me quickly as a Jewish Israeli and the conversation was actually over before it could have even started? I wish I could say for sure, but I can only hope that someday, somehow, the stories I tell will open our eyes to each other and a little more empathy will flow into this world🙏🏽.

03/07/2022

Early tomorrow morning, my first “real” educational tour group is arriving! It’s hard to think of them that way since they aren’t just any group, but ‘s first international trip! What an honor to guide the community where I feel most at home❤️
Pictured: guiding often looks glorious in pictures, with beautiful views and smiling group photos. However, the prep to the groups isn’t always as photogenic- sometimes it’s laminating and printing tons and tons of maps at 11pm and hoping you don’t short circuit the house or electrocute the dog!

30/06/2022

IT’S OFFICIAL!
Nuance Educational Tours is launching today! This has been my dream for years and now that it’s a reality, I can’t wait to share it with the world😍
As a guide and an educator, it is my vision to bring an empathetic, community focused, and yes, NUANCED insight into complicated land of Israel/Palestine. I can’t wait for all the adventures, stories, and change we will make together🙏🏽

Address

Jerusalem

Telephone

+972539187361

Website

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Check out my journey from being a fellow on @yahelisrael to becoming a tour guide & educator, informed by the Yahel values of social change & community engagement🌞