Five high school grads from Teaneck, one from Bergenfield, and one from Passaic are among students finishing an academic year in the new four-story facility of the Tiferet Center for Advanced Torah Studies for Women in suburban Jerusalem.

According to co-founder Rabbi Azriel Rosner, Tiferet was founded in 2005 with the unique goal of providing a complete community for gap-year students, where teachers all live in the neighborhood and maintain an open-home policy for the 60 young women from London, Toronto, Florida, Texas, Memphis, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, and the New York metropolitan area.

Given that nearly 70 different seminary programs are available for overseas women before college — 51 of them in Jerusalem — each one must find a niche that attracts a particular type of student. Tiferet is in Ramat Beit Shemesh, about 45 minutes from the capital city.

“Because we are a little out of the Jerusalem social scene, our emphasis is on girls who are coming to Israel to learn and grow and not necessarily be part of that scene,” said Rosner. “Everyone involved here lives within walking distance, and for students thousands of miles from home this adds an aspect of integration. Judaism is more than academic; it is also experiential, and our setup offers an experience of being part of an Israeli community.”

New Jersey students at Tiferet include, from left, Jessica Listhaus (Livingston), Alana Blumenthal (Teaneck), Lindsay Stadtmauer (West Orange), Ariel Mischel (Teaneck), Rachel Moradi (West Orange), Alyssa Zaretsky (Teaneck) and Michelle Fleksher (Passaic). Not shown are Leora Koenig (Bergenfield), Sara Weiss Kallus (Teaneck), Doren Glaser (Teaneck), and Tehilla Goder (Hillside).

Michelle Fleksher of Passaic, a 2009 graduate of Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for Girls in Teaneck, said Tiferet interested her primarily for its self-contained atmosphere.

“I was looking for something smaller and warm, and here we’re in a community and can go to visit our teachers whenever we want,” she said. “Coming from a place of not liking to be away from home, that was the number 1 reason for me to choose Tiferet.”

Alyssa Zaretsky of Teaneck explained that each student is assigned an “adoptive” family, providing an insider view of Israeli life. The families “live in a very modest way but have everything they need, and they and their children are happy,” she said.

Fleksher noted that unlike many other seminaries, Tiferet offers college credit based on attendance, not exams or papers. “When it comes to testing I can get very stressed, and I didn’t want that,” she said. “You are here because you want to be. It’s very calming.” She hopes to study nursing in the United States after completing a second year at Tiferet.

The new structure, faced in Jerusalem stone, houses classrooms, a dining room, a study hall, and student dormitories. Its construction was financed by private donations and what is referred to as a “substantial” no-interest loan from the Caroline & Joseph S. Gruss Life Monument Fund. To keep up with enrollment demand, added Rosner, a second building is planned.

Students can choose from among classes in Bible; Jewish history, law, and philosophy; and Talmud, prayer, Zionism, and Israel advocacy. Like most other seminaries, Tiferet offers hikes and trips to national parks, landmarks, and archaeological sites. Also like other programs, it holds classes from morning till night and leaves one day a week free for community volunteering.

Bergenfield resident Leora Koenig, a Frisch School graduate, said her service involved playing with children in a local family so that the mother could devote extra time to their autistic sibling.

Alana Blumenthal of Teaneck came to visit the school when she was a senior at Bruriah High School in Elizabeth. “I saw that no one was bored,” she related. “I sat in on a class and was inspired right away. This was the way I wanted to learn and spend the year. And once you get accepted, you’re immediately part of this huge family that is Tiferet.”

Archeologists recently discovered an ancient olive press down the street from Howard and Terry Mischel’s house. Not the house on Maitland Avenue in Teaneck they left last August, but the one on Esther HaMalca Street in Modi’in, an Israeli city that was once home to the Maccabees of Chanukah fame.

“Having history on your doorstep is life in eretz Yisrael,” reflects Howard Mischel. At the same time, notes this former Standard & Poor’s executive, new “sprouts” are shooting up in his neighborhood’s time-worn soil. “On our block, we’re surrounded by younger families where at least one member of the couple is a Frisch graduate,” he says.

Terry and Howard Mischel with youngest daughter Ariel, who will do National Service in September.

If he is successful in his brand-new career as a pre-aliyah counselor for Nefesh B’Nefesh, many other North Jersey Jewish families will follow the Mischels to new lives in Israel. After 30 years of thinking about the big move, the couple came last August with their youngest daughter, just graduated from Bat Torah in Teaneck. They maintain that the answer to the question “When is a good time to make aliyah?” is different for everyone.

“It’s always a good time to come to eretz Yisrael and fulfill the mitzvah of living here,” Mischel says. “But everybody has their own reality. At Nefesh B’Nefesh, we try to counsel people that no matter what their situation, they have to think through what they face there and what they are likely to face here, to make it possible for them to have a successful aliyah. It’s best to have a well-developed plan.”

A 20-minute car ride gets them to the Ramat Beit Shemesh home of their son Judah, his wife, Ora, and their four daughters. Son Elie and his wife Rebecca live in Staten Island with their two girls; daughter Sarah and her husband, Ari Goldberg, have one daughter and live in Fair Lawn; daughter Ariel, 18, spent a year at the Tiferet seminary and will start a year of National Service after working as a counselor in Camp HASC for special-needs children in New York, where Judah is the camp rabbi and Ora is a teacher.

“Our granddaughters here had been missing us,” says Terry Mischel. “Instead of seeing them for a week or 10 days every few months, now we are a real Saba and Savta [Grandpa and Grandma] to them. We can have them for sleepovers, we can go help out in the afternoons — normal family things. Of course, wherever we are, we are missing someone. Our kids [in the States] have intentions of aliyah, and this is our hope. But we’re not arrogant enough to think all will be perfect.”

Keeping in mind his son Judah’s reminder that “you come to Israel to make a life, not a living,” Howard Mischel realized he was taking a gamble leaving Wall Street at the crest of a 32-year career as an analyst and banker. But at 57, he was no longer happy just earning a living. He was eager to trade the pressures and competition of Wall Street for a more meaningful existence.

“It is certainly possible to have a successful career and still feel empty,” he wrote in an op-ed column for Israel National News last month. “Work needs to lead you to a higher purpose — we need to find a way to elevate the entire work experience.”

The position at NBN, an organization that facilitates immigration to Israel, came through at the end of May. Following nine months of a sometimes frustrating search for a viable career in Israel, the job has given Mischel renewed enthusiasm.

“I’m working on a team, the front line in dealing with potential olim [immigrants] from the U.S. and Canada,” he says. “I’m working in a Jewish environment, which is very different from Wall Street, and it is very pleasant to be working with people who have a unity of purpose: to facilitate aliyah of Jews to Israel. There is a tremendous amount of motivation.”

After earning a master’s degree from Harvard in city planning in 1976, Mischel came to Israel with his wife to volunteer for a year. As an assistant planner at the Environmental Protection Service of the Interior Ministry, Mischel played a role in the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall project in Jerusalem and helped prepare environmental impact statements for road development.

Even after the couple moved to Monsey and then Newton, Mass., before coming to Teaneck in 1999, they continued visiting Israel two or three times a year. Howard Mischel volunteered during the 2006 Lebanon war — the same year they bought a house on paper in Modi’in, a central city of about 80,000 planned by Israel’s premier architect, Moshe Safdie. They live in Buchman, a neighborhood that attracts many English-speaking immigrants.

Terry Mischel taught English and history at schools including the Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey in River Edge and Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School in Teaneck. She was in charge of admissions and communications at The Moriah School of Englewood before the move. She spent the past year taking ulpan (intensive Hebrew class) with her husband, and discovering new places.

Looking back on the past year, the Mischels agree that the good outweighs any negatives. “First and foremost, we’re living an entirely Jewish life in a place that wants you to be here,” says Howard Mischel. “It’s a reorientation of the way you live day to day. We take great satisfaction in participating in all the things that happen here that are specifically Israeli and Jewish.”