“Passion” is a word that comes up a lot when people reminisce about Kyle Harty Strang.
At 16, Kyle was an athletic kid with arresting green eyes, an easy smile and a natural way of bringing people together. He was well known at Berkeley High for his loyalty to his friends and his Jewish pride. And he was passionate: about baseball, about his family and — increasingly, in the year before his death — about Israel.
“He was absolutely committed to going to Israel after graduation,” said his father, Craig Strang, explaining that Kyle felt that, as a Jew, it was his duty to serve in the Israeli army. “He told me it was his home as much as it was for any Jew.”
Kyle Harty Strang
Kyle, however, never made it to “his home.” He was killed in a car crash on March 31, 2010, losing control of his vehicle on an expressway, crossing the center divide and slamming into a bus. There were no passengers on board and the driver wasn’t hurt, but Kyle and his passenger, Prentice Gray Jr., one of his best friends, were killed instantly.
Now, one year after his death, 20 of the people closest to him are about to go to Israel in his honor — under the auspices of a new project named the Kyle Harty Strang Leadership Program.
The program is an educational and skill-building project for teens, with the goal of bridging gaps in knowledge about the conflict in the Middle East and humanizing the problems of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It came together through a collaboration between Communication, Arts and Sciences — a small school-within-a-school that Kyle attended at Berkeley High — and Seeking Common Ground, a Denver-based peace-building nonprofit that brings together U.S., Israeli and Palestinian teens.
After months of leadership development activities and fundraising — to the tune of $90,000 over six months — the teens will depart on a 10-day trip to Israel and the West Bank, accompanied by Craig Strang and CAS teacher Hasmig Minassian.
The group is slated to meet with people on different sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The departure date, by coincidence, organizers said, is March 31 — exactly one year after Kyle’s accident.
Craig, Associate Director at Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, said that while his family is still reeling from its loss, forming the program has been a tangible way to honor Kyle’s memory.
“We knew we didn’t want a lot of expensive flowers, to have people spend money that way,” Craig said of the first few days after his son’s death. “So we decided to set up a memorial fund at Berkeley High to benefit CAS, to support Kyle’s teacher’s and friends in some way.”
Craig says the CAS community had become a second family to his son, who had good relationships with many of his teachers and moved in and around different social circles with ease. Fittingly, it was one of his close CAS friends who came up with the idea of the Israel trip as a component of the program.
“We were sitting around brainstorming about what to do with the memorial money, and people were talking about things around Berkeley High — posters of influential people in the classrooms, or creating some kind of media space named after Kyle, and then we started talking about trips,” recalled Leib Sutcher, a CAS senior going on the trip and one of Kyle’s best friends. “I said, ‘I think it’s pretty obvious, we have to go to Israel.’ That’s what Kyle would have wanted to do.”
Kyle’s passion for Israel and Judaism was unquestioned and organic. Though his family isn’t particularly religious and his parents have never been to Israel, he seemed to latch onto Judaism when his parents got divorced.
“I think he gained a great deal of comfort from his Jewish identity during really difficult times of his life,” Craig explained. “It was part of his identity that could not be taken away from him. When he was bar mitzvahed, he took that on in a really eager way that was sort of hard even for me to understand.”
Some of his connections were untraditional, such as when he opted to get a Star of David tattoo (with the Sh’ma written inside it) on his chest. And while other kids directed their energy toward college applications, Kyle focused on making his move to Israel as soon as possible after graduation.
“It was something we had many long conversations about, and that he often talked about with his friends,” Craig said. “No one could talk him out of it.”
On their trip to Israel, students will complete video and photo projects, and when they return, they will give presentations to other classes on what they learned about the conflict. And while the trip may be a one-time thing — it’s not technically sponsored by Berkeley High — the leadership program bearing Kyle’s name is on track to become a fixture in the CAS community.
For Kyle’s father, there’s a mix of emotions as the departure date approaches. “With this anniversary coming up, everybody’s sort of looking forward to it and dreading it,” Craig said. “I still can’t believe it’s been a year.”
Sutcher said that, all in all, the trip feels like the perfect way to honor his friend’s life and passions — even though Kyle’s politics were decidedly more pro-Israel than the curriculum of this program.
“Kyle stood up for what he believed in, and he loved to argue his point, no matter if he felt outnumbered,” Sutcher said. “And he strongly believed that Israel belonged to the Jews. He held firmly to that stance. And I guess some people might say Kyle wouldn’t necessarily agree with this attitude that’s so in the middle … But I also think that in his life, Kyle was a bridge-builder. He had a really diverse group of friends, he brought people together left and right.”
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