With how much time Joshua Appelbaum dedicates to studying Tanakh every week — 25 hours — it could very well be his part-time job.
So it may come as no surprise that the Berman Hebrew Academy sophomore placed third in the Jewish Agency for Israel’s International Bible Contest for Youth, competing against 15 other students from seven countries on April 20.
“I was, in the moment, perhaps a little bit disappointed, but now … I’m very pleased with how I did,” Appelbaum said.
“We are so proud,” said Malkie Hametz, the dean of Berman’s Upper School, who oversees Chidon at Berman. “He really deserves this. He’s been working incredibly hard.”
Two other American students were among the four finalists in the 63rd Chidon HaTanach competition — the champion was an Israeli 11th grader. This year marked a momentous American showing, and was one of their strongest performances in the international competition since 1973, according to The Jewish Link.
The three American teens were selected to compete after receiving high scores in the United States Chidon HaTanach held by JAFI last spring. At the tail end of his freshman year of high school, Appelbaum won second place in the national Hebrew Bible study competition.
He’s spent the past 11 months keeping on top of more than half of the Tanakh.
“He was always in the hallway with a Tanakh reviewing and studying and making sure that he had his Tanakh skills and facts as accurate and sharp as they could be,” Hametz said.
Appelbaum completed a preliminary exam via Zoom on April 12, eight days before the competition in Jerusalem. That exam narrowed down 50 contestants to just 16.
The actual event, usually held on Yom Ha’atzmaut, was prerecorded on April 20 and held in a smaller hall for security reasons. Appelbaum ended up tying for second place with Akiva Shrier, a sophomore at YULA High School in Los Angeles, ultimately conceding since Shrier scored two points higher on the preliminary exam.
Hametz watched the competition when it aired on April 22. “It was really incredible how Joshua knows his Tanakh facts like that,” she said. “At the blink of an eye, he is able to recall small details from Tanakh about specific prophecies and about really tiny details that so many other people are not aware of … or have never really taken the time to study.”
The questions — all in Hebrew — were more advanced than at nationals: “They were definitely more precise,” Appelbaum said. “There are still questions of which prophet said what, but they’re much harder since there are many more prophets.”
Given a verse from the Tanakh last year, Appelbaum had to declare whether Nathan or Yirmeyahu said it. On the international stage, contestants were asked to distinguish between 15 different prophets.
They also had to know locations of where specific battles or events took place, where biblical figures were born and how they’re related to one another.
“There was one question I got wrong — they gave me a bunch of names of cities and asked me which one didn’t appear exactly the way they show it to you,” Appelbaum said. “So it can be very precise and they were definitely hard questions.”
Unlike nationals, none of the questions in any of the league rounds were multiple choice, “so you have to know the answer. There’s not much of a hope of guessing and getting it right,” Appelbaum said.
Time was also of the essence. During the second round, contestants had 78 seconds to answer each question, a nod to the State of Israel’s 78th anniversary.
Appelbaum, who studied an average of three hours every weekday and five on weekends, said he feels that he prepared well.
“Most weekends, I would do pretty much nothing but studying Chidon and homework,” he said. “But it paid off in the end.”
Performing well in Chidon was a sacrifice Appelbaum was willing to make.
“I didn’t take any [other] extracurriculars,” Appelbaum said. “I sometimes had to say no to Shabbos lunches because I needed the time to study.”
Even though Appelbaum knew last year that he was headed to Jerusalem for the international competition, he sometimes took the Chidon exams given to students as part of the qualification process for nationals, earning perfect scores, according to Hametz.
Reading and studying Tanakh is something Appelbaum enjoys: “It’s a fun thing; I really want to be doing it.”
“The times that I didn’t want to study, I reminded myself that I am going to be televised on national Israeli TV and nearly a million people will be watching, and I don’t want to terribly embarrass myself,” Appelbaum said.
But that was far from the case.
Liron Ben-Moshe, a Chidon judge and former winner who wrote the questions, said he was impressed by the American contestants’ mastery of the Hebrew language — they answered the questions without the need for a translator, The Jewish Link reported. He described Appelbaum’s Hebrew as “unbelievable.”
The experience was more than an academic one for Appelbaum, who met fellow teens from Israel and Panama — many others competed virtually and didn’t travel to Jerusalem.
“That was nice to be able to really get to know other kids who were into the same stuff,” Appelbaum said, adding he’s practically the “only [student]” at Berman who is interested in studying Tanakh at this level.
“Not many people are willing to do that,” he said of studying the text 25 hours per week. “So it’s nice to be with other people who [are] … I’ve read it so much that I think I will, for many years in the future, still hold onto it and still feel value out of it.”
