A trip to Israel will become as universal a rite of passage for American Jewish youth as a bar or bat mitzvah, if a new multimillion dollar effort succeeds.
The five-year project will set aside funds to help local federations promote summer trips to Israel and to provide scholarships for teens interested in taking the trips.
Those involved hope to raise the number of young Jews traveling to Israel from the current 8,000 a year to at least 50,000 annually by the year 2000. There are an estimated 350,000 Jewish teenagers in the United States and Canada.
Leading the newly announced effort is the CRB Foundation, which for five years has been researching the impact of Israel trips on Jewish identity. Partners with the foundation are the United Jewish Appeal, the Council of Jewish Federations, the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America and the Jewish Education Service of North America.
“The Israel Experience holds great promise for heightening awareness, strengthening identity and making a significant contribution to contemporary Jewish life, education and Jewish continuity,” Charles Bronfman, president of the CRB Foundation, said as he announced the new program last week to 3,000 delegates attending the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations.
“Here you have a powerful and viable educational vehicle, proven by all of the studies to have an enormous impact on personal identity and key decisions made later in life, and it is taken advantage of by an insignificant number of our young,” said Peter Geffen, program officer for Israel trips at the Montreal- based foundation.
The initial program will provide grants to up to 12 communities that agree to match the money and make Israel trips a community priority.
UJA will provide $750,000 worth of grants over three years, which will form the bulk of the funding. Rabbi Brian Lurie, UJA executive vice president, has for some time called for all Jewish youth to visit Israel.
The CRB Foundation has spent $1.5 million annually the past few years researching the issue and setting up the framework for this new effort.
The participation of the UJA and CJF in the project will send the message that the Israel Experience, as the teen programs are called, is a communal priority and — though this is being left unstated — that the money for these programs will not have to come at the expense of local agencies.
For the project to work, Geffen said he expected that each dollar offered by the consortium of the foundation and agencies will have to be matched by three dollars from the local community.
Half the money will be set aside for local scholarships and the other half for new staff positions and advertising to promote the programs.
“One thing is sure,” he said. “If we don’t put money into infrastructure, and some form of scholarship and savings incentive program, we can’t easily move from the place where we are at this moment.
“We are looking to effect systemic change in these individual communities, and eventually across the continent,” said Geffen.
He added that broad participation in the Israel Experience requires community leadership to consider it important and stress its centrality.
Additionally, families must begin considering sending their children on such a trip long before they are teens.
“We must create methods of funding trips because no foundation can subsidize the hundreds of thousands of kids we’re talking about sending to Israel,” said Geffen. “So every community has to devote a percentage of their resources to funding.”
However, subsidies by themselves are not the only answer, said Geffen.
He said that “while there is a clear percentage of young people for whom money would make all the difference in the world, on the other hand you could probably get 50,000 to Israel without money being an impediment.
“We remain an affluent community where many young people have cars, computers, summer camps, travel to Europe, and go to extremely expensive universities, all of which get paid for.”
Geffen said that precisely how to convince American Jewry to send more than 5 percent of their children to Israel remains to be worked out.
“We’re intentionally calling this a pilot process. Not having had the opportunity to test these questions in the field, no one can tell you if you do this or that, it will make a difference. “Experiments have to be made,” he said. Communities of different sizes in different geographical areas will lend themselves to different techniques of marketing.
“We’re looking to learn over three years in each of the 12 communities things that can then be replicated across the continent.”
Geffen said he believes the real secret will turn out to be simply making the Israel trip “a basic tenet of being a young Jewish person in this country. There was a time when there was no such thing as a bat mitzvah in this country, and now it’s universal.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
