Rethinking Israel Programs: Effort to Send More Teens-agers Flourishing in Many Communities

A continental effort to make a trip to Israel as common for Jewish kids as is a bar or bat mitzvah is getting an enthusiastic start, just four months after it was announced.

Jewish community federations in a dozen cities across North America have joined the effort, and more are expected soon.

The federations of Washington, Palm Beach, Fla., Atlanta, and the Manhattan and Westchester regions of the UJA-Federation of New York will be among the first to work with the new consortium promoting the “Israel experience.”

The consortium is spearheaded by the Montreal-based CRB Foundation, in conjunction with the United Jewish Appeal, the Council of Jewish Federations, the Jewish Community Centers Association and Jewish Educational Services of North America.

The communities in the program will have to put up three dollars for every dollar given by the consortium, a sum that will be split between providing scholarships for the trips and financing new ways of attracting people to the trips. At the minimum, this effort is likely to involve each community assigning a staff member to this area.

As importantly, the communities are being asked to make trips to Israel a local priority.

“We’re trying to say that being a Jewish teen-ager means that one year you’ll go to Israel, just like a Mormon does community service,” said Robert Hyfler, director for budget and planning at the UJA Federation of Greater Washington.

Evidence that this is possible comes from the reaction the CRB Foundation has received to its program — a reaction that forced it to speed up and expand what was originally planned as just a pilot program for four or five communities.

“The intensity of interest was really unbelievable,” said Peter Geffen, director of Israel programs for the foundation.

The interest was not just from educators or federation professionals. Major donors have pledged up to $1 million in several cities, practically forcing the sponsoring consortium to include those communities.

SEVENTH GRADERS TO BE TARGETED

According to Geffen, the participating communities are seeking to raise money for their endowment funds to pay for the program, rather than making allocations from their present campaign budget.

Hyfler said support for this program is not surprising. He noted that one study had found that the two concerns of major givers to federations are Jewish continuity and support for a strong Israel.

Their gifts to UJA supported Israel, “but they weren’t sure what they could do to turn around Jewish continuity,” said Hyfler.

“We think that in what we’re doing, built around sending kinds to Israel, we have an answer,” he said.

Because Hyfler’s federation began considering promoting Israel trips during its own study of how to promote Jewish continuity, its plans are further along than most.

The Washington proposal, laid out by federation President Philip Margolius at a recent CJF meeting in Phoenix, is nothing if not ambitious.

This plan would lay the groundwork for a high school trip to Israel years before, in Hebrew school.

Seventh graders, about to become bar or bat mitzvah, would be targeted for intense marketing, including ads in school newspapers and camp yearbooks. Their parents would be urged to encourage that bar and bat mitzvah gifts be applied to a special savings program for the trip.

For high school students, the community would encourage enrollment in the existing youth groups, but it would bring all of them together in “community-wide mega-events” to “reinforce the youths’ connection to a larger mass phenomenon” as well as to lead toward the Israel trip.

Financially, the major challenge will be raising money for a $1,000 subsidy for each participant. Costs for Israel summer programs are now hitting the $4,000 level.

The subsidy for Washington students alone would cost $500,000 annually, if the community succeeds in meeting its goal for the year 2000: getting half of all Jewish teens who receive a bar or bat mitzvah to then take the trip.

In New York, Palm Beach and Atlanta, discussion is just getting under way on how to proceed, with the hope that the beginnings of a plan would be in place in a matter of weeks.

Other cities whose participation has been announced include Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Jersey’s Metro West federation, San Francisco, Toronto and Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Geffen will only begin meeting with this next group of communities this summer, after plans for the initial group are well under way.

“Everybody is clear this is an action project,” said Geffen. “We know what we want to do. How to do it is precisely the point of the project. We are absolutely convinced we will learn as much from our failures as from our successes.”