DEL.ICIO.USTours give young Jews taste of ‘home’: Israel
Cox News Service
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Jerusalem — It was the first trip to Israel for Lauren Bland, 26, who lives in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood, and she was brimming with Jewish pride.
“It’s always a place you picture, but now you’re here. Being immersed in this place is really powerful,” she said, sitting at a sidewalk cafe earlier this month on the bustling Ben Yehuda Street in the heart of Jerusalem.
ROBERT W. GEE/COX NEWS SERVICE
Harold Herschberg of Kennesaw and Lauren Bland of Atlanta took part in a Birthright Israel tour.
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She was in the midst of a 10-day tour of Israel sponsored by Birthright Israel, which takes its name from the Zionist notion that all Jews, no matter their nationality, have the right to call Israel home.
The program, which is offered free to Jews between ages 18 and 26 who have never visited Israel in an organized group, is becoming a rite of passage for young American Jews.
The highly structured tour seeks to forge ties between diaspora Jews and Israel, and to strengthen Jewish identity in countries, such as the United States, where intermarriage among faiths is common.
But critics say the tour presents a one-sided portrait of Israel and misses an opportunity to educate a new generation on the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This year, 42,000 people are expected to visit Israel on a Birthright tour. Last year, 39,000 visited. Since the program was launched eight years ago, 190,000 young Jews from 53 countries, roughly 70 percent from the United States, have visited Israel on a Birthright tour.
American billionaire philanthropist Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, donated $30 million to Birthright last year and another $35 million this year. This, combined with a current lull in Israeli-Palestinian violence, has significantly boosted the number of participants.
“It has a strategic importance for the state of Israel because in a way it’s a completion of the Zionist dream,” said Gidi Mark, director of marketing for Birthright Israel. He will take over as chief executive next month. “It’s important especially today when we don’t have as many new immigrants as we had in the past.”
The tours showcase Israel as Jewish, modern and thriving. “We didn’t want them coming away with the idea of camels, Orthodox Jews or an island under siege,” Mark said.
For many young Jews who grow up as a minority in predominantly Christian countries, the experience of setting foot in a place where Jews constitute the majority can be overwhelming.
“I just feel comfortable,” said Harold Herschberg, 25, a senior at Kennesaw State University majoring in conflict resolution. “They say you’ll never forget this trip, and I can testify to that.”
Birthright tours are required to visit the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, as well as at least one site each related to Jewish history, Zionist history and Holocaust commemoration. Some tours include rafting on the Jordan River, an overnight stay in a kibbutz or camping in the Negev Desert.
Tours may visit Israeli Arab communities, but the program does not require such visits, and for “security reasons” no tour travels to Palestinian areas, according to Birthright officials. Participants also do not visit Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are at the center of Israel’s long-standing dispute with the Palestinians.
“The conflict bubbles up,” said Barry Chazan, a professor emeritus of education at Hebrew University and education director for Birthright Israel. “But it’s not a seminar in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict … “
Participants sometimes see the controversial separation barrier from the tour bus, and they are accompanied for half the tour by a handful of young soldiers who often speak frankly about their experiences, Birthright organizers said.
A much smaller, rival program, called Birthright Unplugged, provides another view of Israel. Founded in 2005 as an anti-Zionist alternative to Birthright, it offers a tour of the West Bank that includes a home-stay with a Palestinian refugee family to “develop an understanding of daily life under occupation,” according to the group’s Web site.
The program has never encountered security problems, tour organizers said, except once when Jewish settlers in Hebron threw rocks at a group, said co-founder Hannah Marmelstein. No one was injured.
The organization runs on a budget cobbled together from small donations, and the tour is not free. More than half of the 200 participants over the past three years have also completed a Birthright Israel tour, said Marmelstein, who is from Philadelphia but lives half the year in the Palestinian city of Ramallah.
“The voices that are mostly silenced on this issue are Palestinian, especially in the United States. So we want people to have direct conversations with the Palestinian people,” Marmelstein said. “Israel at its core is based on the erasure of Palestinian history, so there’s no understanding Israel without hearing from Palestinians about how Israel has affected their lives, their families.”
Chazan said such criticism of Birthright was “misplaced.”
“It’s concerned with Jewish identity and the future of the Jewish people and in that respect it’s in an ideological frame,” he said.
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