Section archive - Israel Education

On the surface, the tour looked much like a standard Birthright Israel trip: Participants celebrated Shabbat in Jerusalem’s Old City, swam in the Dead Sea and ascended the ancient mountain fortress at Masada. The trip was mostly free and organizers were prepared with follow-up programming after the participants returned home. But the nearly 200 women who arrived in Jerusalem last week weren’t there for one of the free 10-day Jewish identity-building trips that Birthright has operated for more than a decade. They were participants in what has been described as Birthright for Jewish moms, an eight-day tour of the Jewish state for mothers.

Taglit-Birthright Israel has brought hundreds of thousands of diaspora Jewish young adults on tours of Israel. Drawing on data from a large-scale program evaluation, we ask how the program affects participants’ feelings of homeland attachment and political views on contentious homeland issues. North Americans who traveled to Israel with Taglit between 2010 and 2012 were surveyed together with a comparison group of applicants to the program who did not participate.

In anticipation of a 2014-15 school year fraught with anxiety over how to teach kids about the Israel-Hamas war — and about Israel in general, in the wake of the war — Jewish LearningWorks (JLW), an S.F.-based nonprofit formerly called the Bureau of Jewish Education jumped into action late in the summer and organized several educators-only workshops. The gatherings helped teachers and administrators at Jewish day schools figure out how to best approach the subject of Israel. And in conjunction with that, JLW also launched a Web page titled “Israel-Gaza Conflict Resources,” a compendium of helpful materials for teachers.

Inspired by Taglit-Birthright’s free trips to Israel for college students, a brand new program will bring Jewish newlyweds from North America on heavily subsidized honeymoons to the Holy Land. The program, Honeymoon Israel, has just obtained initial funding to finance two pilot trips this spring, each of which will bring 20 couples on nine-day tours of the country. The first trip will target couples from Los Angeles and Phoenix, and the second one, couples from Los Angeles and Atlanta.