Taglit Birthright

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Taglit-Birthright Israel provides first time, peer group, educational trips to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18 to 26. It was founded by Michael Steinhardt and Charles Bronfman in 1999.

Pre-History

Organised tours of Israel for young American Jews date back to the 1950s, shortly after the establishment of the state. In the 1950s they were organised by American Zionist groups (Young Judaea) and religiously-affiliated societies (the conservative United Synagogue Youth [USY]; the reform National Federation of Temple Youth [NFTY]) in co-operation with the Jewish Agency, which provided subsidies. Israel tended to see the tours as a means of encouraging diaspora Jews to make aliyah, but North American groups have used them primarily 'to strengthen Jewish identities in America'.

Prior to 1967 worldwide enrolment in short-term youth and young adult summer programs in Israel ranged from 1,000-2,000 a year. From the end of the Six Day War to 2000, participation oscillated between 4,000-10,000 a year, with annual fluctuation growing sharper since the 1980s and tending to move inversely with the level of violence on the ground.

From a handful, there are now over 100 organisations sponsoring trips to Israel for North American Jews. By the late 1990s USY was offering five Israel trips in additional to its classic 'Israel Pilgrimage' tour: London and Israel; Eastern Europe and Israel; Poland and Israel (emphasising Holocaust education); Italy and Israel (with a three day sea voyage to Palestine simulating 'illegal' immigration to Palestine in the 1940s) and Etgar! The Ultimate Israel Challenge. Young Judaea now offered three summer programs; B'nai Brith Youth Organisation offered 10 (including an 'Israel and Safari in Kenya') and the Orthodox Union's National Council of Synagogue Youth offered six.

Many organisations also run Holocaust-site pilgrimages, whose 'ultimate purpose', one anthropologist reports, 'is to root the sanctity of the State [of Israel] in the experience of the Shoah'.

History

Taglit was initiated by Michael Steinhardt and Charles Bronfman and Sheldon Adelson has been a major donor to the project. Connie Bruck reports:

Michael Steinhardt is a former hedge-fund manager and the co-founding chairman of Taglit-Birthright Israel, a program, established in 1999, that pays for Jewish youths to go to Israel each year. He is friendly with Adelson, who is a fellow-contributor to Birthright. “These things are not done to make money,” Steinhardt said of Adelson’s new media initiatives. "They’re done because Sheldon’s an ideologue—he really cares about things that are of the spirit and not of the pocketbook."
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Sheldon and Miriam Adelson have also donated thirty million dollars a year, for the last two years, to Taglit-Birthright Israel. Before Adelson decided to make his Birthright gift, Shimshon Shoshani, the organization’s C.E.O., recalled, “He looked at every detail of the program—flight schedules, contracts, everything.” Like many prospective donors, Adelson was asked to make his gift over a number of years, but he chose instead to go year by year. He became Birthright’s single largest donor. In 2008, he provided about a third of its eighty-six-million-dollar annual budget. Birthright executives are hoping that he will donate thirty million dollars or more for 2009—but they are still waiting to hear his decision. There are hotel reservations to be made and plane tickets to be purchased for Birthright participants. “With Sheldon’s approach—and with his being the biggest donor—you literally know you have the money just in time to start spending it,” someone closely involved with Birthright said.

Taglit was established as a response to a perceived crisis in the North American Jewish community. In the 1990s the threats that had galvanised American Jews over the preceding 20 years were no longer operative: Soviet Jewry was now free, the Holocaust memorialised, barriers to advancement in America dissolved, and political advocacy for Israel increasingly contentious within the Jewish community. American Jewish activists increasingly, therefore, mobilised against a new threat: that of growing American Jewish indifference to Judaism. As the threat of antisemitism receded the threat of assimilation loomed: North American Jews, explains one of the lead designers of the Birthright curriculum, 'have, perhaps, been too successful in adapting to their host cultures'. Evidence at beginning of the 1990s of a marked rise in intermarriage and weakened Jewish religious and ethical commitment caused 'considerable anxiety' among Jewish leaders. Taglit was one of a number of measures intended to 'change... [this] tide of assimilation' among North American Jews. For those designing Taglit, 'Israel figured... largely as an instrumentality to serve diasporic needs and only to a lesser degree as an end in itself': Israel, the safe haven for diaspora Jews supposedly at perpetual risk from gentile antisemitism, was now being used as a weapon against excessive Jewish integration.

The American-centric focus of Taglit is evident in its stated objective to strengthen the Jewish diaspora, rather than to facilitate aliyah to Israel. As a 2001 Hillel Birthright staff manual explains,

'Some models of the Israel Experience seek to bring the participant to Israel permanently. Some models of the Israel Experience seek to teach the participant about Israel. Our model of the Israel Experience seeks to create a Jewish Educational Experience by means of the use of Israel. Israel is a setting, a context, an opportunity. Israel is the means, not the end.'

Indeed, only about 6% of Taglit alumni, mostly from the former Soviet Union, go on to make aliyah.

Taglit's overall 'vision', Chazan & Saxe report, consisted of 3 long-term goals:

'1) To reach a sector of young American Jewry (popularly known as the 'unaffiliated') that had been regarded as detached or alienated from Jewish life by providing them with an Israel experience [this was a big difference from previous tours, which did not reach out to the unaffiliated but on the contrary largely appealed to those already involved in Israel and Jewish activities; in 2007 more than 60% of Birthright participants had had no contact with formal Jewish education after the age of 13].

2) To launch young unaffiliated Jews on a 'Jewish journey' that would lead them to a lifelong involvement with Jewish life

3) To create links among these young Jews, the State of Israel, and the Jewish community in the years to come'.

Activities

According to the IDC Herzliya website groups including Birthright, Hillel, AIPAC, March of the Living, AJC, UJC among others have planned visits the Asper Institute Institute for New Media Diplomacy, at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications over the course of 2008 and 2009.

Funding

The organization has an annual budget of $86 million, of which $30 million has been provided by Adelson alone in each of the past two years.

Principals

• Michael Steinhardt - co-founder
• Charles Bronfman - co-founder
• Sheldon Adelson - major donor
• Shimshon Shoshani - CEO