These days, perhaps more than any other time in the history of the Jewish state, Janal is a rarity. The Hebrew University bombing last month seemed to confirm every parent’s nightmare about sending a child to the Holy Land: five of the seven people killed were American. But that bombing, for all its horror, likely won’t have much of an impact on the number of American teenagers traveling to the region. That’s because many organized trips to Israel were already down 80 to 90 percent from 2000, before the current wave of Palestinian violence started; a subsidiary of the Jewish Agency for Israel that helps other organizations plan and run tours says the number of North American teenagers it’s bringing over has declined from 6,460 in 2000 to just 200 this year.
After decades in which a formative trip to Israel was seen as a way to cement Americans’ connection to their religion, this precipitous drop has Jewish leaders panicked. “Our biggest fear is that we’re going to have an entire generation of kids that may not have any real connection to Israel,” says Jules Gutin, the head of youth activities for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
Jewish activists warn that the dwindling number of Jewish teens visiting Israel is already having an effect. Jewish summer camps are discovering that fewer of their counselors have spent time in Israel. Rabbi Shaul Feldman looks down the road and sees more trouble: “It could be within 20 or 30 years that the heads of the federations here in North America are going to be leaders that never went to Israel.”
Indeed, Janal’s reaction to life in the most contested piece of holy land in the history of humanity shows why the “Israel experience” has become such a central part of American Jews’ identity. Since returning to the States, Janal has become active in Hagshama, the youth division of the World Zionist Organization; she even went back to the country in June.
The Jewish community’s response to the travel issue has hardly been uniform. Last year, amid much criticism, the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations canceled its teen-oriented summer trips to Israel after a disco bombing. This year the UAHC’s North American Federation of Temple Youth did run a trip, but only 10 high-school students went, compared with 1,400 in 2000. Meanwhile, many Orthodox groups are pushing trips to Israel more fiercely than ever. “They say three years is a generation in a youth movement,” says Steve Frankel, a director of Bnei Akiva, a group geared to Orthodox teenagers.
While leaders from across the spectrum agree that the drop-off in travel to Israel is a problem, there’s not much consensus about solutions. Many Jewish leaders think the community needs to find a way to bring, in the words of one New York rabbi, “the Jewish ex-perience to America.” Others, like Michael Steinhardt, the former hedge-fund manager who helps finance the Birthright program, believes American Jews need to be in Israel now more than ever: “This is a moment when American Jews can act in such a way that they are really standing up for their Jewishness just by going to Israel.” Whether they do so could determine what tomorrow’s American Jewish community looks like.
