The future of Israel educational travel: Rebuilding and reinventing, with a goal of 50% growth – Israel News

More than 35,000 people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, traveled to Israel last year for educational trips, despite the country being engaged in a war on multiple fronts. Looking ahead to 2025, experiential Israel education groups plan to boost participation by 50%, according to a recent gathering of the Israel Educational Travel Alliance (IETA), a coalition of more than 100 organizations dedicated to bringing visitors to Israel.

The convening in Jerusalem earlier this month was the coalition’s first-ever meetup in Israel. IETA was initially founded after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out to help groups focused on educational travel to Israel respond to the global crisis. Ben Perry, one of the founders of IETA and the CEO of Momentum, a group that brings Jewish mothers to Israel, told The Media Line that in retrospect, the pandemic “was just a dress rehearsal” for the challenge of rethinking educational Israel travel following the October 7 attacks.

The challenges of post-October 7 travel to Israel range from the logistical to the ideological. Representatives from numerous organizations highlighted the difficulty of arranging flights to Israel over the past year and a half. Eric Fingerhut, head of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), described travel to and from Israel as a “major, major issue.”

“We had participants who signed up and didn’t come because their flight was canceled. We had dozens who wanted to come but couldn’t find flights to come,” Fingerhut told The Media Line.

He and JFNA’s executive vice president, Shira Hutt, both said they were pleased with the recent decision of many international airlines to restart service in Israel. Hutt told The Media Line that one of the strengths of a coalition like IETA is the ability to collectively lobby for issues like flight availability.

Masa CEO Meir Holtz at the Israel Educational Travel Alliance Leaders Summit. (credit: Yinon Fuchs/IETA)

“Together, it’s a very powerful number of organizations, and we’re hoping that that gives leverage,” she said, adding that the group would keep an eye out as to whether addition pressure would be necessary.

Besides tackling logistical issues like flights, Israel travel organizations like Birthright, Masa Israel Journey, and RootOne were eager to discuss deeper questions about the place of educational Israel travel in the current moment.

“What is really the goal of an Israel immersive experience now?” Perry asked. “Is it solidarity? Or is it what it was before? I don’t want to answer, because these are just questions we’re asking ourselves. And how do we want it to look in the future? When do we get into advocacy? When do we get into how it affects the Jewish Diaspora world?”

A big focus of experiential Israel education is building relationships between Israelis and Diaspora Jews. Perry said that it’s been difficult to figure out how to encourage each group to get to know the other better. “How do we make sure that Israelis are not just focusing on Israel? And North American Diaspora Jewry only focuses on campuses, right? How do we make sure that we continue to strengthen each other? Because we need each other,” he said.

That challenge is especially acute on Birthright trips, which bring young Jewish adults to Israel to experience the country alongside their Israeli peers. These days, many of the Israeli participants are joining the trip just days after returning from serving in the military in Gaza, Elizabeth Sokolsky, executive director of Birthright Israel North America, told The Media Line.

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“We’ve had to do a lot of staff training in order to train our staff to facilitate really challenging and difficult conversations,” Sokolsky said.

Despite the various challenges, 20,000 young people participated in Birthright trips over the past year, making up a significant portion of the 35,000 or so participants on educational trips who visited Israel in 2024.

Participants in educational programs usually make up about 5% of all international visitors to Israel each year, but last year, they made up 15%, IETA acting Executive Director Anna Langer said. Compared to previous years, educational program participants in 2024 tended to be older and to have visited Israel before.

“It makes a lot of sense if you think about it, particularly early on, that the groups who were coming were coming because they wanted to show solidarity to people that they knew and they loved, and they wanted to give direct support to communities that they had direct connection with,” Langer told The Media Line.

She said that many trips had shifted their itineraries to avoid travel to the north, which was engaged in months-long conflict with Hezbollah, and to focus on visits to the southern kibbutzim that were invaded on October 7, 2023.

IETA wants to tell ‘the new story of the south’

Now, more than a year after the invasion, many of the southern kibbutzim have stopped offering tours to visitors, forcing educational organizations to rethink their itineraries. Langer said that IETA was working on figuring out a way to tell “the new story of the south” that also promotes the local economy.

Following the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, educational groups are also working on redeveloping itineraries for northern Israel, she said. “We’re going to Haifa and exploring its potential as a city to understand the complexity of coexistence in war. And then following, we’re meeting with delegations of representative individuals from further northern areas that are not yet prepared to accept tourists, to tell us more about Acre even, as a more complicated mixed city,” she explained.

Another significant shift that many programs have experienced is a greater focus on volunteering. Birthright, which generally serves participants between the ages of 18 and 26, launched a volunteer program serving participants up to age 50. (That age was chosen so that alumni of the first Birthright trips in 1999 would be eligible to take part.) Masa Israel Journey, which had focused on programs between four and 12 months, opened shorter volunteer trips of just four or six weeks.

Overall, the professionals said that Jews in the Diaspora were still passionate about visiting Israel, even if their expectations have changed.

“People don’t want to come to a war zone. And I think that the fact that 8,000 people decided to come on a long-term trip during wartime to a country that is perceived, at the very least perceived, as a war zone, is something that’s really, really incredible,” Masa CEO Meir Holtz told The Media Line. (In a regular year, around 12,000 participants came to Israel on Masa programs, Holtz said.)

Hutt, the JFNA vice president, described a “surge” of interest in Jewish engagement following the October 7 attacks.

“October 7 woke people up. I think that there’s all sorts of people that woke up on October 7 or October 8, some who have had those relationships and have a relationship with Israel already, and some who haven’t necessarily had that relationship. And that’s where that opportunity, that need comes from, that they want to engage with the Jewish community. They want to be more familiar with Israel and Israelis, and I think it’s our responsibility to help them with that,” she said.

The desire to see Israel firsthand isn’t unique to Jews. Passages, a program that brings Christian students to Israel, has experienced a surge in interested participants as a result of the increasing attention on Israel, Josiah McGee, resident scholar at Passages, told The Media Line.

“We expect there to be increased interest in actually traveling to Israel. Not just the issues, but a desire to visit and see firsthand for themselves. We also expect that the program is going to evolve because Israel has changed,” McGee said. “So the things that you need to help students understand are also changing. Both what happened on October 7, but more than that, how Israel has changed in response to the events of October 7.”

He said that the most meaningful moments of the trip usually include seeing biblical sites like the Sea of Galilee, volunteering, and celebrating Shabbat with a Jewish family. “After a Shabbat dinner, many Christian students can have a better appreciation and understanding of why Jewish-Christian relations are important,” he explained.

Across the board, the representatives hailed the importance of getting to see Israel up close, especially during challenging times. “Experiential education, the actual doing, is often much more impactful, much more dynamic than classroom education,” Fingerhut, the JFNA head, said. “We’ve known now for a couple of decades that Israel travel is the most impactful way to help build Jewish identity and connect people to Israel.”

Fingerhut attributed much of the resilience of the North American Jewish community in the months since October 7, 2023, to the Israel experiences common to many community members. “The fact that for decades now we’ve been bringing hundreds of thousands, millions of people to Israel is, I really believe, the reason why today we’ve been able to sustain the support for Israel over this last year and a half,” he said.

IETA can help lift all boats involved in experiential Israel education, he added, calling attention to the diversity of the growing industry. “We don’t think alike. We don’t play alike. We don’t dress alike. We don’t eat alike. We’re all over the place geographically,” Fingerhut said.

For Hutt, his vice president, the benefits of expanding Israel education will be felt back at home across North America’s diverse Jewish communities. “Israel immersive travel has never only been about the connection to Israel,” she said. “It’s also been about participants’ connection to the Jewish people. And that’s, of course, related to wherever they live.”