Taglit-Birthright Israel program has been a success since its inception in the year 1999. The program is a half-billion-dollar joint plan of individual contributors, the State of Israel and the Diaspora Jewish organizations. The program gives a free ten-day pilgrimage tour of Israel to Jew youths in Diaspora. These youths are mainly from North America with a small number from other continents. Taglit-Birthright Israel supports, finances, and licenses the operation of tours through different groups. The program runs tours twice a year in winter and summer sessions.
The progress of the program tracks issues concerning characteristics of the Diaspora participants, formation of alumni community, religious behaviour, return visits, local community involvement, insights after the trips, and attitudes of the Diaspora youth towards their Judaism orientations and Israel. Taglit-Birthright Israel program has fundamental features the organizers use to improve on future trips. Organizers conduct surveys with control groups who have not joined the tour. The post-trip follow-up surveys help the organizers to determine the long-term effects on attitudes of the Diaspora youths towards Israel and Judaism.
Israel travel education
Israel travel is an emerging field for Jewish education tours. This is an attempt to exposure Jewish students in other countries to vital experiences of their educations in relation to their traditions and community. Taglit-Birthright plays a fundamental role in organizing educational travels to Diaspora youths. In this sense, the tours aim to promote inter-relationships among youths, community and Israel. The educations system, through tours attempts to offer individuals means to increase contact with the cultural and community practices.
Tours to Israel exposes students to real Jewish experiences. Taglit-Birthright Israel tours focus on the experiences of the Diaspora youth visits and their Israeli peers. Studies are primarily now focusing on this encounter (mifgash) so as to enrich future experiences. Scholars such as Saxe, Chazan, Sasson and Hecht are carrying out studies on pre and post tours to establish the experience of Diaspora youths during and after their tours to Israel. They mainly draw their subjects from North America (Saxe 20).
The encounters of participants challenge the cultural identity of Diaspora youths and enhance their sense of belonging to the wide Jewish world community. The groups share common backgrounds and practices, which serve as sense of identity among them. The groups review issues concerning religion, people, culture and nationality. The common framework helps the participants to understand themselves and their hosts. Therefore, they build a sense of identity and belonging.
The impact of Taglit-Birthright on Israel-Diaspora relations
Taglit-Birthright transforms the identity of Jewish. However, these impacts are not automatic. Studies show that visits to Israel strength Jewish identity and the participants feel that their Jewish identity must include a high level of commitment to the State of Israel. Participants have developed the habit of returning to the same camp every year throughout their life time to strengthen their Jewish identity and impact of the program. Taglit-Birthright Israel emphasizes the necessity of visiting Israel even if only for a short time (Rosenak 54).
Participants admitted that the tours have sharpened their Jewish identity and have created the strongest experience in their lives in relations to their identities. Organizers observe the behaviour and declared attitudes among the participants so as to measure the impacts of the visits on participants’ Jewish identity. The surveys strive to establish the communication links, participations, interests in Israeli and local community events. They also seek to establish plans to return to Israel, and whether participants are planning to become Israeli citizens.
There is a sense of importance among the Diaspora youths who participate in the local Jewish community program. The program aims to transform, and strengthen the lives of Jewish in the Diaspora. Another vital impact of Taglit-Birthright relates to its effects on the attitudes of the Diaspora youths towards Israel. The critical aim of this Taglit-Birthright program is to embed a sense of connection and commitment to Israel among Diaspora youths. However, the challenge of impacts on the attitude of participants towards Israel is ambiguous in relation to Jewish identity. Participants derive a sense of pride in visiting Israel.
Possible future visits to Israel are declining among the participants. We can attribute this to negative encounters they had with Israelis. Several participants were not ready to admit that they like Israel. The organizers need to prepare for the cross-cultural exchanges and mediated encounters in order to avoid the trips negative impacts in future visits.
Several participants identified with the term “aliya” (immigration to Israel). The program strives to instil the notion of aliya among young visitors to Israel. In this regard, Diaspora youths who had visited Israel had less negative perception of the country in reference to internal wars, fundamentalist and militaristic tendencies. These groups derived a sense of pride in Israel and are most likely to consider Israel as a future home (Miller 493).
In addition to impacting on the Jewish identity of the participants, the program has also affected personal development of the participants. The program has inculcated a sense of responsibility among the participants. Organizers feel that Tag-Birthright program is nurturing Jewish leadership of the next generation. At the same time, most youth participants feel that the program is enhancing their sense of personal independence.
The program summer trips to Israel have positive impacts on self-esteem of Jewish youths. This is particularly vital since most of the participants have leadership responsibility within the Jewish community.
Long-term impacts of Taglit-Birthright Israel
The Taglit-Birthright Israel program has long-term influences on the participants. However, the impacts had different levels of influence among the participants. Some researchers found out that the visits did not produce greater impacts in behaviour change, and attitudes in relation to those who never made such tours. Studies concluded that the difference existed due to self selection i.e. those who made the visits had strong Jewish affiliation. Conversely, some studies showed that even after a period of one year, alumni who internalized the program’s content and attitudes incorporated it into an integral part of their beliefs. These studies confirm long-term influences of the program on the Diaspora youths.
The studies identified mixed reactions in relation to Jewish identity. Other participants believed that the program had strengthened their Jewish identity. However, there was a sense of weakening among the participants in relations to awareness of the needs of their local community. This is necessary because the program is in the realm of community involvement. After a period of one year, some participants believed that the program had influenced and enhanced their relationships to Israel.
The number of alumni who considered moving to Israel reduced drastically after returning to North America. A small number showed interests in returning, living and working in Israel. In this regard, there is a long-term effect of the tours among the alumni. This group had a strong sense of recommending the Taglit-Birthright program to their peers.
In summary, the long-term influences of the tour had mixed outcome among the surveys carried out. Participants’ reactions to the program demonstrated that feelings of connection to the Jewish people and to Israel were still strong after a year and dwindled after more than two years. However, the idea of instilling a sense of identity through raising children increases with the time among parents.
A strongest conversion effect of the Taglit-Birthright program lies in the feelings of ethnic connection to Jewish people, Israel and Jewish history. On the other hand, a marginal number of Diaspora youths showed little effects of change on the religious practices and community participation. The results of these studies indicate that the continued impacts of the trips, and the gradual declines in the influence of the Jewish identity are structural features of the long-term effects of the Taglit-Birthright Israel program on the Diaspora youths (Cohen 92).
Integration of Diaspora youth and Israel in their home country
The Taglit-Birthright Israel program uses tour programs to the Jewish homeland in order to create a sense of encouragement among youths of Diaspora. These enhance their feelings and attachments to their historical identity. However, tour programs come with a force that creates distance and estrangements among the Diaspora youths. The main purpose of tour programs is to break the social and symbolic barriers that inhibit the Diaspora youths from identifying with the State of Israel as their personal homeland. However, tours present difficulties associated with the cultural divides between the Diaspora tourists and the people in their homeland. Tourists feel like foreign nationalists when in Israel.
The first force of estrangement occurs at the border post. The process of identity verifications asserts not the Jewish homecoming tour but his alienation. Passports identify Jewish tourists as members of a different state. The entry visa restricts time, what an individual can do, and no paid works while in Israel imply that Jewish tourists cannot have the same rights as those of citizens (Kelner 109).
Many Jewish tourists find language barrier and cultural incompetency as limiting factors. They have to depend on mediating infrastructure of the tourists’ border zone. This is the only way Jewish tourists can navigate and explore Israeli spaces. The support systems only provide basics on how tourists can make brief tours on their own.
In an attempt to integrate the Jewish tourists with the locals, tour organizers plan for central positions where tourists can experience themselves. This is a strategy to reduce the cultural barrier that tourists encounters while visiting Israel. Organizers deploy several strategies to integrate the Diaspora youths with Israel in their homeland. The strategies of discourse of homeland belonging and the Diaspora otherness work well to integrate tourists with the locals.
Other strategies such as role modelling, group discussion circles, site-specific rituals, tangible experience, and the cross-cultural peer-to-peer encounters integrate visitors by counteracting distance experienced. However, internal contradictions prevent the methods from achieving effectiveness. However, they form a part of powerful set of tools the organizers of Israeli visits are increasingly using to integrate the Diaspora youths with people in their homeland.
Works Cited
Cohen, Erik H. Youth Tourism to Israel: Educational Experiences of the Diaspora. Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2008. Print.
Kelner, Shaul. Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Print.
Miller, Helena. International Handbook of Jewish Education. London: Springer, 2011. Print.
Rosenak, Michael. Philosophy of Jewish Education: Some Thoughts. New York: Springer, 2010. Print.
Saxe, Leonard. Ten Days of Birthright Israel: A Journey in Young Adult Identity. London: Springer, 2008. Print.