In the 14 months since the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Enter: The Jewish Peoplehood Alliance has seen a marked rise in interest in global Jewry among the Israeli schools that it works with to promote stronger Israel-Diaspora ties, representatives from the organization and an external pollster told eJewishPhilanthropy.

Since 2021, Enter, which was founded in 2020 with support from Charles Bronfman and Irina Nevzlin, has worked with a small number of Israeli elementary and middle schools — roughly a dozen at any given time — to introduce content related to the Israel-Diaspora relationship into the curriculum as part of program dubbed “Peoplehood Infused Schools.”

In May-June 2024, the Israeli evaluation firm Research Success Technologies Ltd. (ReST), had the principals of the 12 participating schools fill out questionnaires and interviewed the teachers leading the programs to gauge how the Oct. 7 attacks and their aftermath have affected the program. 

“The findings revealed that, in light of the security situation, there was an unprecedented desire and motivation to initiate Peoplehood-related activities,” according to Hadar Franco, who conducted the evaluation alongside ReST CEO Ezra Kopelowitz. “The principals and lead teachers reported a large jump in the number of teachers expressing interest in education focused on Jewish identity and the connection to Jews who live outside of Israel… At the same time, they shared how previous resentment towards any sort of ‘Jewish education’ in secular schools has now reversed into increased interest of the students for teaching about Jewish life outside of Israel in general, and about the experience of Diaspora Jews post-Oct. 7.”

According to Kopelowitz, this is not the case in secular Israeli schools in general. 

“In Israel, the presence of Diaspora Jewry in the equation isn’t obvious. There’s an awareness that there’s a rise of antisemitism. But there’s not an awareness for the average Israeli that the depth of the Jewish experience due to the war is radically changed. It’s really, really impacted what it means to be a Jew and how people are thinking about themselves. And there isn’t that depth of awareness,” Kopelowitz told eJewishPhilanthropy recently.

“In the average Israeli school, there is actually no connection in an organic way to the Jewish people… [There is the] teaching of Jewish history, which tends to be modern Zionist Jewish history, where the Jewish Diaspora is not [really a part of it],” he said. 

In the survey, a teacher from a participating school noted that the Peoplehood Infused Schools program allowed one of her students, whose grandfather — Chaim Peri — was taken hostage in the Oct. 7 attacks and died in Hamas captivity, to speak about the situation. 

“She told us that [the girl] was able to share her grandfather’s story just because they were able to create such a platform for Jewish values and talk to other Jewish kids from across the world and understand what it means to have Jews standing next to each other. And it was a safe space for her for the first time to actually share her thoughts and feelings,” Kopelowitz said. “I think that’s the point of it. The ability to have close relationships with one another and create a safe space for everyone to have the conversation.”

According to Alon Friedman, the founding director of Enter, the goal of the program is — in the long term — to deepen the relationship between Israelis and Diaspora Jews not only through knowledge but also through greater awareness for the students. 

“This is definitely a marathon. This is something that we want those kids in 10 years, when they emerge out of the socialization process of the educational system in Israel, especially the state secular one, that they will have a peoplehood basis and won’t be as ignorant as we were,” said Friedman.

In the short term, the program also appears to be having an effect on the teachers and faculty at the schools.

Zohar Mandel, the associate director of strategic partnerships at Enter, said this could be see in the two participating schools in Ofakim, one of the two larger towns that were attacked by terrorists in the Oct. 7 attacks. 

“I think that with the two schools in Ofakim — even before Oct. 7 but definitely after — we see the way that the teachers have changed. Their connection to the [Jewish Federation of MetroWest, N.J.] has increased dramatically,” Mandel said.

Enter’s other flagship program, One2One, which pairs Israeli teenagers with Jewish teenagers abroad — mainly in the U.S. — for a series of Zoom conversations, has taken a major hit in the past year. For the Israelis, the main draw is that the program allows them to practice their English, even earning additional credit in their classes for participating. But most of the Americans come to the program as a way to fulfill the requirements for a RootOne voucher for an Israel trip; as RootOne trips decreased by some 90% this past summer, One2One saw a similar drop in participants. 

“We did end up disappointing some of our Israeli schools because the will on the Israeli side was very high, the demand was very high, but we couldn’t provide as much as we would have wanted to,” Friedman said.

Though he said there are indications of growth for the coming year, with a new cohort starting last month and recruitment underway for February and March 2025.

Friedman added that the Oct. 7 attacks and rising global antisemitism were potent topics of conversations for the Israeli and Diaspora participants. 

“Oct. 7 really touched us in the kishkes, and it’s something that [they] connected about. [The Diaspora participants realized, ‘We suffer antisemitism, you guys [in Israel] are under rockets,’ but the shared experience is that we’re both Jewish and it must mean something,” he said. 

“The teens did engage in some political discussions. We did ask [them], ‘Were you able to hold the conversation if you disagreed?’ And the answer was yes. No one said that they stopped talking to each other. They said I was willing to discuss things that I didn’t feel comfortable discussing in the beginning or I was willing to answer questions that I didn’t think I would be asked. The conversation brought them to really open up and, you know, hear some stuff that’s out of their echo chamber,” Friedman said. 

Friedman said that Enter was using the relative downtime to improve its platform, which includes not only the Zoom-powered video conferencing software but also an algorithm to match the Israelis with the Diaspora Jews based on shared interests and personalities, as well as databases and automation services. Enter has also been working to connect with more Jewish organizations and institutions in the Diaspora to grow the pool of foreign participants.

“We had some of our foundations and funders joining us on the effort. We got some emergency grants from Jim Joseph and others to do a kind of marathon of new partnerships,” Friedman said. 

“We understood that we need a system that’s going to be able to support thousands in real time because up until now, even though our user experience for the teams was good, we were all standing in the back office holding wires together [to make it work],” he said. “So we’ve had a very intensive and expensive year working on our technology. We were able to fundraise for that as well. New funders like the Crown Foundation from Chicago joined us and really enabled us to dive deep into technology. And we’re hoping to get more and more partners who will understand the long term needs of sustaining that sort of a system.”

Friedman said Enter was looking to develop its One2One platform into something that could be licensed to other organizations that are looking to do so-called “mifgash,” or encounter, programs of their own. 

“So we are seeing how we can turn Enter from [having] a program that enables teens to meet online into Enter having a technological platform that can master the mifgash, which for us is the culmination of peoplehood education,” he said.