E-Mail 'Taglit's New Policy Enabling Participation of Alumni of Teen Israel Programs' To A Friend

Comments

1. Rabbi Sid Schwarz says

   February 4, 2014 at 2:43 am

   Bravo to Elan for raising this issue. As important as the Taglit/Birthright program has been for tens of thousands of Jews, it should not be treated as a sacred cow. The current issue of the Forward features a piece by a Birthright participant who was turned off to Israel because the program totally ignored important moral issues that are at play in Israel/Palestine today. That reaction is hardly an isolated one.

   More to the point of Elan’s article, the exclusion of high school aged students from the Birthright initiative reflects the Jewish community’s bias over the past decade that privileges Jews in their 20’s and 30’s to the exclusion of every other demographic. When the Coalition for Jewish Service was “upgraded” to create Repair the World, an initiative designed to make Jewish service learning initiatives available to young Jews, I was among those that argued strongly that high school students be eligible for the generous subsidies that would be offered to participate in Jewish sponsored service missions around the world.

   I was not without a stake in the matter. As the founder and president of PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values for 21 years, we were among the pioneers in the field of Jewish service learning. Our target audience was Jewish teenagers and we touched the lives of over 20,000 teenagers during the years I led the organization. Yet the decision was made to target college and post-college students for the subsidies notwithstanding the voluminous literature about the power of identity formation during the teen years.

   I hope that funding bodies begin to recognize that we need resources that provide incentives for transformational Jewish experiences at many stages of the Jewish life cycle.

   Rabbi Sid Schwarz

2. Benji Lovitt says

   February 5, 2014 at 8:41 pm

   Well said.