I’ve just returned to the U.S. after two weeks in Israel training tour educators and participating in the Israel Educational Travel Alliance (IETA) Leaders Summit, where I joined more than 100 professionals whose work is focused on bringing people to Israel on a wide variety of educational programs. 

Along with most organizations, Honeymoon Israel has struggled to fulfill its core work since Oct. 7. We’ve compensated by focusing on alumni engagement and keeping the thousands of couples who have applied to go on our trips “warm” by offering them domestic weekends and other programming. Now we’re poised to come back and run 13 buses this June and July filled with young couples who have been waiting many months for their Honeymoon Israel experience. This will be followed by hundreds more participants, God willing, in the fall and beyond.

Avi Rubel, Honeymoon Israel CEO, and Linor Zeilig, One8 Foundation portfolio manager for Jewish life and Israel engagement, at the 2025 Israel Educational Travel Alliance (IETA) Leaders Summit in Israel. Courtesy/Avi Rubel

At the IETA conference, I sat in the front row of an auditorium at the Anu: Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv and listened to the stories of Shai, Ilay and Dalia, whose relatives are either being held hostage in Gaza or, in the case of Shai, have been murdered. It wasn’t my first time listening to testimonials of Oct. 7. In fact, I still resided in Israel on Oct. 7, and I lived through the shocking moments of realizing that our country was not safe and that some combination of vanity, hubris and incompetence on the part of our leaders allowed our border to be infiltrated with such ease. I lived there through the agonizing days of coming to terms with the murder of 1,200 innocent people and the kidnapping of 240 including children, women and elderly. I fell apart when I learned that my friends Jon and Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s son Hersh was among the hostages.

Time stopped on Oct. 7, 2023. When you speak with most Israelis, it’s as if the massive trauma of that day and every day since are all blurred into one bizarre horror movie that is real life. I was there too, but I moved to the U.S. one year ago to manage Honeymoon Israel as its CEO — and I found myself in a country where the predominant news stories about Israel were completely different. The barbarous and deranged acts of violence perpetrated by Hamas — an organization rooted in hatred and dedicated to the complete destruction of Israel — were misrepresented as a legitimate expression of the ongoing Palestinian struggle for equal rights and their own state. I saw Free Palestine graffiti all over my new community of Atlanta but nobody was talking about the hostages and all those murdered.

I always knew that bringing young, mostly interfaith couples on Honeymoon Israel was important for the Jewish people, but now I realize that we absolutely must redouble our efforts and expose as many people as possible to Israel so that they have a first-person relationship with our homeland. My hope for our participants is not that they always like everything about Israel or its government’s policies but that they develop a love for the amazing experiment that is the Jewish state and that they feel part of the story as part of their journey to become active players in the Jewish community.

Here I was, rejoicing with the IETA Leaders Summit participants and all of Israel as hostages Emily, Romi and Doron were released, and also listening to the heartbreaking stories of hostages’ relatives and thinking about Hersh and how I still can’t believe that we couldn’t save him. Then it hit me in a profound way: What a daunting task we have ahead of us to bring hundreds of couples to Israel this summer, most of whom are first-timers, and to expose them in the most sophisticated way to this beautiful, complex — and, right now, completely traumatized — country. Honeymoon Israel is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and we’ve run hundreds of trips; but it’s a new Israel now, and our nine-day itinerary needs to evolve accordingly.

One major emphasis on our upcoming trips will be to put more focus on connecting our participants with Israelis during the trip and ensuring that people-to-people connections are built. Our participants need to connect with Israelis for several days so that an authentic, human narrative is present; that Israelis can tell their stories and understand that Honeymoon Israel couples care, want to hear and want to connect and build a new sense of solidarity for days and years after, so we are working to make sure that there will be young Israeli couples joining all our groups. 

We have also always included components and speakers on our trips that showcase an Arab-Palestinian narrative. Post Oct. 7 we will continue to do so, but it will require more training of our amazing tour educators and staff to appropriately frame and process the experience for our thousands of participants. 

More than anything, I am excited at the potential for a robust, renewed Israel educational travel ecosystem, because it will bring with it the power of global Jewish peoplehood. By enabling thousands of North American Jews and their partners to visit Israel they will explore complex realities, develop personal connections and shape a new narrative informed by where Israel is going and how the story of our people is one story that needs to merge and not be completely separate narratives based on geography. We will do our best to create trips that, despite many devastating moments, will also be uplifting and showcase the amazing resilience and diversity of the Israeli people. 

I’m sure that the coming months and even years will be challenging for the world of Israel educational travel, but I’m also sure that our work has never been more important for the thousands of participants we will engage and for the state and people of Israel. I’m hopeful that by the time our 13 buses get to Israel this summer, there won’t be a single hostage left and that our participants will be able to celebrate a new reality. Whatever the situation will be, I am confident that we will move forward and that time will eventually stop standing still and we will advance into a brighter future.

Avi Rubel is CEO of Honeymoon Israel.