Good Wednesday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we profile an internship program through the Israeli religious advocacy nonprofit Itim, and feature an opinion piece from Hillel David Rapp. We’ll start with a new Jewish Federations of North America trip to Israel for Jewish educators to learn about the current debate in Israel over the government’s proposed judicial overhaul.
Having just returned from a five-day jaunt through Israel led by Jewish Federations of North America and designed for educators who work with Jewish teens and millennials, Jewish educator Elyssa Hurwitz said she feels “reenergized,” reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen.
“What role does Israel play in our communities? How are we supporting the young adults we work with all over the world in having any kind of relationship with Israel in all of its facets? I’ve been thinking about these questions for a while but they have fallen on the back burner,” Hurwitz, who coordinates Jewish programming at Moishe House in New York City, told eJP.
The initiative, called Israel Intensive for Engagement Professionals, brought 33 Jewish professionals who work with teens and young adults from around North America to Israel last month. It was the first trip of its kind, a joint venture together with UJA-Federation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and the One8 Foundation.
“It was wild,” Hurwitz said of the Knesset meeting. “It was a broad range of perspectives and I couldn’t tell you the last time I spent time in a room with someone who was on [the] opposite end [of the judicial reform debate] as the person I was about to spend the next 30 minutes of my life with.”
According to Shira Hutt, executive vice president of JFNA, the trip was designed to give participants deeper context to issues being debated in Israel and to equip them with tools to bring complex topics back to the teens, college students and young adults they teach.
“This trip came up because of the moment that we are in,” Hutt told eJP, adding that the program was organized in about six weeks. “We reached out to a number of federations and national partners like BBYO and OneTable and identified professionals that were working on a local level to do the work I mentioned.”
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