Good Tuesday morning!
Ed. note: In observance of Passover, the next issue of Your Daily Phil will arrive on Friday, April 14. Chag kasher v’sameach!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we look at how Ukrainian Jews are preparing for Passover and report on a potential U.S. Department of Education rule change that could affect Jewish college students. We also feature op-eds from Andrés Spokoiny and Michael W. Sonnenfeldt. We’ll start with a Christian group offering trips to Israel to high schoolers.
Passages, a Christian group that organizes Birthright-style trips for college students, will expand significantly in the coming years to send thousands of high school students to Israel as well, following a $12 million grant from the Marcus Foundation, the CEO of the organization told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross. These trips come as surveys show potentially flagging support for Israel among young evangelicals Christians in the United States.
Offering these trips to high school students, who are still living at home and going to church with their parents, provides an opportunity to reach teenagers before they have a potential crisis of faith in college, CEO Scott Phillips said. “This can help set them up to be successful, to hopefully not put their faith on the shelf when they go to college,” according to Phillips. It also offers an opportunity to prepare them to interact with Jewish students in college and to be advocates on “college campuses [that] can be hostile to Israel and to the Jewish community,” he said. “A lot of these students have never met someone Jewish their entire life, especially those who are studying in Christian high schools.”
Bernie Marcus, chair of the Marcus Foundation and the co-founder of Home Depot, said that it was critical to focus on younger people, to get to them before they reach college. “It has become abundantly clear that we need to focus our energy on high school students and teens. Getting them ready and connecting them to Israel has never been more important, because we want them to be prepared for what they will face on college campuses,” Marcus said in a statement. “We have invested in RootOne for many years and feel that partnering with Passages for Christian high schoolers is essential.”
Passages will begin its high school trips this summer but it will be in a limited capacity as the organization works out the kinks, Phillips said. It will run trips in the winter, spring and summer, when students are most likely to be on vacation. “This year is just a pilot. We’ll have about 300 students, just to get us launched,” he said. “But then next year, we’ll have a massive scale-up, with 1,500 high school students.”
The $12 million grant from the Marcus Foundation will cover the costs of sending 4,000 students to Israel over the next four years, according to Phillips. “But the plan is to continue beyond four years and, of course, to grow it,” he said.
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