Israel Encounter programme may be in peril

ANT KATZ

After going for nine years and having facilitated around 1 600 southern African Jewish teenagers visiting Israel for the first time, the Israel Encounter programme is in dire peril of having to close shop after one more trip over the 2017/2018 year.

Israel Encounter is an exclusive project for South African youth, initiated by South African Jewish philanthropist, Mendel Kaplan, whose vision was to see that every southern African Jew would have an opportunity to visit Israel before their 18^th birthday.

To implement this vision, Kaplan donated “several million dollars”, says Jewish Agency shaliach, Aviad Sela.  This was to kick off the project and fund it for a decade, covering 100 per cent of the ground costs in Israel.

The Jewish Agency for Israel (JA), through its Israel Centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town, implemented Kaplan’s vision and run the programme.

For the past nine years, between youth movement camps returning and schools opening, between 150 and 200 youngsters travel on Encounter – around 1 600 to date.

Says Sela: “It makes Israel real for them. They visit, feel, taste and smell Israel.” They become “connected in the most fundamental way. They touch the sand and the stones.”

Over the past December/January there were five separate Encounter groups who mostly went for 12 days, accompanied by local teachers and joined on the other side by a tour guide.

For the more observant there were separate boys’ and girls’ groups; there was a large Cape Town group, a mixed group and a specific Yeshiva College Kfar group – the last one being a six-week trip.

“What we have seen over the past nine years,” says Sela, is that Encounter has connected South African youth to Israel in a multitude of layers:

• They understand the components of their identity; it becomes real and not abstract.
• “It creates the understanding of the dream,” says Sela. Local Jewry understands why Israel is important as a collective community, but not about how Israel has created large numbers of gap-year projects to allow teenagers to spend meaningful time in Israel.

Encounter scholars all come back much more “connected in terms of values”, says Sela and this understanding of “the collective peoplehood of the Jewish people and the importance of there always being an Israel, allows them to become more active members of the community”.

They realise that being Jewish is not simply a religion, he says, but also Zionism, culture (reminding them that Israel is a centre of who we are) and knowing that they have a home in Israel should they ever want to study there, or make aliyah.

“I strongly believe that Mendel Kaplan’s vision has borne enormous fruit,” says Sela, but the programme must now find a replacement sponsor in the next 12 mo