LITTLE ROCK — In the summer of 2005, Fort Smith
native Lisa Perez shared lodging
with an Israeli soldier on a communal farm in Israel.
The first time they walked into their room, they turned on the TV, just in time to see a movie, dubbed in Hebrew, about a "galaxy far, far away."
"The soldier got so excited because the favorite thing in her world was Star Wars," Perez said. "She said: 'You love this, right? You're American, you love this?'"
Perez has never seen a Star Wars movie.
"But it was really funny to see because she was so young, she was probably 18."
Perez, 26, came to realize she was older than most of the Israeli soldiers on the farm. (young Israelis are required to serve in the armed forces.) "They just want to go and hang out at the beach and the mall," Perez learned on that free, 10-day-long educational trip. "They're not really fierce warriors."
Perez is one of 220,000 young Jewish adults who have participated in Taglit-Birthright Israel, a project launched in 1999 to connect Diaspora Jews to Israel. Taglit is Hebrew for "discovery."
Founded by Jewish philanthropists Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, Birthright Israel "started because the younger generation was fading in its interest inIsrael. They were becoming more self-centered and Israel was more remote, where for the older generation Israel was very central," said Michael Lieber, a former faculty adviser for the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville's chapter of Hillel (a national Jewish student organization).
Birthright Israel participants must be Jews between 18 and 26 who have never visited Israel as part of an educational program.
Donors foot the entire bill for the journey, which cost about $2,500 per person in 2008. Trips are organized during summer and winter breaks by various providers, including those affiliated with Jewish religious groups, national Jewish organizations and private touring companies based in Israel.
Lieber's daughter, Debbie Deere, was the only Arkansas student on a Birthright tour 10 years ago, Lieber recalled. She enjoyed the tour, which she shared with a group of Yale University students, he said.
Since then, "one to two students" from the college's Hillel have gone every few years, Lieber added.
Less than 60 students from Arkansas have gone on Birthright Israel in 10 years, said Deborah Goldberg, spokesman for the New York-based organization.
Arkansas' relatively small Jewish population is a primary reason, Jewish leaders said.The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville's Hillel has more than 70 people on its e-mail list server, current faculty adviser Jay Greene said. Hendrix College in Conway has 25-30 members, its faculty adviser, Marianne Tettlebaum, said. Although Hendrixs' Hillel is open to all central Arkansas college students, only Hendrix students participate, she added.
Still, many of the Arkansas natives making the trip have found it worthwhile.
David Barel, 26, went in 2002 after his sophomore year at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. The Little Rock Central High School graduate, whose Russian parents lived in Israel for six years before immigrating to the United States, wanted to visit Israel and liked the idea of a free trip through Birthright Israel, he said last week. Barel, who'd visitedfamily in Israel five or six times before, didn't experience the same exhilaration upon touchdown as some of Perez's Birthright group in August 2005.
"We stepped off on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv," Perez recalled, "and people got on their knees and put their heads to the ground."
Perez was part of a group including nine Arkansans, mostly reform Jews, organized with the help of an Israeli emissary to the Jewish Federation of Arkansas, she said.
Before the chartered flight, she says, she knew "the importance of Israel - how important it is to have a place where people can't say: 'Jews, get out.'"
Still, "I didn't know just how much it would mean to get off the plane and actually be there."
The group then plunged into a 10-day whirl throughIsrael: traversing the Golan Heights in the north; kayaking the Jordan River; riding camels in the desert; hiking Masada, a site of ancient Israeli palaces and fortifications atop an isolated mesa in the south; watching the sun rise over the Dead Sea; hearing a Holocaust survivor speak; visiting the tomb of Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism; and visiting Jerusalem twice.
"I fell in love with Israel when I went on the trip," said Perez, a University of Arkansas at Little Rock law school student who attends Little Rock's Temple B'nai Israel.
A few Israeli soldiers are assigned to each Birthrightgroup as a "reward" or "incentive," for two or three years of good military service, said Barel, who served eight months in the Israeli Army. "One of your commanders will recommend that you go on this trip as a kind of twoweek vacation in which you get to hang out with American kids."
Toby Chu, 27, went on a December 2008 Birthright trip as a University of California at Santa Barbara graduate student. "I wanted to learn more about my Jewish heritage," said Chu, a Little Rock native who'd never traveled to the Middle East.
Chu, who earned her master's in environmental science, chose a tour tailored to her outdoors interests. She enjoyed the beauty of Israel's southern desert, Negev, and helped clear brush and tidy up a nature trail around the Sea of Galilee, a key site in Jesus' ministry in the New Testament.
She also enjoyed learning from minorities such as desert-dwelling Bedouins, with whom she broke bread and rode camels. Perez, meanwhile, mixed with the many Israeli Arabs grilling on Tel Aviv beaches on a Friday night. "It's really funny," she said. "All of the religious Jews are inside being religious and all of the Muslims are out celebrating the end of their dayof rest."
Chu said she wasn't introduced to Palestinian Arabs on her Birthright trip, although she would have liked it. "It would have been interesting, from a different angle, but I understand this is a Jewishtrip from Jewish donors," Chu said.
The state of Israel, worldwide Jewish federations and roughly 2,000 private donors gave more than $110 million to Birthright Israel in 2008, said Goldberg, the group's spokesman. Roughly 45,000 people from 32 nations made the trip last year alone, she added.
Organizers hope to draw Birthright alumni back. Trip guides "literally said to us, 'This is where you can find your husband or wife,'" said Perez, adding that one of her co-travelers has gone back five times while another lives there.
Barel has lived in Israel for the last two years and now works as an online marketing consultant. "Life is more interesting here," he said, citing the area as "the crossroads of different cultures, languages, nationalities. There's something about walking out in the street, and every person you walk by speaks a different language, has a completely different view about things."
The land's history fascinates him as well. "Every step you take here stuff happened that spanned thousands of years."
Perez returned to Israel as a volunteer in the summer of 2006 to live with soldiers, sort military supplies, put up barbed wire along Israel's northern border, and clean up rubble after fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, a militant Shiite Islamist organization based in Lebanon.
She said, "If I had the money and the time, I would be there tomorrow doing it again."
Religion, Pages 14, 15 on 09/26/2009