History
The Birthright Israel program was initiated in 1994 and founded in cooperation with Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, as well as the Israeli government, private philanthropists, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and Jewish communities around the world. Top educators, historians and tourism professionals were recruited to plan the program, for which demand is very high. Tours are held in the winter and summer. Registration is conducted online and each round there are thousands more applicants than spots available.
In 2007, annual capacity was increased to 37,000 participants a year. Taglit is the Hebrew word for discovery, and participants, most of whom are visiting Israel for the first time, are encouraged to discover new meaning in their personal Jewish identity and connection to Jewish history and culture.
In 2011, a new initiative was launched to increase the number annual participants from 30,000 to 51,000 by 2013. Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson pledged an additional $5 million toward the effort that would allow one out of every two young Jewish adults to participate. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu also announced an increase in the government's budget for Taglit-Birthright Israel, pledging $100 million to Taglit-Birthright Israel over the next three years. To match this commitment, the Israeli government expects a corresponding increase in funding from Birthright Israel’s partner organizations - the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Agency for Israel - and from individual donors.
Read more about this topic: Birthright Israel
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)