Avraham Infeld is the founder and director of a succession of innovative educational institutions and serves as President Emeritus of Hillel International. In the 1970s, Avraham founded Melitz, a non-profit educational service institution that fosters Jewish identity rooted in a pluralistic understanding of Jewish life and the centrality of Israel. He also served as chairman of Arevim; director of the birthright Israel planning process; founding chairman of San Francisco Federation’s Amutot in Israel; and chairman of the Board of Israel Experience. Most recently he was President of the Chais Family Foundation.

The remarkable success of the Birthright experience itself must be enhanced by a follow-up program which helps returnees find their space within the Jewish community. A well thought out follow-up program would not only serve the participants, but could impact Jewish communities in ways which make Peoplehood much more than just the buzz word of certain community leaders. The potential of having such an impact on bringing about change could certainly challenge young people of the Obama era.

In their recent publication Ten days of Birthright, Leonard Saxe and Barry Chazan have done an excellent job in analyzing the surveys done with Birthright returnees The impact of the trip is evident in participants even years after the trip, and their increased identification is not only with Israel – the site of the experience, but also with the Jewish people . I, however, believe, based on my personal contact with these young people, that two very profound additional insights can be gleaned.

To my mind, the primary unarticulated – but very real – reaction of many of these young people is “WOW, what I was taught being Jewish is, and have chosen to reject or ignore, is not necessarily so…” Many of the participants have either had an elementary Jewish education till Bar-Mitzvah age or are children of parents who had such an education. Their understanding of being Jewish, especially in the case of those from the US, is obviously that Judaism is primarily a religion. In every exercise I have done with them they constantly refer to Judaism as a parallel to either Catholicism and Protestantism, or usually to Christianity and Islam. Their previous experiences with things Jewish all served to confirm that understanding.

Suddenly, as a result of the Birthright gift, they are put into a direct unfettered contact with a totally different experience. They encounter people who write things on public toilet walls in the same language they were taught to read without understanding. They are warmly welcomed by civic leaders who look and sound nothing like their Rabbis. They engage in fun activities with Israeli soldiers with whom they share a world of western culture, but who define their Jewish Identity in a very different way. They suddenly feel at home, and surprisingly, the elements of their identity which facilitate that sense of home, stem from the very core they either rejected or chose to ignore. This sense of “WOW” is, to my mind, not only an identification with Israel, but far more importantly, a potentially profound foundation for the development of an identity of Peoplehood.

The second insight is that Jewish Education can be well imparted in ways other than the traditional process of formal education. Of course, the imparting of knowledge necessitates the process of teaching. But Birthright proves that a moment of education such as Birthright can create the emotive sense of belonging, which provokes the kind of questioning that makes learning a much more enjoyable and sustaining experience.

The oft spoken about need for Birthright follow-up needs to move beyond reunions and a continuing connection to Israel to a program of Peoplehood education which sees at its core an understanding of the values of Jewish Memory, our core relationship to each other as a Jewish family, the foundational place in our heritage of Mount Sinai, the centrality of both the land of Israel and the State of Israel, and the understanding that Hebrew is not the language only of prayer, or everyday discourse, but as one of the central means by which culture is transferred from generation to generation.

My experience with so many of these participants has shown how ready and eager they are for such a discourse.