Ta’am Yisrael: A Taste of Israel

Ta’am Yisrael: A Taste of Israel—the eighth-grade educational trip for Chicagoland public school students with either supplementary school or no formal Jewish education—is cooler than most middle school field trips. The program is designed to give students a meaningful taste of the land and their heritage through a weeklong “hands-on” experience in Israel that goes beyond a one-off experience. The kinesthetic model has a bigger goal: It begins a process of engagement and relationship with the Jewish community, at home and in Israel. Ta’am Yisrael sees the first year after b’nai mitzvah as a small window to retain any Jews wandering away from Jewish communal life.

Experiencing Israel with peers and friends (instead of with family and parents) opens teenagers’ hearts and minds to absorb the experience in an entirely unique way, which Ta’am Yisrael believes leads to a long-term impact on their Jewish identity. Ta’am Yisrael recruits trip staff from local youth programs, summer camps, and other Jewish educational institutions to help as wranglers and role models. They’re trained to develop strong relationships with attendees to involve them in Jewish education and communal programming after the trip. Ta’am Yisrael is careful to ensure that the trip is developmentally appropriate for eighth graders, is purely educational, and does not engage in advocacy of any one position or theology. The trip also boasts a significant mifgash experience with Israelis, including Israeli Arabs, and participants also spend time with peers from Chicago’s partnership city of Kiryat Gat. In Chicago, the Ta’am Yisrael trip is now seen as a Jewish life-stage experience for adolescents just as Birthright has become for college students and young adults. The organization’s research has shown an increase in likelihood of trip participants choosing Jewish extracurricular activities in high school, serving in their local synagogue school, working as a junior counselor at a Jewish summer day camp, or studying Hebrew in high school. By sending kids across the world, Ta’am Yisrael has created stronger Jewish youth communities in Chicago and helped young Jews feel at home both in Israel and in their local Jewish communities.