|
|
December 31, 2004/Tevet 19 5765, Vol. 57, No. 18
Tourists Return to Holy Land en masse
DINA KRAFT
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
TEL AVIV - Rapelling down Judean Desert mountain faces, bumping along dirt roads by jeep and tucking notes into the Western Wall in Jerusalem, tourists have returned to Israel for winter vacation in the largest numbers since the Palestinian intifada began more than four years ago.
The perception that Israel is safer than it was a year ago, and renewed hopes for peace in the wake of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's death, are playing their part in luring tourists back, tourism officials and trip organizers said.
"During the intifada you literally begged people to come, and now people are begging you to get on the trip," said Marlene Post, president of Hadassah International and chairwoman of Birthright Israel in North America.
Across the board, more tourists are coming - Jewish and Christian, students and families, are all part of an overall surge in tourism in 2004. Some 1.4 million tourists are expected to come to Israel by the end of 2004, a 44 percent increase over last year.
"The increase in tourism this year and the optimistic outlook for 2005 can be attributed to an increasingly positive atmosphere in the region, an improvement in the security situation and the renewal of intensive marketing efforts around the world," Tourism Ministry spokesman Golan Yossifon said.
Among the visitors this year was a group of 127 from New York City's Park Avenue Synagogue, one of the largest synagogue missions to come to Israel since the intifada began.
Throughout the year the synagogue focused its congregation on Israel - revamping its religious school curriculum to put Israel at center stage, hosting festivals of Israeli art and film and hosting lectures.
The climax was climbing on a plane and exploring "the complex-ities of Israel for eight days," said Paul Corwin, a synagogue member and lawyer who organized the trip. Their first stop was cheering in the stands at a professional basketball game in Tel Aviv, while their last was a tour of the hall where David Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence in 1948.
For Amy A.B. Bressman, chairwoman of the syn-agogue's board, the most moving moment was watching 10 of their b'nai mitzvah-age children help a group of special needs Israeli children hold a bar mitzvah ceremony in a Conservative synagogue in Jerusalem.
Cloaked in white tallitot, the 13-year-olds from New York City helped wind leather tefillin straps around the arms of the Israelis and read aloud from the Torah. The Israeli teenagers led the service's prayers.
Later, members of the Park Avenue Synagogue and the Israeli families hoisted the special needs children into chairs amid a chorus of singing and cheering.
"The faces of those children in those chairs is a memory I will always have," Bressman said.
The event was part of a Bar/Bat Mitzvah for Special Children Program operated by the Masorti movement, as the Conservative movement is known in Israel.
Exposing congregants to the ordinary and the extraordinary is what the trip was about, Corwin said.
Birthright Israel, the free trip to the Jewish state for Diaspora youth who have never visited on a peer trip, also saw high numbers, bringing about 8,500 youth to Israel this winter.
The Jewish Agency for Israel saw a dramatic rise in the number of high school and college students brought to Israel from around the world. Some 4,600 students from countries as diverse as South Africa, France and Australia came for their December vacation as part of JAFI's "Israel Experience" program.
JAFI led programming of trips for some 2,400 of the birthright participants.
Hillel also is seeing the highest number of American college students coming to Israel since the start of the intifada.
"We are at maximum capacity," said Wayne Firestone, executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, an umbrella group for 30 national Jewish organizations founded by Hillel International and the Schusterman Foundation.
He said the easing of the security situation has made it easier for people to come to Israel and also has facilitated travel within Israel.
"Parents seem more comfortable and have made less problems about sending their kids," he said.
|
|
