June 4, 2019
Tens of thousands of Israel supporters gathered in Manhattan on Sunday for the 55th annual Celebrate Israel Parade – the largest celebration of Israel in the world. Beginning on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street and making their way up to 75th Street, marchers embraced this year’s theme of “Only in Israel” from the 1970s Hebrew classic “Rak B’Yisrael.” The parade,...
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May 21, 2019
Eighteen years and 650,000 happy participants later, you’d think people would get Birthright Israel right. Yet it’s amazing how many people get Birthright Israel wrong. Few understand Birthright’s secret sauce – what I call the Zen of Birthright. They expect it to be as site-oriented as a grand European tour, as partisan as a Zionist pep rally, as self-involved as...
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May 10, 2019
My two boys, Lenny and Ben, went on Birthright Israel this past winter and all I can say is THANK YOU from deep in my soul for this opportunity. This WAS the trip of a lifetime and everything I ever wished for; everything I worked hard to develop came to fruition on this trip. I wanted to give my kids...
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April 12, 2019
Get to my hotel. Informed my room is on the third floor. I know better than to accept a low room in Midtown Manhattan. Ask for a higher floor. Offered something on 10. “Anything higher?” I ask. The guy offers to show me a room on 22. “Great,” I say, and off we go. As we take the elevator up,...
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February 6, 2019
Palm Beach native and longtime Temple Emanu-El member Susan Pertnoy recently took a trip that she had spent nearly two decades promoting and supporting for others. Pertnoy joined other donors on a specially designed Birthright Israel trip celebrating the organization’s 18th anniversary. Founded in 1999, Birthright Israel Foundation, the largest educational tourism organization in the world, sends Jewish young people...
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December 18, 2018
Our daughter, Desiree, went on Birthright Israel last July from New York. Up until this trip she had very little interest in her Jewish heritage and absolutely no interest in going to temple, adhering to the traditions of Judaism or dating/marrying a Jewish man. When my wife and I picked her up from the airport, we were amazed and delighted...
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December 11, 2018
I grew up in the diaspora of New Jersey in the 1950s, where there was no religion. We never belonged to a synagogue, never had a Seder, and didn’t celebrate the High Holidays. When my husband and I had our first daughter, Pamela, I began to realize how important that missing piece of my heritage was to me. So we...
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November 8, 2018
On Tuesday, October 23rd Birthright Israel and Birthright Israel Foundation hosted an afterparty at the 2018 JFNA GA in Tel Aviv, Israel to celebrate our 18th Anniversary and the overall success of the program. We raised our glasses and had a huge l’chaim with a crowd of over 150 Federation professionals, current Birthright Israel participants, alumni, donors, board members and...
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October 26, 2018
This is why I became a Birthright group leader. I remember every second of my first Birthright Israel trip. I’ve never felt that connected to anything in my life. Everywhere we went, everything I saw and did, I felt like I was meant to be there. I think it’s because it’s the land of my people. I didn’t expect to...
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August 28, 2018
As we embark on this month of Jewish holidays, starting a New Year of an ancient people, I am honored to share with you a few thoughts. Our collective Jewish narrative arguably revolves around that seminal moment at Mt. Sinai, wherein a pulse of the divine merged with the human, infusing an eternal ethical backbone to govern mankind’s life on...
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