As Violence Continues, Hillel Decides To Postpone Student Trip to Israel

The organizers of an annual three-week long trip to Israel have decided to postpone this year’s trip because of Israel’s ongoing conflict with Lebanon.

The ten Harvard participants in the Netivot Fellowship, who were supposed to arrive in Israel on Sunday, were told of the cancellation Monday through an e-mail from Michael Simon, Harvard Hillel’s director of programming.

The Netivot Fellowship annually sends around 20 students from Harvard and Yale to Israel as part of a year-long program whose mission is to develop Jewish leaders.

Monday’s decision marks a change for the fellowship’s organizers, who last week said the trip would still continue despite Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah guerrillas.

Simon and Hillel Executive Director Bernard Steinberg said at the time that the trip’s itinerary would be changed to avoid the northern parts of the country, including the city of Haifa, where Hezbollah rocket attacks have been common.

Last week, Steinberg did say however that the group “won’t proceed if we feel that there is any danger at all to our students.”

Simon said Tuesday that the program was postponed because a majority of students expressed doubts and uncertainty about the trip—not because officials felt the situation was too dangerous.

“From the planning perspective, none of the circumstances on the ground changed significantly in either direction during the past week,” Simon said, explaining that the conditions neither improved enough to reassure the students, nor deteriorated so as to make the trip unsafe. “We still feel and we are confident that we could have had a safe and secure and educationally rich program.”

Simon said that the decision to postpone the trip came after discussions with the students and staff from Harvard and Yale involved in Netivot, as well as communication with Israel’s Nesiya Institute, a Jewish leadership program with offices in New York and Jerusalem.

After these talks, Netivot officials concluded that the number of students “willing and able” to come on the trip without uncertainty was too small to continue with the plans.

“It was a very difficult and wrenching decision,” Simon said. “But we obviously could not run our program without its key component: the student participants.”

But Simon stressed that Hillel is already beginning to plan for a Netivot trip to Israel in the winter of 2006-2007.

Simon, who is in Israel now, was originally planning to use his time there to lay the final groundwork for this summer’s trip, but now he will begin efforts to remap Netivot’s itinerary and modify the trip for this winter. Because of Harvard’s winter recess schedule, it is unlikely students will be able to go to Israel for three weeks, so some adjustments will have to be made.

Simon added that it is also impossible to know now what the situation will be in Israel next winter and that students will probably discover “another, new landscape.”

“Whether we are actually able to come this winter will depend on the same factors that went into our decision this week,” Simon said, adding that these factors include safety and student participation.

Simon said that Hillel may consider opening up the trip in the winter to include more students than were scheduled to go this summer.

In 2001, during a major Palestinian uprising, the Netivot trip was also postponed until the winter recess. Netivot was able to hold a program in the United States that summer.

This year, because Netivot was scheduled to depart much later in the summer than in past years, there is no time to plan another trip for this summer. However, Simon said that a Netivot retreat in the United States will be planned for sometime this fall.

—Staff writer Claire M. Guehenno can be reached at guehenno@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.