Translation from English
This summer Isaac Weiss visited Israel for the fourth time, but this trip was different from all his previous ones.
For eight weeks, Weiss, 20, and 32 other Cleveland residents lived and worked as Israelis in a dormitory and interned with the Cleveland Onward program at the Jewish Federation of Cleveland.
“I think the biggest difference on this trip that I really enjoyed was that we became fully independent and complete individuals in the culture and society of Tel Aviv,” Weiss, a second-year history student at Ohio State University in Columbus, told the Cleveland Jewish News.
Since 2012, Onward Israel has invited college students from around the world to Israel for the summer for eight weeks of immersion and resume enhancement, pairing them with a company for an internship during their stay. This year, 2,981 students participated in the program, and in addition to the 33 from the Cleveland Onward program, another 12 Cleveland residents participated in other Onward programs.
Weiss, a Shaker Heights resident and member of the Jewish Family Experience in Beachwood, interned as a content writer at Am haZikaron, which means “People of Memory,” a family research institute that creates large family trees and histories to better understand Jewish identity.
He said that living with other Clevelanders in Tel Aviv and working at the company, he feels “very connected to the Jewish people and our community. And I feel very unified as a group, I feel very belonging to Israel, to and around Jews, and I think that’s really special.”
The Jewish Federation of Cleveland has partnered with the Onward program since the pilot group launched, and this year’s group has interned at 19 companies, Ilanit Gerblich Kalir, the federation’s assistant vice president for external relations and international operations, told CJN.
“We also have a variety of programs for them to meet Israelis from our partner community, Beit Shean and Valley Springs,” she said. “They do some trips around Israel, each participant gets an Israeli bus pass, so they’re really free to explore.”
Grant Barson, a third-year student at High Point University in North Carolina majoring in sales and business administration, had wanted to return to Israel ever since he and his brother became bar mitzvahs there. Seven years later, he was able to return to the same place thanks to the Onward program.
“I celebrated my bar mitzvah at the top of Masada, so to be able to climb Masada again, to be in the only shaded spot on the summit and see almost the day seven years ago when I had my bar mitzvah was amazing,” Barson, 20, told CJN.
Barson, a Solon resident and member of The Shul community in Pepper Pike, worked for travel technology company Bridgify as an account manager and helped the company find more potential partners.
Lynn Cohen learned about Onward as a former chair of the Overseas Relations Committee at Federation and serving on the Onward Board of Directors, but she was able to see the program from a parent’s perspective when her son Jacob participated in 2018 and her daughter Natalie participated this year at Tulane University, where she is a senior.
Her daughter worked at digital marketing firm First Media, and her son worked at Maverick Ventures Israel, which helped him land a consulting job at Bain & Company in Chicago.
“You could just hear it in their voice and everything they were doing, how excited they were,” Cohen, a Pepper Pike resident and member of Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple in Beachwood, told CJN. “And it just brought to life for me what I had heard and read about.”