c. 2006 Religion News Service
Birthright Israel to Send 100,000th Participant on Israel Trip
NEW YORK (RNS) When Stephanie Lowenthal, 26, leaves for Israel Monday (June 5), she will be the 100,000th person to travel there through a program that provides free, educational trips to Israel for 18 to 26-year olds.
Her trip is a milestone for Taglit-Birthright Israel, an organization funded by the Israeli government, Jewish groups and private donors. The group’s guiding principle is that it’s every Jewish person’s birthright to visit Israel. The 10-day trips are open to Jews visiting Israel for the first time on a peer-group trip.
“We see ourselves as trying to be the fulcrum for a life-changing experience for an entire generation,” said Jay Golan, president of the Birthright Israel Foundation, which coordinates private donations for the trips. “That’s why the 100,000th participant is a turning point.”
Lowenthal, who works in the communications department of the Nasdaq stock exchange, was raised in Queens, N.Y. She said she’s not particularly religious, but believes this journey is an important one.
“As a Jew, I want to go to the Jewish state, and maybe have some sort of connection to this country I’ve never seen before,” she said.
Birthright’s goal is to foster that sense of connection to Israel, as well as to promote connections between Jews and to allow individuals to develop a sense of Jewish identity. Birthright’s three funding arms raise as much as $45 million a year to support the program, Golan said.
Although the majority of people who participate are American or Canadian, the 2,700 trips in the past six years have included young people from 50 countries, from Argentina to Uzbekistan. For the summer 2006 program, more than 25,000 people in North America applied for 10,000 available spaces.
A 2004 study by researchers at Brandeis University showed that two to four years after their trips, more than half the Birthright participants said they still felt very connected to Israel, compared to 35 percent who felt that way before they went.
For Lowenthal, it’s an opportunity to experience Israel first-hand and learn more than she would if she traveled alone.
“I want to see and hear the history,” she said. “I want to take a little bit of my heritage home.”
_ Ansley Roan
Update:
Anglican Panel Responds to Conn. Episcopal Priests
(RNS) An Anglican panel responsible for settling disputes between parishes and bishops on Tuesday (May 30) responded to charges from six conservative Connecticut pastors that it had shirked its duty.
The six pastors, known as the “Connecticut Six” have sued their bishop, the Rt. Rev. Andrew Smith, over church property, money and personnel. They complained when the Anglican panel refused to take up their case.
Retired Australian Archbishop Peter Carnley, who chairs the Anglican Panel of Reference, said the panel’s “published guidelines request a stay on civil proceedings” before it can hear a dispute.
Carnley also said the panel informed the six pastors of its decision through a representative on March 6. In a statement released to the media May 17, the “Connecticut Six” said that “we have had no contact with, or personal communication from, the Panel. …”
The turmoil between the parties began in 2003, when Smith supported the election of openly gay Bishop V. Gene Robinson in New Hampshire. The six pastors said they could not remain under the bishop’s authority.
The Connecticut diocese is part of the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church in the United States, which is the American arm of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
_ Daniel Burke
Nuns, Following a Nearby Monastery, Open Doors to BBC Cameras
LONDON (RNS) A British convent has opened the previously unseen world of its tightly knit sisterhood to national television _ at the suggestion of an abbot who reported an “amazing response” when cameras went live in his own monastery a year ago.
At the nuns’ invitation, BBC-TV has gone behind the closed doors at the Poor Clares convent at Arundel, in southern England, to follow four lay women who gave up their everyday lifestyles to spend 40 days and nights with its community of sisters.
The program, entitled “The Convent,” is tentatively scheduled to be televised across Britain on June 14.
The broadcaster promises a candid view of convent life as the cameras follow the four outsiders as they seek to cope without material possessions on their intended “spiritual journey.”
From day one, the BBC says, there were “tears, high emotions and revelations” as the quartet left their modern lives and struggled with the convent’s rigorous routines, 5 a.m. starts and _ almost overwhelmingly at times _ the silence.
“The Convent” follows on the success of “The Monastery,” BBC-TV’s surprise hit last year, when five ordinary men similarly spent 40 days and nights with the Benedictine monks at Worth Abbey, near the Poor Clares.
Within a month, Abbot Christopher Jamison reported, the monastery’s Web site had recorded 40,000 hits, and its monks had received some 3,000 e-mails and letters. The response, the abbot said, was “to a degree that we really hadn’t anticipated.”
The Poor Clares nuns contacted Jamison, who urged them to open their convent _ described as even more secretive than the monastery _ to the cameras.
The nuns have a Web site, where they identify themselves as “sisters, who share prayer, work, laughter and struggles” as they live according to the “forms of life” drawn up in 1253 by St. Clare of Assisi.
_ Al Webb
Quote of the Day: Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick
(RNS) “I’m going to learn Arabic. You have to do something to keep your mind from turning more to jelly than it already has.”
_ Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, whose retirement was accepted by Pope Benedict XVI on May 16, on his post-retirement plans. He was quoted by The Record newspaper in Bergen County, N.J.
KRE/LF END RNS
Editors: To obtain a photos of Lowenthal to accompany the first item, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.
