Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

JERUSALEM — On a recent Shabbat, Jerusalem's Olive Tree Hotel was filled with sounds reminiscent of the Tower of Babel.

In the middle of the street-level lobby, you could hear a mishmash of young Reform and Conservative voices belting out their respective liturgical songs in different corners. Upstairs, out of hearing range, was the Orthodox service.

Also in the lobby was an alternative service where non-religious young people were discussing their beliefs, or lack thereof.

Welcome to Birthright — a program designed to bring first-time visitors, mostly college age, on a free trip to Israel where it was hoped they would discover their Jewishness.

The trip was created especially for the unaffiliated. This certainly was evident at the alternative service where students talked about searching for a place within Judaism where they could reconcile their personal beliefs and experiences. Some said they were searching for a way to be Jewish without believing in God. Others, who were products of mixed marriage, talked about the real possibility that they also would be involved in an interfaith marriage.

Brigitte Lowry of Sebastopol, a dance and math major at U.C. Berkeley, was typical of the Birthright participants. "In high school, I didn't feel connected to Judaism," said Lowry who was one of 80 Bay Area students on the trip, whose visit was sponsored by Hadassah. "I knew that wasn't how you were supposed to feel about religion. In college, I took a comparative religion course. That didn't give me answers. "

Riva Saker of Deerfield Beach, Fla., also was raised with very little Jewish identity. The product of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, she said, "I think we only did Shabbos, in my entire lifetime, about six times."

Knowing the program would draw people like both Lowry and Saker, the organizers ran 14 separate educational programs that were prepared for young skeptics.

Ian Epstein, 21, also from U.C. Berkeley, sought out a course in Jewish meditation. "A lot of people I know are into meditation and Zen and I never knew you could approach that from a Jewish slant," said Epstein. I've met more cool rabbis in three days than in 20 years. They're showing me that Judaism has a spiritual side."

Most participants interviewed said they hadn't really thought too much about the larger issues of Jewish continuity — whether they would marry Jews or raise Jewish children — and this is the first time they have taken the time out of their lives to think about it. The same is true of their examination of their belief, or lack of belief, in God.

The alternative group on Shabbat sat in a circle and discussed their concept of Judaism as a code of conduct, of moral behavior, that does not necessarily need a God.

In fact, said 18-year-old Anna Guercio, "I have a rabbi who doesn't believe in God."

That statement from the Brown University student who attends a secular humanist congregation near Chicago, caught the attention of Carey Simon, 24, of Austin, who approached Guercio after the service.

Simon's father is Jewish, his mother is not, and he was raised with no formal religion at all. He decided to explore his Jewish side through Birthright Israel because even though he does not believe people should base their lives on "dictates or commandments," he is attracted to the "tightness" of Jewish families and Judaism's emphasis on morality.

He said the Birthright Israel trip has changed his perceptions because he now sees that "Judaism is more than just a religion, it's a lifestyle."

Still, he said, there is that problem with the concept of God, something he said he'll continue to struggle with.

He delved deeper into conversation with Guercio, who is considering becoming a secular humanist rabbi. Maybe there is something to being an atheistic Jew, Simon said.

The reason many of them don't believe in God, Rabbi David Aaron told a group of students a day earlier, is that Hebrew school fed them a child's vision of God from which they ran away before they allowed it to evolve into a more sophisticated concept.

Aaron is founder and dean of Isralite, an Israel-based educational program that centers on Kabbalah and Jewish spirituality. It was one of the groups that provided the educational content for the first wave of Birthright Israel.

Along the way to Qumran and Masada, Aaron stopped his busload of students at a synagogue in Mitzpe Jericho and gave them a lecture about how they need to stop thinking of God as a "big blob in the sky."

Aaron, who told the group that he was "not suggesting you believe in God," introduced them to Jewish mystical concepts of God's existence within them, and their role as humans in tikkun olam, repairing the world, through mitzvot.

Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, which brought more than half of the first 6,000 Birthright Israel participants, took the concept of a personal relationship with Judaism a step further through a series of what it called "identity conversations," using sites in Israel as launching points for investigation.

Richard Joel, Hillel's president and international director, said, that one of the goals is "to get them to feel inside a deep sense of passion about owning their Jewishness."

For example, Joel said, before a visit to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the Hillel tours had a session on being Jewish, called "Special or Normal, You Choose." In it, they contrasted the religious nature of Jerusalem with mostly secular Tel Aviv.

The young adults, Joel said, are not simply touring the sites of Israel, but they are being asked to think and discuss how these sites reflect their own identity. It's part of an attempt to get away from today's mantra of "I'm a cultural Jew."

They looked at a text from the Torah that describes the Jews as the chosen people, and a statement from Israel's founding father David Ben-Gurion about how Israel will have become a normal nation when Jewish prostitutes and Jewish thieves speak Hebrew.

Joel said that as a result of their experiences, some participants had decided to have long-delayed bar and bat mitzvahs while they were there, and one cried when she chose a Hebrew name for herself.

Far from being a "Jewish Disneyland," Joel added that Israel, its land and its people can "provoke the Jewish renaissance that the world needs and we can provoke Jewish involvement by using our country as 'Ki mitzion, taytzay Torah' — 'From out of Zion will come forth Torah.'"

Joel said that educating them about Israel's struggles and history is meant to make them think about its place in Jewish history and in their own history.

Birthright participants toured the entire country — they floated in the Dead Sea, listened to settlers on the Golan Heights talk about their uncertain future, went hiking at the Ein Gedi nature preserve, visited Yad Vashem.

Pride in Israel can translate into Jewish connection back home, said Michael Papo, executive vice president of Birthright Israel North America and former executive director of the Koret Foundation in San Francisco.

"That sense of pride will hopefully open doors into people's minds," Papo said, inspire them to "take a Jewish class. Or a program at the JCC or Hillel. Life is full of these kinds of little decisions."