NEW YORK –Jennifer Kessler of Los Angeles always knew she would spend a year between high school and college studying at a girls’ yeshiva in Israel.
Her modern Orthodox day school, Shalhevet, usually sends at least a third of the graduating class to Israel, and among the children of her parents’ friends, “everyone” goes to Israel.
But when it came time this year for Kessler, 17, to firm up her plans to attend Midreshet Lindenbaum, a prestigious program in Jerusalem, it wasn’t easy.
Her parents, who canceled a family trip to Israel due to concerns about the violence, started worrying. Several other L.A.-area teenaged girls that Kessler knew had been planning to study in Israel decided not to go.
And a close friend studying in Gush Etzion, a bloc of settlements near Jerusalem that have long been an outpost of the English-speaking modern Orthodox community, complained to her that the drive-by shootings on the road to Jerusalem kept him virtual hostage at his yeshiva for days on end.
Nonetheless, Kessler remained cautiously committed to her upcoming year in Israel.
In the Orthodox world, she is fairly typical.
While American Jewish tourism to Israel is way down, and American enrollment has dropped sharply at secular institutions like Hebrew University of Jerusalem, post-high school yeshiva programs in Israel are — so far — an exception to the trend.
*Almost 2,400 American yeshiva and seminary students will be studying in Israel starting this month, according to Sheryl Stein, a spokeswoman for El Al Israel Airlines. The number is “a drop” from last year, “but not significant,” Stein said. However, she could not provide statistics for last year.
*Yeshiva University, centrist Orthodoxy’s flagship institution, reports that almost 1,000 recent male and female high school graduates will be under its auspices in Israel at Bar-Ilan University and 36 yeshivot and seminaries, the same as last year. Y.U. officials said very few people left in the middle of the last school year, and virtually no students registered for this year have canceled their plans.
*Yeshivat Har Etzion, a boys’ yeshiva in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, expects 45 students this year — the same as last year — and had to turn away a number of applicants.
Of course, these numbers could still decrease during the school year if the violence intensifies or there is a major bombing targeting young adults.
Why, at a time when Israel’s tourism industry is on the rocks, are Orthodox students still flocking to the Jewish state?
Yeshiva students aren’t getting a free trip, unlike Birthright Israel participants — one of the only other steady sources of young travelers to the Jewish state since the Palestinian uprising began last September.
And a year at a post-high school yeshiva program costs an average of $10,000 plus airfare, according to Rabbi Shalom Berger, a teacher at Midreshet Lindenbaum and a faculty member at Bar-Ilan University’s Lookstein Center for Jewish Education.
Kessler said she decided to stick with her plans, in part because she’s not the type to “back out of things” and, having already deferred admission at the University of Pennsylvania for a year, wasn’t sure what she would do if she stayed at home.
But ideology also played a part.
“My mother has always said if people stop going to Israel then the Palestinians have won,” she said.
Going to Israel, Kessler said, seemed like an “opportunity to do something good for my people.”
Rachel Singerman, of Baltimore, said, “It makes a difference that we’re going to be with people in a time of crisis. I wish more people would.”
Singerman, who is attending Orot Israel College, which is in the West Bank, 20 minutes outside Tel Aviv, grew up in a family that commemorated Israeli Independence Day with a special meal each year. She says she has wanted to make aliyah since she was a small child.
In addition to ideology and idealism — and studies have shown centrist Orthodox Jews have stronger feelings of connection to Israel than liberal and unaffiliated Jews — other factors have kept enrollment fairly stable at post-high school yeshiva programs, say observers.
For one thing, pre-college Israel study has become a standard rite of passage for modern, or centrist, Orthodox Jews. In a 1999 study, Berger found that close to 90 percent of modern Orthodox young adults spend a full year studying Torah in Israel following high school graduation.
The fact that yeshiva programs are the communal norm means that most potential participants either have friends or family members who recently attended them and can vouch for their safety.
Another reason Orthodox study programs aren’t affected the way other Israel programs are, say yeshiva officials, is because their primary focus is on study that can last from morning to night, rather than traveling around the country.
“They’re going to a place to stay and the purpose is to learn and develop in their religion and within themselves,” Schuster said. “They’re not just going there and hanging out on the streets.”
And most programs have restricted travel further with intensified safety procedures. Many programs brief students regularly on the situation, have extensive sign-out procedures and — in some schools — require that students who are traveling call in to the school after major terrorist incidents, so that the school can notify parents that everyone is safe.
Despite the travel restrictions, Michael Kranzler, Y.U.’s director of admissions, said the same percentage of last year’s students are opting to stay for a second year as they always do.
Many students reported, Kranzler said, that the intifada “simply intensified the experience of the year.”
“My Israel experience is going to be really different from other people’s experience in the past,” Kessler said. “I’m not going to be able to explore and not going to have the freedom that’s the trademark.”
However, she is looking forward to the intensive education.
“I think the entire year will be more focused on learning than it has in the past,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s a bad thing — that’s a good thing.”