NEW YORK — After Sunday’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, Batyah Levine received an e-mail checking on her safety.
In fact, after every such attack, Levine, a Brandeis student spending her junior year in Israel, hears from her onsite campus coordinator.
“Brandeis does not abandon their students in Israel,” said Levine, who is studying at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Not every American university is like Brandeis, however.
As Israeli universities gear up for spring semester, most American universities have canceled or suspended their study abroad programs.
That’s the chief obstacle to attempts to attract American students willing to study in Israel.
In addition, fearful parents, a stream of State Department travel advisories and the threat of war with Iraq have contributed to radical drops in American enrollment at Israeli universities.
The universities that attract the most American students — Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion and Hebrew universities — will host 245 Americans this year, including the two regular semesters and the summer session.
That’s only a quarter of pre-intifada enrollment, according to the universities — though one insider thinks even these numbers are inflated.
College counselors no longer dispense brochures on Israeli programs or suggest them to students, so Israeli universities have become more dependent on advocacy efforts on American campuses, according to Orli Gil, Israel’s consul for academic affairs in the United States.
“In the past, most of the work was more or less done through word of mouth,” said Rachel Bar-El, director of the Lowy School for Overseas Students at Tel Aviv University. Today “we are trying to send people who are very charismatic” to campus, who “can approach students and speak to them, give them some sort of picture.”
Some 80 American students enrolled in Tel Aviv University last fall, down from 120 in fall 2001. Another 40 students are due in the spring, up slightly from last year.
Before the intifada began, about 200 students came for the fall semester, and many stayed for the whole year. Another 300 came in the spring.
In any case, Bar-El sees a change in the way students react to terrorism.
Last year, “whenever something happened it had an immediate effect on the way people reacted,” causing students to withdraw from school, for example.
After this week’s attack in Tel Aviv, however, none of the students scheduled to come for spring semester withdrew, she said.
“People are starting to get used to the idea, and they start feeling that if they want to come study about the Middle East, they should do it no matter what,” she said.
Rebecca Weinstein, director of Ben-Gurion University’s office of student services, agreed that students were more tentative last year.
Still, Ben-Gurion’s American enrollment has hovered at 60 percent of its pre-intifada numbers, even though Beersheva largely has been spared the terrorism that has hit other parts of Israel.
Only 12 students are slated to come in the spring, joining 22 who are there for the year.
The university is feeling the pinch, unable to offer as many courses as it would like, Weinstein said.
“Our decreased enrollment surely goes hand in hand with American universities canceling their programs in Israel, which goes hand in hand with the exacerbated violence in Israel,” she said.
Educational institutions such as the University of Colorado began suspending their partnerships with Israeli universities in the fall of 2000, when the State Department issued a travel advisory to Israel after the intifada erupted.
Several major campuses, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California system and Indiana University, suspended their programs last spring.
Students from