Since October 7, 2023, RootOne, like every organization committed to immersive teen travel in Israel, has faced the challenge of helping teens and their families feel able and willing to make the journey. This past summer, RootOne again supported travel at scale, with 4,000 teens participating in programs that criss-crossed Israel. That created the welcome opportunity to focus less on whether teens would get on the plane and more on what Israel travel can make possible once they arrive. During two weeks visiting RootOne-supported programs across the country, I watched North American Jewish teens navigate Hezekiah’s Tunnel, linger in the aisles of Machane Yehuda before Shabbat, and wrestle, sometimes aloud, sometimes quietly, with the complexity of the place they were encountering. I saw moments of joy, reflection, and connection that reinforced a central lesson: Israel travel can be profoundly formative, but travel alone is not enough.

If the Jewish community wants teen trips to Israel to foster enduring connection — to Israel, to Jewish life, and to one another — we must stop thinking of them primarily as summer experiences. We must design them as educational journeys: prepared for before departure, shaped by meaningful encounters on the ground, and sustained after participants return home. This is especially urgent at a moment when Jewish teens are coming of age amid rising antisemitism, deep polarization, and hard questions about Israel. A well-designed Israel experience cannot resolve every question. But it can give young people context, relationships, language, and a sense that they belong to a people and a story larger than themselves.

Begin Before the Plane Takes Off

The educational value of an Israel trip begins well before a teen reaches Ben-Gurion Airport. Pre-trip learning gives participants historical context, Jewish vocabulary, and emotional readiness for what they will encounter. It helps transform a visit to a site from an entertaining stop on an itinerary into an opportunity to ask: What happened here? Why does it matter? And what, if anything, does it ask of me?

Preparation is particularly important when teens will confront subjects that are emotionally and politically complex. Young people deserve more than slogans or carefully curated certainties. They need a foundation that enables them to encounter Israel with curiosity, empathy, confidence, and intellectual honesty. The goal is not to predetermine what participants will think. It is to ensure they have the tools to think, and to keep thinking, once the trip is over.

Make Relationships Central

The most memorable moments of youth travel are often not the monuments, museums, or meals. They are the encounters.

On this summer’s programs, North American teens met Israeli peers, shared music and stories, and found moments of recognition across differences in geography, religious practice, and communal affiliation. At one gathering, teens from a wide range of movements and organizations came together around Israeli music and an unmistakable feeling of collective joy. Elsewhere, groups who did not know one another found themselves sharing Shabbat in Jerusalem. These encounters matter because Jewish peoplehood is not an abstraction. It is experienced through relationships.

For many North American teens, meeting Israeli peers replaces a distant or idealized image of Israel with human connection. It makes room for affection, difference, disagreement, and solidarity. It also invites teens to recognize that Jewish life is larger and more diverse than their own school, synagogue, camp, or neighborhood. Programs should treat teen-to-teen encounters not as an optional add-on, but as a core educational design principle. The same is true of the adults leading these trips. Counselors, guides, and educators must be prepared not merely to manage logistics, but to facilitate reflection, ask difficult questions, and help teens make meaning from what they see.

Build a Bridge Home

The field should also resist measuring success at the airport gate on the flight home. A powerful trip may be a catalyst, but it cannot be the entirety of a teen’s Israel or Jewish education. Its impact depends on what follows: conversations with family, continued learning, relationships with peers, opportunities for leadership, and institutions ready to welcome teens back into communal life with seriousness and purpose. That requires an ecosystem approach. Families, educators, synagogues, schools, youth movements, camps, trip providers, and communal organizations each have a role in helping young people integrate what they experienced. When those partners reinforce one another, a three-week journey can become part of a much longer process of identity formation and belonging.

This is not simply an argument for better programming. It is an argument for a different measure of success.

The question is not only whether a teen enjoyed Israel, though joy matters. Nor is it only whether a teen returns with stronger feelings about the country, though connection matters as well. The deeper question is whether the experience has helped that young person locate themselves within the ongoing story of the Jewish people: connected to Israel, connected to other Jews, and equipped to participate in Jewish life with greater confidence and commitment.

Israel travel can offer a rare and powerful opening for that work. But only if we understand that the destination is not the end of the journey.

Jonathan Fass is a Senior Managing Director at RootOne. RootOne, seeded by a generous gift from The Marcus Foundation and incubated at The Jewish Education Project, aims to maximize teen participation in immersive Israel travel and maximize the lifelong impact and connection of the experience. Learn more at RootOne.org.