OUR MISSION STATEMENT

KIVUNIM: New Directions, a year-long program for college students, seeks to forge a lifelong relationship with Israel and the Jewish People through travel across the world - gaining understanding of other cultures, religions and worldviews in order to develop “world-consciousness”.  Based In Jerusalem, we encounter Israel openly:  appreciating its grand and historic achievements together with its unfulfilled goals and aspirations.  We encourage a perception on the part of our students that there is work yet to be done and that they have a role to play in the fulfillment of the Zionist promise.   We introduce students to the world of Arab-Jewish co-existence, perhaps the greatest challenge to the State of Israel and the Jewish People in our time. 

KIVUNIM: New Directions provides ongoing opportunities for service to others with the goal of developing an abiding sense of social responsibility to those in various forms of need who surround us wherever we live .

KIVUNIM: New Directions believes that by educating young Diaspora Jews (and eventually Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike) in this way, we will give voice to a Zionism for the 21st century that can be embraced by all freedom-loving, democracy-building people throughout the world.  We believe that this education will make our students strong, confident, and hopeful advocates for a Middle East of cooperation, mutual acceptance and peace.  We expect our students to return to their college campuses and their future lives with the capacity for and interest in building dialogue in place of confrontation and to become living representations of the words of the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, “If you will it, it is not a dream.”

KIVUNIM: New Directions uses its travels, its academic course of study, its social responsibility/coexistence programming and its spiritual and Jewish life experience to give form and content to the Jewish person for the future.  KIVUNIM seeks, through its travel program, to enable students to interpret the past and understand the present in order to build and insure the future.  For if there is a true goal to Zionism for the 21st century, for the national liberation movement of the Jewish people in the decades to come, it must be to improve the world’s tolerance, mutual respect, commitment to human rights and human dignity, in a just and peaceful world:  to give life to the words of the Hebrew Prophets in modern times.

KIVUNIM: New Directions believes that Jewish Education must  take place within a context of lofty goals and aspirations filled with optimism, tempered by reality and encouraged by the understanding that words have power and that betterment of the world is the central goal of the Jewish people and its religious and national tradition.