What happens when 20 Israelis from a wide range of professional, religious, and ethnic backgrounds spend a week together in New York City? Connection. Understanding. And an eye-opening look at the differences between the same groups on two very different sides of the world.
The visitors are this year’s cohort of CoLab, a 10-year-old UJA initiative that brings together Israeli citizens from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds to collaborate on year-long initiatives important to their communities and Israel as a whole.
Participants can work in a wide range of fields, bridging areas from sustainability to social services, parenting to employment, advocacy to the arts, tourism to technology.
The goal, according to Ezra Moses, a UJA grant manager for Israel programs, is to have the makeup of each cohort reflective of Israeli society.
Like Themselves, But Different
At the end of each program year, participants convene in New York City for a week. CoLab Director Dafna Dor calls the trip “an opportunity to meet the Jewish community in New York and understand the relations and the challenges,” with the same being true for those they visit in New York.
The cohort visits organizations that relate to its initiatives — this year they visited the Brooklyn Hub, Covenant House, and the Upper West Side’s Congregation Ansche Chesed, among other places.
The meetings, Dafna shares, allow the CoLab participants and their New York hosts to “hold up a mirror” to see themselves and others from different points of view. They learn, for example, that the groups that make up a majority in Israel are a minority in New York. Or that being Arab or Haredi in New York is different than it is in Israel.
Issues explored by this year’s participants include such topics as violence in the Arab community, the impact of technology and innovation on different socioeconomic groups, and how NGOs are impacted by innovation.
A Journey to Understanding
For Tamar Perlstein, a self-described right-wing Israeli journalist and mother of four, CoLab offered a path away from the anger she felt in the aftermath of October 7.
She explained the animosity she felt toward the Israeli Haredi community, because they were exempt from serving in the military, while so many around her, including three of her own children, were not.
“I didn’t want to keep this feeling,” she says. “I didn’t want to go around with so much hate.”
At CoLab, Tamar worked one-on-one with people from groups she had little or no contact with before. Together, her small group developed an initiative to use “deliberative democracy” to address divisive issues and help citizens feel more represented.
One of her collaborators was Yossi Klar, founder and CEO of an organization that offers support for graduates of the ultra-Orthodox education system that enlist in the Israeli army.
“In this year, I found out so many things about my brothers and sisters,” Tamar recalls. When she went home in tears, she said, sometimes it was because she acknowledged the grief of another community and sometimes it because she felt something “changing inside.”
As a result of her experience, she has switched career paths to work in the social sector, where she feels she can do more good.
A Microcosm of Israeli Society
This year’s cohort also included members who were Bedouin, Muslim, and Christian Arabs, as well as Jewish. Atara Haffner, the only Haredi woman who participated, is founder and director of an NGO that focuses on dance, culture, and the arts.
As part of the group, she shares, “I learned to fight for my truth even when it wasn’t easy.”
“We learn how to be good to each other, even if we disagree,” Dafna adds.
An Ongoing Impact
Collaborations are not limited to the year period, nor to specific cohorts; several ongoing initiatives have been formed by participants from different years. Ongoing groups include Conflict Resolution Theater, with facilitators from Arab and Jewish communities; Voices from the Heart, which has created choirs for homeless and sexually abused women to regain their voices; and Haredi Students Communities, which provides a support network for Haredi young adults pursuing higher education.
“We have learned that it’s possible to have respectful conversations around really hard topics that allow people to reassess their own thinking,” Ezra Moses says. “Participants have influence over others in their particular segment of society, which really has a ripple effect. This is a shared fabric of society we’re trying to develop.” To learn more about CoLab, visit https://colab.org.il/en.