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Masa Activities for Participants
Masa Israel’s Masa Activities for Participants (MAP) initiative provides our nearly 9,000 participants per year with highly subsidized, extracurricular cultural, educational and social programming throughout the year, including:
These programs extend your individual Israel experience beyond that of your program, enhancing your educational and cultural exposure and enabling you to make connections with Masa Israel participants from around the world.
Building Future Leaders Seminar (BFL)
Building Future Leaders (BFL) is a unique professional leadership seminar series that enables participants to develop their own educational/social projects for implementation either in Israel or back in their communities of origin. An important part of the MAP curriculum, BFL enables participants to examine the nature of leadership from a multi-cultural perspective while providing them with the tools they need to lead programs both in Israel and in Jewish communities abroad.
BFL participants develop their projects over the course of three weekend seminars throughout the year, during which they hear from prominent community leaders, work with staff and receive input from their peers.
Participants must apply to course, and must be active and involved initiators who wish to develop and take part in the leadership and enrichment of the Jewish world. Graduates receive professional mentoring throughout the year and, in some cases, support with the implementation of their project in the community. In addition, graduates of the course are granted diplomas of completion by the Jewish Agency and MASA.
Movements in Judaism: “My Way of Being Jewish”
During this shabbaton, participants meet with representatives of the various movements of Judaism and leaders from each community. They learn about the developments and differences between the movements and clarify the unique issues characterizing life Israel by looking at challenges currently facing Jewish communities all over the world
Political Issues and Governing Systems in Israel
During this shabbaton, participants examine the Israeli political system through its institutions, management and challenges, meet with leading academics, political activists, and media commentators, and conclude with an examination of Israeli democracy and its surroundings in the Middle East. Israel-Diaspora Relations Shabbaton The state of Israel, being a Jewish State, serves as a national home for all Jews. Israel and world Jewish society depend on each other and sustain complicated and constantly changing relations. During the shabbaton, participants examine the natural, complicated relationship between the two communities, the historical processes, current situation and tendencies for the future, as well as take part in a unique encounter between participants from various programs and communities in the world.
Forum: Israeli Culture Between Music and Dancing
Participants watch a performance by the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company and have the opportunity to take part in a modern dance workshop or personal encounters with the members of the company. They attend then a concert at the Music Center of Ma’a lot. The staff conclude the forum with a workshop about Israeli identity and culture.
Forum: Israeli Society through Photography, Cinema and Game Theory
MASA participants are invited to explore Israeli society through Israeli cinema between 1947 and the present, tour Jerusalem while looking at the city as a microcosm of Israeli society, and attend a lecture by a Nobel Prize winner on “Game Theory and Israeli
Society.” The forum concludes with the presentation of a spectacular landscape and ethnographic photography exhibit.
Idan Raichel Project Concert
A reception and encounter with Ethiopian youth accompanied by music, folklore and community arts, followed by an exclusive performance and meeting with the Idan Raichel Project band members. The artists discuss the origins of their music and the diverse background the member of the project.
Jewish Identity and Community Leadership
Participants think about the aspects that have brought them, their friends, and their family to the Jewish community and examine the components of personal Jewish identity and how it connects and relates to their community. They look at appropriate places to operate within communities by examining communal needs and determining how to go about exercising leadership in the community.
Vision and Tools – Personal Projects
Participants look at the basic tools to help with the implementation of their initiative and vision, working with fellow participants to create an initial basis for cooperation and receiving feedback.
Community Mapping
Participants learn how to map the different aspects of their community in order to measure and learn about the operations of each community and how their initiative has the potential to influence community priorities.
Leadership in Education
This lecture explores educational psychology and implementation and provides tools that help the creation of meaningful educational work with groups and individuals. The lecture reveals the enigma of the world of leadership and provides the implementation tools for different style of leadership in educational or societal work.
Delivering a Message: Body Language and Rhetoric
These sessions bring techniques and tools to conveying messages in the correct manner while using effective body language. Participants also learn techniques related to rhetoric, debating, and persuasive communication.
Fundraising in the Jewish world
Financial support is necessary for the operation of any project. Participants gain tools to raise money in the Jewish world while learning about central organizations, their processes, and how to work with them in order to succeed in the realm of development.
Networking in the Jewish World
The world of education and global Jewish communal work has a variety of projects running around the world. Participants are exposed to other organizations and leaders within the Jewish world and learn skills to build connections with those who can to help promote their initiative.
"The worldwide Jewish connections I have experienced through this BFL seminar and living and studying in Israel have given me an even greater appreciation of and respect for Judaism as both a religion and a culture. I now know with great certainty that I want to be involved with the Jewish community throughout my life and I know I want to work to make the community stronger, healthier and enduring. The ideas, tools and resources that we have gained in BFL have prepared us well to begin our Jewish leadership journeys."
-- Sophie Krentzman, University of Haifa
Art Powered Encounters
Amy Shafran, WUJS Israel – Denver, Colorado
This art program encourages youth living in Israel and the US to explore the power of art as a way to connect to their own identity and community culture, as well as to those of peers in a different country. Art provide a safe and nonjudgmental environment for youth to explore their own identities, as well as new aspects about personalities and situations. This initiative will enhance the quality of life of the participants with specifically tailored art/poetry programs designed to help youth tap into their self-awareness and creative potential, while increasing cultural awareness.
The youth are encouraged to work with the objective of learning more about not only themselves, but also about peers in a different country. Initially, the youth will exchange letters or email. As a class they will create friendships and increase their understandings of youth outside their own comfort zone. They will work as group on an art project on the same theme as the youth in the other country. As a result, they will realize the similarities and common interests they share with their peers across the ocean.
Bible Raps Project
Matt Bar, Pardes – Iowa City, Iowa
The Bible Raps Project will be an album of raps, each based on a prominent Biblical story or Jewish figure. Along with the album, the initiative will include a curriculum aimed at young Jews from all religious backgrounds and streams. The Bible Raps Project will include curricular materials for each track. The curriculum, relating directly to the rap's subject matter, will further the innovative nature of the initiative through the use of Talmudic page construction, with the following components:
Bible raps will be a bridge between the overt curriculum of Jewish education and the informal education occurring through what students' listen to on their iPods many hours each day. Instead of kids singing to themselves, "booty, booty, booty everywhere," they will be singing "ha shomer achi anoki," thus providing an access point for Jewish education. This access point will be exploited by a curriculum and a website and sold as product to the Jewish educational world.
Understanding Immigrant Communities in Israel and the US
Jane Yamaykin, WUJS Israel – Cary, North Carolina
The project proposed here is a program to be run by teens for other teens at camps and in youth group settings, to introduce and discuss the issues relating to absorption, assimilation, and integration of new cultures and languages into existing societies. In studying immigrant communities, similarities and differences are revealed between the situations of immigrant community relationships in Israel and the US. This discussion allows for further dialogue and greater understanding of both immigrant communities and their absorbing countries, with an emphasis on Israel.
The program itself will incorporate research on immigrant communities, governmental agencies set up to handle immigration, and personal accounts of people living in the communities with some attention given to historical perspectives on immigration. By relating immigrant issues occurring in Israel to those teens are more familiar with in the US, teens will gain a greater understanding about Israeli society and be able to explore similarities in challenges faced by Israel and the US. Additionally, teens will develop a heightened awareness of and sensitivity towards the struggles of immigrant communities in adapting to their new homelands.
The Israel Connection
Jorie Sapir, Tel Aviv University
The Israel Connection is a curriculum for a series of six one and a half hour classes after school for Jewish children, in which they will learn about Israeli culture and a simple conversational Hebrew. The goal of The Israel Connection is to give Jewish children between the ages of 8 and 10 a chance to get to know Israel in a fun, non-religious setting. Building positive associations with Israel for American children at a young age will make them more likely to choose to visit and support Israel as they get older.
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| Meet Masa Alumni |
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| Alumni Testimonials |
 As a Chicagoan with degrees in biology, Michael Rosenbaum decided to go to Israel to explore possible career paths in the sciences. On the Masa Israel-accredited internship program, Career Israel, he was able to take part in a cutting-edge research project at Tel Aviv University and stay up-to-date in the field while applying for a masters degree in science high school education.
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