Youthful envoys

The Young Ambassadors program recruits high-school students to teach them communication skills and spread around a little good PR.

By MIRIAM KRESH
The Young Ambassadors program (photo credit: SHNEUR DOLEV)
The Young Ambassadors program
(photo credit: SHNEUR DOLEV)
Small country, big PR issues: that’s us. Israel has an enormous need for people with diplomatic and communication skills – not only in the field of diplomacy, but in everyday interaction within communities.
The Young Ambassadors program, fruit of retired ambassador Yitzhak Eldan’s vision, provides promising teenagers with the ability to master these skills and realize their potential as leaders.
In the five years since the Young Ambassadors program has been implemented, 2,500 youngsters chosen from close to 100 schools have participated in the course. They come from everywhere in the country, with a special effort made in periphery towns; recently, a course for students from Israel’s Druse communities has been set up as well.
The heart of the Young Ambassadors program is developing students’ sense of social responsibility, equipping them with tools for making a difference in their environment.
Metro interviewed Eldan and two students in the program, Or Morshtein and Liran Michaeli, both 15 – or as they endearingly made a point of emphasizing, 15-and-a-half. Both speak fluent English, and both study at the Alliance school in Ramat Aviv.
Eighth- to 10th-grade students attend the after-school program on a weekly basis, for two hours. Each student must commit to volunteering in the community; some lead youth groups, others work with Holocaust survivors, the local Magen David Adom or similar organizations.
“Those who don’t volunteer can’t participate,” asserts Eldan. “It’s essential, part of learning how to become young leaders in their own communities.”
Liran enthuses, “The course already influences the way I relate to everyone, even old friends; the knowledge I’ve acquired, I try to share with everyone.”
Or provides another example. “I study physics. Very few girls ever took physics; we managed to change that. It took some work and discussion, but more girls study physics in my school now. It’s not all work for us here in the course, most of us enjoy after-school activities; I myself belong to a dance troupe.”
By the 11th grade, the students have mastered what Eldan calls “the diplomatic toolbox”: etiquette and manners, personal and cross-cultural communication techniques, the ability to speak confidently in front of an audience. At the end of the year, each student writes and delivers a speech about what it is to be an Israeli. The speeches are often very moving, as the kids express pride in their roots and love of Israel, sometimes revealing things about themselves they’ve never articulated.
The second year culminates in a group trip to a capital city abroad. The program has sent 10 delegations abroad in the past two years, each with about 25 participants.
It’s a week of intense activity where the young future educators and leaders meet with the local Jewish community, visit a non-Jewish school to mingle with students their age, and meet foreign diplomats, business leaders and politicians. All that in order to get a picture of how foreigners perceive Israel and Israelis – and spread around a little good PR.
“The trip is the culmination of everything they’ve learned in the two years,” explains Eldan. “These are the only Israeli kids to have gone behind the scenes in an Israeli embassy, meeting the ambassador and learning what this outpost of external defense is and how it represents Israel. Then we take them to the local foreign affairs ministry, where they talk to diplomats and business leaders, and hear about relations between the country and Israel. We also take them to the local parliament to show them the workings of that parliament vis-à-vis the Knesset.”
An important part of the tour is meeting the Jewish community. Via community leaders, the students learn about local anti-Semitism, the community’s standing in the general population and its history; at a visit to the synagogue, they talk with the chief rabbi. A crucial point driven home to the youngsters is the danger of assimilation. “Assimilation is a greater threat to Jewry than terrorism,” maintains Eldan.
The Young Ambassadors also volunteer at a local charity and visit the local Jewish museum. Eldan makes a point of organizing a commemorative ceremony for victims of the Holocaust on each trip, in which the group visits the Jewish cemetery, says the Kaddish prayer and sings “Hatikva.”
One of the trip’s highlights is the visit to the local Jewish school.
“You can’t imagine how immediately, the kids fall into each other’s arms,” says Eldan humorously.
“They sing together and talk endlessly; they split up into groups where they discuss all kinds of issues.
Then we invite the local kids to come to Israel, because we’re not only visiting abroad, we’re very eager to invite visitors here.”
The most recent delegation of Young Ambassadors visited Vienna for a week. Liran notes, “Or and I have both been abroad with our families, but the trip with the Young Ambassadors program was entirely different.
Ambassador Eldan kept reminding us that ‘we’re not tourists now.’ “You feel like you came to work and to do good work, not to tour. You feel that you made a difference, that you influenced the way the people we met see Israel now. It was terrific.”
Another essential aspect of the trip is creating dialogue between Jewish and non-Jewish teens; the group visits a local non-Jewish school or the international school. Or says, “The kids at the Austrian school don’t know much about Israel; they really thought we all get around on camels. We were able to show them the reality is different, that we’re a developed and thriving country and that we have lives similar to theirs, with friends and society like them.
“At the Jewish school, we showed them that we’re always with them, that they always have a place to come to here. Apart from representing Israel, we also want to demonstrate solidarity and let them see they’re not alone.”
“What was really interesting,” Liran adds, “was to see how the kids abroad are so different from us, in their behavior, the way they dress (“In jackets and ties!” chimes in Or), their manner of speaking, even the way they walk.”
How do the Israeli and Austrian students communicate? “At the Jewish school, the kids speak Hebrew,” says Or. “The non-Jewish kids speak English, as all of us do. The course has special classes entirely in English, to encourage our fluency.”
“We’d been warned that Austrians are cold, that it’s hard to make connections with them,” recounts Liran. “But in both schools, the kids were very interested in us and really wanted to know what goes on with us in Israel. We talked about issues and events that don’t get published in their newspapers. We talked as peers, about our lives, what we do in our free time.
“It was easy to make friends. We keep up the connections we made, with the Jewish kids and the non-Jewish kids, through WhatsApp groups.”
Liran concludes: “One of our goals was to give people a positive image of Israel and Israelis, to show them that Israel has the best youth in the world.
We got them to ask questions and learn. The questions we ourselves asked wherever we went, how we showed our interest in everything, the things we talked about, our exchanges with people and the conclusions we shared – I believe we changed their attitude towards Israel in a positive way.
“We showed them that Israel is an important part of the world.”