ImpactAliyah supports, organizes and enables students to move to Israel and make a difference. It enables Aliyah-minded students to become agents of positive change in Israeli society, the global Jewish community, and the world, using Israel as a platform. ImpactAliyah operates by building communities of Israel activists on college campuses throughout North America who are emboldened to ask and search for answers to the simple question "how can I best contribute to Israel?"  These communities are built around 10 day winter-break Focus trips to Israel, where students engage with Israel's opportunities and challenges.  During the semester prior to the trip, ImpactAliyah communities build the trip's content, design its programs and work towards outcomes that will contribute to Israel.  In the semester following the winter trip, students cultivate the connections they build on the program, and bring back programs which will serve to expose the greater campus community to the challenges and opportunities they learned about on the trip.  We see this as a way of building a community of leaders who connect to Israel in a deep and meaningful way, and serve as a bridge between Israel and the American Jewish community.

At Scripps College in Claremont, California, Eli Winkelman served as president of the Hillel student board for a few years and founded Challah for Hunger. Challah for Hunger (CfH) volunteers bake challah from scratch every week, and sell it to the campus community to raise money for the victims of and awareness of the genocide in Sudan. In two and a half years, Claremont CfH sent more than $30,000 to humanitarian relief efforts in Sudan and Chad, and facilitated the writing of hundreds of letters to Washington. Eli is now helping students at other campuses start CfH groups. 

A founding editor-in-chief of Chalav U'Dvash, Brandeis' Journal of Zionist Thought, Jason Lustig (22) runs independent research focused on key issues of Israel, Zionism and the Jewish people. At the same time, Jason is a technology expert who seeks to utilize modern tools to solve ancient problems--and currently serves as the CTO of a Jerusalem-based company. International Communications VP of United Synagogue Youth back in the day, he continues to fight the same battles to help the Jewish world enter the 21st century while retaining its roots with antiquity.

The Bible Raps Project is a new initiative aimed at exciting young Jewish students about Judaism, Jewish Heritage, and Jewish texts.  Built around a series of raps that draw on texts from the Bible and Midrash, The Bible Raps Project will resonate with Jewish youth in a way that traditional media cannot by fusing rap music, this generation's most powerful mode of cultural communication, with Jewish discourse. It is an innovative strategy, consisting of professional grade music and an accompanying curriculum, to express the value of Jewish Peoplehood and cultural relevancy among young Jews while injecting needed excitement into the Jewish educational experience.

 

Ori Salzberg is a 23 year old music producer and student of philosophy and musicology at the Hebrew University. He enjoys rock, hip hop and alternative music and is very connected with the traditional Jewish and Hasidic music. Ori is constructig a small home studio for recording in an intimate, relaxed setting, in which he hopes to produce many albums and other various projects. He is part of a commuinty of young creative thinkers and performers in Nachlaot, an old neighborhood of Jerusalem, and hopes to release some of the building energy and crystalize it in recordng and performance. Ori plays guitar, percussion, sings, and is currently exploring digital music programming as well. Always exploring and looking for new connections, Ori is a dreamer, but also grounded in this concrete life, and is hopeful to utilize the summer for planning practical ways of attaining some of these goals.