KIVUNIM

While it provides an opportunity for international travel and study, KIVUNIM: New Directions is not your typical year-long study abroad program. Aside from taking place between high school and college, what makes KIVUNIM unique is its commitment to building a global consciousness, with a focus on understanding the history and contemporary life of international Jewish communities. Focused on taking North Americans abroad, KIVUNIM participants visit Israel, Greece, Bulgaria, Morocco, India, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Spain and Turkey, among others, to grapple with Jews’ place in a larger world context. 

In addition to its academic and travel focus, KIVUNIM includes social responsibility and co-existence programming as well as spiritual and Jewish life experiences – all in an effort to reconcile the past and present and ensure a hopeful future. To recall the arc of Jewish history is to remember that Jews co-existed peacefully as a minority within many majority and foreign cultures. This is the Jewish experience that KIVUNIM seeks to make known in order to approach today’s complex and fractured world. 

Despite KIVUNIM’s start-up status, founder Peter Geffen has a 40-year track record of building successful programs, including New York City’s Abraham Joshua Heschel School. Anecdotally, comments from participants such as, “It was the single most profound, influential, educational and defining year of my life,” are common. One evaluator says, “Peter Geffen is a very well-respected master educator. He is a wonderful storyteller and is able to make history come alive.” The goal is that part of his vision to award more scholarships takes hold so that this high touch model of education becomes more accessible to those between the coasts.