One2One: Online Encounters Between Jewish Teens Around the World

Started in 2021, in the midst of the global pandemic, ENTER: The Jewish Peoplehood Alliance (ENTER) launched One2One, an online mifgash (educational encounter) between Jewish high school aged teens who live in Israel and North America. To date 7,200 teens have participated in an online mifgash, which involves two teens, meeting once a week, over five weeks for at least 30 minutes each meeting.

This report focuses on One2One’s development of “the online mifgash” since its inception in 2021, the contribution to the field of Israel education, to One2One’s strategic partners and the participating teens.

The Virtual Mifgash
“The Mifgash” is an educational methodology developed in the 1980s by travel programs bringing Diaspora Jewish teens to Israel. The Mifgash has since taken root as a basic component in many of the educational venues involving Diaspora Jews traveling to Israel, and Israelis traveling abroad, including programs aimed at adults.

One2One’s innovation is the development of an online mifgash. The in-person mifgash requires travel, which is costly and involves high levels of organizational and communal investment. The goal of the online mifgash is to enable the beneficial outcomes associated with in-person mifgashim, without requiring international travel. Until One2One there was no systematic development of the online mifgash in a manner that can reach large numbers of participants.

The report shows how One2One utilizes three elements to enable online mifgashim, 1) technology to enable the online meetings; 2) organizational partnerships which are essential for recruiting the participating teens and enabling the online mifgashim to contribute to broader educational processes; and 3) appropriate educational design.

One2One: Online Encounters Between Jewish Teens Around the World, Ezra Kopelowitz Ph.D., Research Success Technologies, Ltd., July 23, 2023

Learn more about the program’s impact and its contribution to the broader fields of Israel and Jewish education in this essay in the Peoplehood Papers by Yael Rosen, One2One Program Director, and Dr. Scott Lasensky, One2One Senior Advisor