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MASA TORAH

About Masa Torah

There are more than two hundred year programs in Israel.
Almost none were built for him.About Masa Torah, a gap year Israel program for Jewish young men with no day school background.

Every June, thousands of Jewish young men graduate from public high schools in North America. Some of them are quietly curious about the tradition they were born into and barely met. A few of them are ready to give a year of their life to finding out what it actually is.

Those guys have almost nowhere to go. The Israel year programs that teach Torah seriously are built around day school graduates, who arrive already reading Hebrew, already knowing the room, already knowing each other. The programs built for beginners tend to be tours with a Jewish flavor rather than a year of substance.

Masa Torah exists to close that gap.

It is a ten month year in Ra'anana where the beginner is the norm rather than the exception. Half of it is a beit midrash designed from scratch for guys opening a sefer for the first time. The other half is the country itself, one travel week every month, north to south, because the fastest way into this is to stand in it.

We cap the founding cohort at fifteen. Not as a marketing line: at fifteen, every young man is genuinely known, gets real one to one time, and cannot disappear into the back of a room. That is the whole design.

Why Ra'anana

A home, not an institution.

Ra'anana is a green, walkable, largely Anglo city twenty five minutes north of Tel Aviv. There are families here who will have a nineteen-year-old at their Shabbat table every week for a year and be glad about it.

That matters more than it sounds. For a guy who did not grow up with this, the thing that changes him is rarely the shiur. It is the fifth Friday night in a row at somebody's house, watching a family do this and finding out he wants it.

Jerusalem can be overwhelming for a first year. Ra'anana is soft enough to land in and close enough to everything to leave from.

The people

Program Director

Eliezer Maier Cohn

Eliezer grew up in Overland Park, Kansas and South Florida, which is to say he did not grow up in the middle of it either. That matters here more than any qualification on paper.

He spent four years in Israel learning, and teaching at yeshivas and year programs in Tel Aviv, Tzfat, Beit Shemesh, and Yerushalayim. Four cities, four very different rooms of guys, which is close to the best training there is for a program whose classroom moves every week. In the same years he founded Kooper Studios, a film and photography company working in corporate film and music video.

He and his wife Esther now live in Oakland. Off hours, he is usually tying tzitzis or out on a trail with Esther, which is a fair summary of the year he is building.

The founding team

Torah Tech

Masa Torah is a sister program from the team behind Torah Tech, the Opportunity Year in Tel Aviv for young men who refuse to choose between the beit midrash and the real world.

Masa Torah is its own organization with its own staff and its own character. What it inherits is a team that has already run a year in Israel, and knows exactly how much work it takes to do it properly.

Visit Torah Tech

Want to be part of building this?

We are talking to educators who love teaching beginners, and to people who want this generation to have somewhere to go. Either way, write to us.

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