Participants in the Nativ pre-college gap year program, which is affiliated with the Conservative movement, divide their time between study in Jerusalem and volunteering elsewhere in Israel. Courtesy of Nativ
(JTA) — The Conservative movement is relaunching its Israel gap-year program in 2026, after shuttering operations completely over a year and a half ago.
The four-decade-old Nativ program was put on hiatus in 2024 after it failed to recruit enough students to be sustainable.
Now, the organization that operates Nativ — United Synagogue Youth, the youth movement of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism — says it believes an overhaul will make the program more attractive to students picking from an increasingly crowded field of gap-year options.
Instead of sending students from Jerusalem to kibbutzes and small villages for volunteer work, Nativ will now have students spend the second half of the school year in Tel Aviv, with a home base in the trendy Florentin neighborhood. And students will be able to earn college credits and complete internships, in a change from the past.
“We heard from families of our participants that that portion of it wasn’t as meaningful and tactile as it was years ago,” Julie Marder, USY’s senior director, said in an interview about the time spent in small communities. “Their kids were looking for more.”
To pull off the new program, USY is partnering with Aardvark Israel, a gap-year clearinghouse that already operates four other tracks, including ones focused on tech, food and volunteering. Aardvark maintains apartments in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and has a collaboration with Portland State University that allows its participants to earn college credits. Nativ will benefit from Aardvark’s economies of scale while offering participants their own seminars, Shabbat retreats and field trips, according to Aardvark’s website.
Students might also be able to study at the Conservative Yeshiva at the movement’s Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center, but that will no longer be a core component of the program.
Nativ is expecting a relatively small cohort for the first year of its relaunch: about 15 to 20 students, similar to how many were enrolled the last year the program took place. But Marder — who herself did Nativ after high school — said she expects growth and ultimately aims to grow to 40 students a year.
“We know we’re going to build up to it,” she said. “We are also working very closely with our congregations and our rabbis for recommendations for the program.”
The relaunch comes at a complicated time for gap-year programs serving non-Orthodox U.S. Jews. (Orthodox teens more typically enroll for a year at an Israeli yeshiva or seminary before returning to the United States for college.) A pluralistic program operated by Young Judaea is thriving, and newer egalitarian programs such as one by the Shalom Hartman Institute is drawing some teens who might have attended Nativ in the past. Hadar, which is growing from its roots as a “traditional egalitarian” yeshiva, is in the process of launching its own program.
Marder said she believes Nativ can carve out a compelling niche.
“It has been, I would say, most common for our teens to participate in Young Judea or Hartman,” she said. “We feel that our program is kind of that space in the middle, where they’ll have a lot of the fun and internships and social programs and things like that, and the opportunity to study — but it’s not as intense study as what Hartman is.”
The relaunch follows several other changes to youth and teen programming in the Conservative movement, which has been shrinking for decades. A decade ago, facing a budget shortfall, the movement suspended its college program, KOACH, following a year when it narrowly survived through emergency fundraising; the movement does not operate on college campuses today. And in 2024, soon after announcing the Nativ suspension, the movement announced that it was overhauling USY to eliminate regional chapters, raising concerns among the movement’s adherents about whether a pipeline to Israel programs was being attenuated.
The new program will cost students around $29,000, and Marder said scholarships will be available. According to an FAQ posted online, the movement raised $80,000 toward a $125,000 target for a scholarship fund in just the past few weeks. Some funds from an emergency campaign in the last year before the suspension also remain and will be redirected toward scholarship, the FAQ says.
