Claire met Tony on a dating app in 2023. She’s Jewish, involved in Boston’s Jewish community. He’s not Jewish. When Claire first suggested that she and Tony participate on Honeymoon Israel, Tony’s response was immediate: he didn’t want to go. Tony was nervous about safety and security. His concern was entirely reasonable. He and Claire had just found each other and had just built something precious, and he wanted to protect it.

But nine days in Israel, in January 2026, changed everything. Not just for Claire and Tony as a couple, but for how they understand themselves as participants in Jewish life.

Since its founding in 2015, Honeymoon Israel has brought more than 3,300 couples to Israel. The cohorts reflect the growing reality of Jewish life in America. Approximately 70% of participants are multi heritage, the demographic least likely to maintain connection to Jewish life without deliberate engagement. And more than half of them are visiting Israel for the first time.

Most critically, the cohorts are built of 20 couples from the same city, all in a committed relationship, with the goal of creating lasting Jewish community and connection.

Today, nearly 75% of non-Orthodox young American Jews are in multi heritage relationships. For many of these young Jewish adults – especially with a non-Jewish partner – connection to Judaism and Israel is no longer inherited or socially reinforced. After October 7, navigating these diverse relationships has become even more complicated.

Ava’s family is Catholic. Her husband Perry is Jewish and had spent time in Israel previously. They got engaged in October 2023 and just days later, October 7th happened. Suddenly the country Perry loved was under attack. Ava watched her new fiancé navigate deep grief and anxiety about his extended family. She wanted to understand what he was experiencing. Her friends asked why Perry was so invested in Israel. Some questioned how he could support it at all.

Ava’s hesitation to participate was about more than just safety. It was social. “There is definitely a social cost to traveling to Israel,” she noted. For new friends and colleagues, she framed it as an “international trip.” In today’s environment, the barrier facing young couples isn’t what might happen to them in Israel. It’s what their friends, colleagues, and social circles will think of them for going. According to the Greater Boston Jewish Community Study of 2025, 40% of Americans ages 18-29 identify as somewhat or strongly anti-Zionist.

For both Tony and Ava, once they landed in Tel Aviv, their fears evaporated and their understanding of Israel and Jewish life transformed completely.

The Impact on Young Families and Jewish Identity

For every Honeymoon Israel couple the trip is about the future shape of a family’s Jewish life.

Claire’s decision to marry Tony meant making choices about Jewish life that she might not have had to make otherwise. With Tony at her side—supportive but unfamiliar with Jewish tradition—she had to become the guide. That responsibility, combined with the community they built on the trip, had a big impact.

The impact of the trip for Claire and Tony was profound. “I got pregnant on Honeymoon Israel, in Tel Aviv,” Claire said. She is now in her final weeks of pregnancy, expecting a son who will arrive soon—a child conceived during the trip, born into a Jewish identity that his parents have chosen and embraced.

Ava married into Jewish life and had to adjust to her husband’s deepening religious commitment after October 7th. For Perry, who grew up conservative and studied in Israel during college, the country had always meant something. But the war changed the intensity of his connection. It became personal in a way his family’s traditions hadn’t quite made it. Before October 7th, Ava and Perry had casual conversations about raising their kids Jewish and having a Christmas tree. After October 7th, those conversations became more urgent. Perry needed Ava to understand not just intellectually but viscerally why Israel mattered.

The trip was transformative for their relationship and how they navigated their family’s identity. Ava spent nine days in a Jewish country, met Israeli couples, learned the history from guides and Rabbis, and absorbed the lived experience of Jewish identity in its homeland. But the part that hit her hardest was simple: “the people, the food, the nature, and the Israeli couples they got to connect to.” It wasn’t ideology or politics. It was humanity.

“It allowed us to explore the question as part of a community,” Claire said, “if we’re able to see how other couples are coming to compromises and solutions.”

This is perhaps the deepest impact of the trip: it gives couples permission to build their own Jewish home without guilt or isolation.

Claire and Tony are raising their son Jewish. Tony took a Jewish 101 class with Rabbi Oberstein afterward, not because he converted but because he wants to be a partner in his son’s Jewish life, not an observer. He’s learning the basics, and he’s found that Judaism’s ethical framework, focused on being a good person, resonates with him.

What moved Claire most was watching Tony explore Judaism openly during a session on Avraham Infeld’s framework for understanding Judaism. He was the only person at the table talking about the “Mt. Sinai” leg of the table, asking real questions and getting answered fully and without condescension.

Embracing Complexity

Tony had virtually no knowledge about Israel. He’d agreed to the trip, but Israel was foreign territory. Over nine days of speakers, historical sites, conversations, and being immersed in the country, he and Claire built a shared framework for understanding a complex place.

Ava’s transformation was even more dramatic. “Seeing it for myself is different,” she said. “I have a much better sense of the reality. I have been able to humanize and normalize Israel and the Israeli experience for all of my friends and family.” For someone who hadn’t grown up in Jewish community or understood the place of Israel in the Jewish story, the trip unlocked the ability to speak about it from lived experience rather than from secondhand anxiety or media narrative.

Rabbi Andrew Oberstein, who co-led the trip, became a crucial guide for Claire and Tony, answering detailed questions about Judaism, Israeli politics and society with patience and nuance – never dismissing skepticism, just helping them see beyond the headlines.

The HMI trip doesn’t shy away from complexity. It leans into it. As Project Prism: A New Map of Young Adult Jewish Life, released by the Jim Joseph Foundation has shown, young adults want spaces that can “hold complexity, plurality, and nuance without social penalty.” They feel like Jewish spaces are judgmental, don’t tolerate dissent, and demand ideological conformity. In a moment when young Americans increasingly see Israel as ideologically fraught, Honeymoon Israel has rebuilt its entire trip architecture through honest engagement with complexity, with the contradictions, the beauty and the pain, the ideals and where they fall short.

The trip gave these couples a shared understanding, built on lived experience rather than filtered through screens and headlines.

Community as the Long-Lasting Gift

If seeing Israel mattered, so did who they saw it with.

Ava and Perry applied to HMI because they did not have a community of other couples like them. “All of Perry’s Jewish friends are in relationships with other Jewish people and none of my friends are in relationships with Jewish people,” said Ava. “It can be difficult to find a community that understands some of the growing pains that have come from learning each other’s culture. We want to build a community before we have children so that we can have people in our lives with similar experiences.”

The community that emerges from a Honeymoon Israel trip lasts far longer than anyone expects—and includes Israelis as well. One of the most powerful elements of the redesigned Honeymoon Israel trips is the mifgash—”encounter.” Rather than panel discussions or curated speaker sessions, Israeli couples travel with each group throughout the trip. They share meals, navigate bus rides together, celebrate Shabbat as one cohort and stay up late talking. For Claire and Tony, this meant real ongoing relationship, not a transactional interaction. The Israeli couples on their trip—diverse in their religiosity, their politics, their family situations, their perspectives on the country—gave them something you can’t get from a tourist experience: a window into what it feels like to be Israeli in this moment.

Equally important, the Israeli couples got something they desperately needed: genuine connection and solidarity from Jewish communities abroad. Many arrived carrying an enormous weight, uncertain whether diaspora Jews truly saw or understood what Israelis had lived through, especially since October 7th. They left with friendships and a sense that the Jewish relationship with Israel was reciprocal—that people across the ocean cared and were invested.

For Claire and Tony, the bonds they formed on the trip became the foundation of their lives back in Boston. Rabbi Andrew runs a young adult program called the Riverway Project, and several Honeymoon Israel couples show up together once a month. They especially connected with another couple who they see nearly every weekend—sailing, concerts, dinners. When that couple moved to Portland, Maine, they drove to visit. When Labor Day came around, they rented an Airbnb with multiple Honeymoon Israel couples and went to New Hampshire together.

“We made lifelong best friends,” Claire said simply. “We see them almost every weekend.”

Nine Days That Ripple Forward

Prior to October 7, 2023, more than 12,000 couples had applied to Honeymoon Israel. Each one represents a family at a decision point: Will their children grow up with a deliberate connection to Jewish life, or will that connection drift into nostalgia and memory? Will Israel be something they understand from lived experience or from social media algorithms?

Claire and Tony’s son will be born into a family that chose Judaism. Ava and Perry have a level playing field on which to explore their connection to Israel and to build Jewish community. The Honeymoon Israel opportunity, multiplied across the thousands of couples who have yet to participate, has the potential to secure the Jewish future.

Honeymoon Israel brings groups of 20 couples to Israel from the same city. At least one member of each couple must be Jewish, couples must be in their first five years of a lifetime commitment, and they must be under the age of 40. Couples pay $2,900 to participate including flights and most ground costs.

Learn more about the organization’s transformative work at honeymoonisrael.org.