Israel Scraps Plan For Database Of American Jewish Students

Image by JUF.org

By Ari Feldman October 16, 2017

The Israeli government has suspended a plan to create a database of the names of all Jewish college students in the U.S., Haaretz reported. The plan was scuttled after Haaretz released an article detailing the controversial initiative.

The company that was supposed to run the initiative, Mosaic United, is run by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs.

Hillel International, the largest Jewish student organization in the world, released a statement saying that Mosaic United had agreed to stop the database plan after hearing Hillel’s concerns.

“We believe the initiative in this tender is not in the best interest of engaging American Jewish college students,” the statement read. “Based on our objections, Mosaic United has agreed to take down the tender from its website and cancel this initiative.”

Mosaic United had initially released a call for bids for the project.

“The idea is to set up a database of all Jewish students in the United States (some 350,000 students) and to map daily all the Jewish/Israel events taking place on campuses, along with a daily structural mapping of Jewish/Israeli online content from around the web,” Mosaic’s website read.

This article has been updated to correctly identify the Israeli government ministry that formed Mosaic United.

Contact Ari Feldman at feldman@forward.com or on Twitter @aefeldman.

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. He covers Jewish religious organizations, synagogue life, anti-Semitism and the Orthodox world. If you have any tips, you can email him at feldman@forward.com. Follow him on Twitter @aefeldman.

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