Image by birthright israel

(JTA) — There may be no such thing as a free lunch. But there is a free 10-day trip to Israel.

For 16 years now, the Birthright Israel Foundation has been giving away guided tours of the country to young people from around the world. The goal is to strengthen participants’ Jewish identity and connection to Israel. Tens of thousands of 18-26 year-olds sign up every year to see the highlights with a group of peers.

Someone is paying for all those trips. But who?

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

Inside Philanthropy, a website that investigates charities, delves into the program’s funding in an article published Tuesday.

Here are some notable numbers from Inside Philanthropy and the Birthright Israel website. Birthright contested some of the numbers in the original Inside Philanthropy article and those changes are reflected below.

$3,000 – Average price of the trip, per person

$47 million – Birthright’s budget in 2015

45,000 – Total participants in 2015

$40 million – Annual contribution by the Israeli government

$50 million – Annual contribution by the organized international Jewish community, including individual donors and Jewish family foundations

30,000 – Number of non-governmental donors (individuals, foundations and institutions) who give to the program each year

$2.5 million – Top annual individual donation

7 – Number of Jewish family foundations who have contributed a million dollars or more in recent years

$200 million – Amount billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam Adelson, have donated since 2009, making them the biggest funders in the program’s history

$2.7 million – Amount raised last year by “direct marketing” initiatives

Over 500,000 – Total number of trip alumni

80,000 – Number of Israelis who have participated in the program

1999 – Year the program was founded

66 – Number of countries represented by participants

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount