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German Youth Educational Travel to Israel a

Yoni Ayalon PhD & Izhak Schnell PhD

a

a

Department of Geography and Human Environment, Tel Aviv University Published online: 10 Nov 2014.

To cite this article: Yoni Ayalon PhD & Izhak Schnell PhD (2014) German Youth Educational Travel to Israel, Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Education, 26:4, 188-197, DOI: 10.1080/10963758.2014.959965 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10963758.2014.959965

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Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Education, 26: 188–197, 2014 Copyright © The International Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education ISSN: 1096-3758 print / 2325-6540 online DOI: 10.1080/10963758.2014.959965

German Youth Educational Travel to Israel Yoni Ayalon, PhD and Izhak Schnell, PhD

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Department of Geography and Human Environment, Tel Aviv University

The article examines the phenomenon of German youth educational tourism to Israel. A qualitative analysis of visits to the main tourist sites in Israel was conducted, and the analysis and interpretation of interviews that were conducted with the youths reflected characteristics of the youths’ sense of a tourist place. The experiences of the German youths in Jerusalem, on the Tel Aviv beach, at memorial sites, in seminars, and in visits to the private homes of Israeli youths blended into a central narrative of creating a reality of a new coexistence that is based on mutual respect between the next generations of Germans and Israelis. We suggest that a reconstruction of identities emerges from the dialectics between the home place of the tourists and the toured places in Israel. Keywords: educational travel, youth tourism, identity reconstruction, attitude change

INTRODUCTION Since the 1960s, the German government has encouraged youth exchanges with Israel. In light of Germany’s past, the German government has attempted to convey a new image of Germany to the world (Ben Natan, 2002; Primor, 1999). The special relationship between Germany and Israel is part of this effort, reflecting part of the debt that present-day Germany believes that it owes to the Jewish people. In this context, youth tourist exchanges represent an educational means by which to encourage German youth to address and cope with the Holocaust (Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft [DIG], 2012; Pahnke, 1999; Zimmermann, 2002). The present study aims to focus on the educational process that young German tourists undergo through their visits to Israel and the effects of these experiences on their identities. Earlier research has primarily focused on the influence of tourist travel and primarily educational tourism on the reconstruction of the attitudes of tourists toward a visited country, in addition to the gaining of knowledge and skills through visits to toured places (Amir & Ben Ari, 1985; Bhuiyan, Islam, Siwar, & Ismail, 2010; Fisher & Price, 1991; O’Leary & Deegan, 2004; Pizam, Fleischer, & Mansfeld, 2002). Former studies have examined previsit and postvisit Correspondence should be addressed to Yoni Ayalon, PhD, Department of Geography and Human Environment, Tel Aviv University, POB 3904 Zelig Street, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: yoniaya@ post.tau.ac.il

attitudes, referring to the destination state as a black box while ignoring the experiences of different places in the destination and how they fuse into a general image of the toured country. Over the past few years, an increasing number of studies have highlighted the impacts of educational tourism on social identities beyond the cognitive process of learning. In these studies, the role of sense of place has been less debated (Boone, Kline, Johnson, Milburn, & Rieder, 2012; Cohen, 2008; Iorio & Corsale, 2012). The studies’ emphasis on the relevance of place-based identities in the era of globalization (Schnell, 2007; Schnell & Mishal, 2008) has opened a discussion for understanding the impact of the touring of places on tourists’ identities. For that purpose, we present the concept of tourist sense of place, which relates to tourists’ experiences of places as sources of identity reconstruction. This article aims to demonstrate how the educational process during tours to Israel influences young Germans in reconstructing their identities as Germans and in changing their attitudes toward Israel. Our primary focus is to demonstrate the role of sense of a tourist place in the reconstruction of tourists’ identities. The German–Israeli case, with its unique history, could highlight our argument concerning the special status of tourist sense of place as being rooted in the tourists’ subjectivities as Germans who carry with them a historical burden and in the toured place as it is constituted by the victims of the Holocaust. We argue that the focus of the toured place has the potential to expose the influence of the tour on the process of the reconstruction of

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tourists’ identities. The study of youth educational tours has its advantages because young people are more vulnerable to influences on their identities (Tiano, 2001).

GERMAN YOUTH EDUCATIONAL TOURISM

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Youth travel is an emerging sector in world travel. Twenty percent of the 990 million international tourists in 2011 were youths who were traveling for vacations, education, or adventure. Youth travel has emerged as one of the most promising paths toward a more responsible and sustainable tourism sector (World Tourism Organization, 2013). According to a World Tourism Organization declaration of May 2011, Young travelers are environmentally aware and tend to stay longer and interact more closely than the average tourist with the communities they visit. As such, youth travel has emerged as one of the most promising paths toward a more responsible and sustainable tourism sector. (World Tourism Organization, 2013)

Youth educational travel has also become an important factor in German tourism. There is a recognition that close relations between countries require the binding of direct ties between peoples, institutions, cities, and towns. The network of such relationships between Germany and Israelis is closely linked (Deutsche Botschaft, 2012). German youth travel to Israel, in either formal or informal educational frameworks, involves youth exchanges with schools, municipalities, organizations, community centers, and youth movements. Former German President Horst Koehler emphasized the importance of youth exchanges: “The relationships between youths will shape future Germany–Israel relations, their acquaintance and understanding, and their joint activity, which constitute the objectives of youth exchange between Germany and Israel” (Deutsche Botschaft, 2012). In Israel, memorialization of the Holocaust in politics and among the public has been continuously increasing (Zimmermann, 2002). With the institutionalization of public Holocaust commemoration, the State of Israel is interested in bringing the Holocaust to the attention of tourists in general and to the attention of German tourists in particular. During their tours, German youths examine the role of their nation in the events of the Holocaust. A considerable proportion of visits to Israel consist of emotional tours, in which young people visit memorial sites, participate in Holocaust-related seminars, and encounter Holocaust survivors. One of the goals of visiting Israel is to examine the ways in which people can live with the heritage of the Holocaust and to challenge the visitors’ identities as Germans (Bundeszentrale, 2003; Haberland, 2003; Pahnke, 1999). However, these studies do not highlight the experiences of places by German youth tourists or their implications for identity reconstruction.

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Educational tourism consists of sightseeing; meeting local people and studying their characteristics; as well as exploring the symbols, history, and heritage of the country. Tourists experience a unique combination of meetings with local youth and participate in subject-focused seminars that aim to activate youth while educating them and transmitting moral messages to them (Con-Act, 2012; Richards, 2006). Tours of Israel by German youth delegations commence with study and guidance in Germany under the direction of experts, including discussions and seminars pertaining to Israel’s history, geography, and society (Pahnke, 1999; Schwartz, 2004). The regular 7-day tour of Israel is lengthened to 11 days in the case of educational tours. The special activities of educational tours include seminars with the active involvement of the participating youth. Historic issues that are relevant to German youth are taught through either a 1-day seminar at Yad Vashem or a seminar on past and present issues at Kibbutz Massua, where youths view exhibits, films, and Holocaust-related documents. In addition, the German tourists attend lectures and engage in discussions with Holocaust survivors and with people who lived through the period. At the conclusion of most such programs that we have examined, the tourists meet Israeli political and other public figures and are exposed to various social and historical aspects of the country. In general, the youths exert significant effort in meeting, speaking with, and understanding the Jewish host population (Bundeszentrale, 2003; Con-Act, 2012).

IDENTITY AND TOURISTS’ SENSE OF PLACE IN EDUCATIONAL TOURISM Educational tourism is frequently defined as group tours with the primary aim of undergoing a learning experience directly related to the toured places (Rodger, 1998). It is considered an effective means of developing knowledge, skills, and attitudes (Bhuiyan et al., 2010). It has been widely recognized as a professional development tool that can add significant value to the learning experience of students (Boone et al., 2012; Cohen, 1979, 2008; Richards, 2006). Stansbie, Nash, and Jack (2013) argued that a learning experience such as travel must be designed and constructed as an active process, involving teachers, guides, and students. Green and Sammons (2014) argued that experiential learning involves finding meaning in an experience. The researchers also noted that the cone of experience model best portrays the base for active learning because students remember 10% of what they read but 90% of what they do. Tourism saturated with heightened, active experiences increases its learning effects and its impact on identity reconstruction. Classical studies separated tourists from tourist places, focusing on the cognitive learning processes of tourists and the authentication of tourist places as a means of increasing the places’ attractiveness (McCannell, 1976; Zarzuela,

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Diaz Pernas, Calzon, Gonzalez Ortega, & Rodriguez, 2013). Current studies have been increasingly aware of the interdependence between the tourist as an experiencer and the tourist place as the experienced site. Tourists perceive tourist places from their subjectivities or their intersubjectivities in ways that can influence tourists’ identities (Bruner, 1991; Cohen & Neal, 2010; Desforges, 2000; Maoz & Eidelson, 2007; Sedmak & Mihalic, 2008). Cohen (2008) argued that tourist responses to tourist places with which they are emotionally involved tend to influence tourists’ identities more. Adolescence is part of a period that involves an intensive process of shaping and reshaping repertoires of identities and attitudes while constituting reference groups among mates and other youths (Tiano, 2001). Therefore, youth group tours create supportive milieus for resocialization and the reevaluation of identities. Although traditional theories in social psychology have understood identity as being crystallized during childhood and remaining fixed during the adult years, recent discourse on social identity has reinforced the importance of tourism in identity reconstruction. Giddens (1991) and Sarup (1996) claimed that self-definition occurs through a flexible, continuous construction of one’s narrative during one’s interaction with the surrounding environment. For these authors, identity is not a fixed matter; rather, it is a reflexive collection of experiences and narratives that a person acquires throughout his or her life. Accordingly, people develop complex repertoires of identities, with some of them relating to more salient aspects of the person’s social life and others relating to less salient aspects, with national identity being considered, in many cases, among the more salient aspects of a person’s identity (Amara & Schnell, 2004; Falk, 2006; Shavit, 2009). In this sense, tourism as a heightened experience has the potential to become an effective agent of identity reconstruction. Several studies have drawn associations between identity and space. Norberg-Schulz (1980) and Buttimer and Seamon (1980) contended that identity construction occurs through the home reach dialectic. Tourism-related experiences can be viewed as reaching out in search for adventure, curiosity, and exposure to innovative experiences in which one is open to others and returning home and assimilating such experiences into one’s home place. The key concept that connects identity and space is the sense of place, as discussed by scholars such as Relph (1976) and Tuan (1977). A place is conceived as a center of meanings, feelings, and experiences that constitute important components of understanding a person’s pattern of exposure to reality and his or her construction of identity. Relph coined the term sense of place, which accentuates three mutually complementary aspects of place: the components of a place, a sense of belonging, and authenticity. The components of a place consist of the time, location, community, and landscape in which the inhabitants of a place habitually conduct their daily lives (Buttimer & Seamon, 1980; Cresswell, 2004; Pred, 1986). These elements fuse into

one set of meanings that are embedded in the landscapes and in the mindsets of local communities. Unlike local people, tourists experience the components of a place as heightened experiences of places beyond home that are frequently compared with home places or images that are drawn from media; thus, such tourist experiences have the potential to leave deep imprints on tourists’ memories of a place. In this regard, we extract the components of the visited places that are imprinted on the memories of tourists as sources of intense experiences (Larsen, Urry, & Auxhause, 2008; Uriely, 2005). Educational tourism focuses on the symbolic meanings that are attached to the visited places, including religious, historical, or national aspects that tourists interpret using their particular intersubjectivity. We contend that these components fuse into a generalized atmosphere of the place. A sense of belonging and attachment to a place includes both cognitive and emotional aspects. A sense of belonging renders a place a part of a person’s identity, whereas a feeling of detachment creates feelings of strangeness and even alienation. In the case of tourism, complete insideness and outsideness are impossible. Tourists bring to tourist places their home place–based identities and their perceptions and images of the place, and they are exposed to tourist places through mediation (Moufakkir, 2008). In this context, MacCannell (1976) distinguished between tourists who visit a place from the front door and those who visit through the back door. Tourists who explore the front of a place visit the threshold of the place without engaging in experiences with locals and their daily lives. Mass tourism is frequently characterized by exposure to a superficial view of a toured place (Urry, 1990) and by engagement with a cursory view of such places (Cohen, 1979). Tourists who visit the back of a place meet local people directly, engage in meaningful communication with them, and learn about the symbolic meanings of their places from empathetic perspectives. This experience allows for penetration into the deeper layers of a place (Cohen, 1979; Larsen et al., 2008). According to Moufakkir (2008), a deep and positive experience of a place might change the tourist’s image of the place. This empathetic dialogue with a toured place could be associated with the reconstruction of the identities of tourists. Such a process does not derive from either the tourist’s home place or a visited place; rather, this process synthesizes both places to form a revised identity. The experience of German tourists in Israel fuses identities from both sides of a traumatic experience and thus overshadows the common post–World War II German identity. Therefore, a German educational youth tour of Israel involves confrontation with one’s identity in the backyard of the Israeli place. Authenticity has been defined as an experience that is consistent with a person’s immanence. Such an experience characterizes places in which both the community and individuals experience events similarly as a result of their loyalty

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to a common past, a common vision, and a common current reality (Nost, 2012). According to Schnell and Mishal (2008), the question of authenticity does not withstand the test of the reality of globalization because people’s exposure to varied places is a common reality of life. At this stage, authenticity constitutes an expression of seclusion, whereas places stimulate and challenge one’s repertoire of identities through the dialectics of one’s home place and of toured places. In studying tourist places, we address the question of how places that are distant from one’s home reconstitute aspects of the individual’s repertoire of identities. In such cases Schnell (2007) suggested replacement of the term authenticity with atmosphere. A place’s atmosphere involves comparisons between a toured place and the home place. Experiencing the similarity and tension between these two places constitutes the central foundation upon which a place’s atmosphere is structured, as well as its effect on identity reconstruction. Several scholars have argued along the same line that any special experience that occurs during a tour or a local smell contributes to the creation of a sense of place (Crang, 2005; Ryan, 2000; Urry, 2000). In this sense, German youth who tour Israel arrive with hesitations concerning the ways in which they will be treated in Israel as Germans. Meeting Israelis and encountering Israeli places raise questions concerning the youths’ identities as Germans. Furthermore, much of their tours are directed toward the memory of the Holocaust, and this orientation colors the construction of the meanings of the places they visit and the reconstruction of their identities as Germans from this unique perspective. Several American tourism researchers have focused on practical tools for introducing tourists to the sense of place that is experienced by locals (Farnum, Hall, & Kruger, 2005). Researchers from Wales produced a guide that contains practical advice for local tour agents. This guide suggests that these agents should meet tourists face to face, describe and specify different components of places with historical or other symbolic meanings, recommend restaurants and plays at local theaters, and provide tourists with an enhanced sense of the local pulse and a glimpse of the sense of place that is experienced by the inhabitants of the place. In the opinion of these researchers, a tourist’s attachment to a place will generate a feeling of satisfaction deriving from a visit, and a pleased tourist is potentially a returning tourist and a marketer of such a place (Mid Wales’s U.K., 2012). Despite the great importance that we attribute to the efforts of tour agents to educate tourists with regard to the sense of place of locals, we believe that it is impossible for a tourist to penetrate the meanings that local people associate with their places. A tourist’s sense of place is constructed from experiences that arise from a comparison between the visited place and the tourist home place (the point of reference or the zero point) and the identities that arise from such dialectics. We assume that the attachment of tourists to a visited place depends on the tourists’ ability to connect their home

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reality with the meanings of a place, to attach themselves to these meanings, and to experience these meanings as relevant to their identities. Mediators are critical to the sensitive dialogue between home and toured places, particularly in the context of the loaded history of German–Jewish relations. The heightened emotional challenges of German youth tours to Israel have led tour organizers to employ special educators to accompany young tourists. Such educators are called Multiplikatoren (literally, “multipliers”). They manage the educational tours and also provide guidance to young people and assist them in interpreting their experiences (Freericks, Hartmann, & Stecker, 2010). Possessing considerable knowledge and experience, these educators serve as role models and mediators between the youths and their physical and human environments in Israel. Interviews with accompaniers that have been conducted in previous historical studies of such tours have revealed the unique emotional significance of tours in Israel (Nordrhein-Westfalen [NRW], 1998; Schwartz, 2004). Another important mediator is the Israeli tour guide, who is usually an expert on the subject matter, is attractive and interesting, speaks eloquently, and presents perspectives that are likely to impress tourists and be consistent with the official Israeli narratives. The studies of Cohen (1979, 2008) portrayed tour guides as the most significant mediators between tourists and places by transmitting knowledge of social contacts and the preferred narratives and emotional feeling of the visited places. The discussion calls for a conception of the tourists’ sense of place, in which Germans, from their positions as Germans, penetrate, with the mediation of tourist guides, into the backyard of Israeli society, exposing themselves to the historical, religious, and everyday life meanings of the places they visit. Above all, they confront the historical events of the Holocaust face to face with the victims and their descendants, asking questions from this point of view about the meaning of the places and the places’ identities. Previous studies have noted that Israel attracts German tourists because of its status as a religious and cultural center, as a young and dynamic country, and as a land of refuge for Holocaust survivors (Haberland, 2003; Schwartz, 2004). We argue that beyond these motivations, the tours of Israel have a deep impact on the adolescents’ identities as Germans.

THE RESEARCH METHOD In this article, we apply the concept of tourist place to the case of German youth in Israel. We conducted in-depth interviews with participants in four German youth groups and their German and Israeli guides. These interviews assisted us in determining the characteristics of the visited places as they were experienced by these youths. We are both Israeli academics who understand and speak German. In May and June 2009, the first author accompanied four educational youth

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groups to obtain a thorough view of their experiences. All four of the groups were whole groups that arrived at that time in Israel as part of a German–Israeli exchange youth program. These groups consisted of a total of 67 young Germans (30 male and 37 female), high school students and graduates ages 16–19 years old. All of the young tourists were interviewed about their experiences in different places throughout their travel routes. We conducted interviews in German with all of the group members immediately after their visits to each place. After each visit, approximately five or six interviewees were randomly selected for interviews in such a manner that all of the group members were interviewed at least twice along the tour. In addition, all of the mediators were interviewed after the tour, and we attended their evening briefings and discussions during their tours. During the research, we asked the subjects about their main experiences in each place individually within the sequence to the visited places. An average interview lasted for approximately half an hour. The interviewees described each place according to their immediate impressions of these places; they attempted to relate to the components of each place, to the meanings that they ascribed to each place, and to the atmosphere of each place. At times, social, emotional, and spiritual components were dominant, whereas the physical components of a place were secondary; this combination typically resulted in a pleasurable experience. At other times, the physical components were dominant. However, we found that a certain combination of all of the elements typically constructed the experience of a place in the consciousness of the tourists. On a general level, we analyzed the links between places and identity with great openness. We extracted the components and characteristics of the sense of place from the text and studied the connections between identity construction and place. We retrieved categories that characterized the relationships between the characteristics of the places, and we redesigned the characteristics of identity. In this article, we do not describe each visited place; rather, we provide a sufficient number of examples from a selection of places to validate the relevance of the general concept of the sense of Israel as a place that consists of the fusion of the sequence of studied places. We asked five sets of questions: general questions, in which we asked the tourists to describe their place-related experiences in their own words and with minimal guidance from the investigator; questions in which the youths were urged to expand on certain aspects of the place; meaningrelated questions, in which the youths were asked to clarify unclear points; comparative questions; and challenging questions, which were intended to examine further the youths’ deeper meanings and to verify the consistency and coherence of their arguments (Shakedi, 2006). We created a close dialogue with the interviewees, and we listened to the personal narratives, opinions, ideas, feelings, and sensations that emerged during their experiences in Israel. All of the

interviews were conducted in German and were recorded. The texts were translated into English by the first author and were retranslated into German by the second author to validate the accuracy of the translation. Our interpretations of the youths’ answers were presented to four German experts in youth tourism to neutralize any Israeli biases that might have been present in the interpretations. Only interpretations that were considered adequate by all of the experts and both of us were considered in this research. In addition, the group leaders and tour guides were also interviewed after the tour and after the seminar in Israel to examine their subjective views regarding the processes to which the youths were exposed in Israel.

GERMAN EDUCATIONAL YOUTH GROUPS TO ISRAEL To examine the educational youth tour experiences in Israel, we examined four specific characteristics: physical and historical characteristics, social characteristics, characteristics relating to the mediation element, and characteristics arising from forms that fuse together to create a specific atmosphere of the place. We provide examples of different tourist sites to demonstrate the characteristics of a concept of a holistic educational tour process rather than to present a comprehensive description of any particular place in Israel. The Physical Landscape as a Characteristic of a Tourist Place During the visit, the groups encountered a variety of landscapes and engaged in various outdoor activities, such as walking and hiking in desert areas or in the Galilee. Sometimes they simply observed the landscapes from the bus. M.1 described a visit to the shore of the Sea of Galilee as follows: “We rode through such beautiful green scenery. We walked on a track alongside a flowing stream; the air was clean, the landscape consisted of soft hills, and it was so quiet.” Considering the bucolic scenery further, she expressed two thoughts that occurred to her: First, she commented on her lack of previous knowledge of Israeli scenes (“And it is so beautiful”); second, she mentioned the local geopolitics (“It is so beautiful and quiet, while in Germany, we only hear of problems and wars in Israel”). G. focused on the desert landscape: “We rode along the Dead Sea beaches. There was a landscape of desert cliffs on one side and blue sea on the other side. We departed the vehicle, and around us, there was only a brown desert and emptiness.” He continued by comparing the Israeli landscape to that of Germany, with which he was familiar: “It is very special here; we don’t have such things. In Germany, you can drive and drive, and it’s all green forests.” L. added, “This was an out-of-the-ordinary experience. Swimming and floating in the Dead Sea, we had such a good time, although

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it was very hot, and we were also sunburned from the intense sun.” The desert view with the Dead Sea alongside it constituted an impressive landscape unit that was starkly different from the familiar landscapes in Europe. The Tel Aviv beach promenade also became a focus of attention and a memorable experience. C. stated, “At the beach, it is warm and pleasant, the wind is blowing, it is an open space, and I can see the wide open sea . . . it is blue, the water is deep, and everything is clean.” B. commented, “The scenery is different than Germany’s. Here, the sand is golden, there is an open landscape, and next to it, I could see the high buildings of the Tel Aviv promenade.” G. stated, “The beach attracted us like a magnet, and a bit of sun can’t do us any harm. . . . How wonderful nature is. I feel wonderful on the beach, and I feel the intensity of the wind and the sea.” To the young people, the beach symbolized freedom, the direct, open atmosphere that characterizes life in Israel, and the normality of Israeli reality; we explore these notions in the next section on social landscapes. Such scenes were engraved into the memories of the young people as new and significant experiences. In some cases, the physical landscape was the focus of an experience and constituted the background of the illustration of a social or spiritual experience for some people. This experience was derived from both the contrast with the familiar landscapes of Germany and the contrast between the landscapes and the youths’ previsit images of Israel. The reality of calm, day-to-day Israeli life; the directness of Israeli society; and the openness of the landscape and the people were salient, constituting a surprising reality and creating fertile ground for a reexamination of previously held conceptions. In this sense, the openness of the landscape reinforced the openness of Israeli society and the acceptance of foreigners, particularly Germans. The Social Landscape as a Characteristic of a Tourist Place The program included visits to sites that highlight the historical, religious, and cultural importance of Israel. Jerusalem was an important place among these sites. D. described the alleys of the Old City in Jerusalem: “We walked through narrow passages to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. There were many people; everything was awkward and crowded.” Referring to the place’s atmosphere, he continued, “We saw many Jews, Arabs and Christians; they all seemed religious.” T. stated, “Everything is together in Jerusalem. Everyone is religious; you see it in the city churches and mosques and at the end, we went to the Wailing Wall, the most sacred place to the Jews.” The Old City of Jerusalem was described as crowded and provided a monotonous view of alleys and buildings, all of which resembled religious institutions. S. offered a comparison to the situation to Germany: “People in Jerusalem are so different than in Germany; religion is so significant and important here in their day-to-day lives.”

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The interviewees seemed to have referred to Jerusalem as an urban scene that consisted of an old, crowded city of alleys and that featured heritage and religious institutions sealed within a wall. The significance of this description of the components of the place is an example of a physical landscape that connotes an atmosphere of crowdedness, density, and closeness. The social significance of this description appeared as a blend of masses of people with diverse religious and ethnic characteristics. Such social diversity appeared to contrast with familiar scenes at home in Germany. From the youths’ perspectives, the cultures of Jews, Muslims, and Christians were significantly different but unified with regard to their religiousness. Another aspect of Israel that was impressed on the youth was the country’s security-driven atmosphere, which created a unique sense of significance for the tourists. T. explained, “There are many soldiers in the streets. In our country, we see police, but here, you see people or soldiers with weapons everywhere.” A. stated, “We walked freely at any hour, day or night. You don’t see police, but you see soldiers who walk around all over with their weapons.” The significance of the security issue involves several aspects that suggest that the social environment is a central factor that contributes to imbuing Israel with a sense of place. The first aspect was the instilling of people with a sense of confidence. The young Germans spoke of feeling that the places were quiet, tightly guarded, and secure; there was no violence or terror in the streets, as depicted on German television. The second aspect related to the political situation and an understanding that the conflict necessitates a massive presence of military and security personnel in the cities. The third aspect related to the ages of the youths who participated in the tour. A. explained, “We met soldiers in the streets. They were nice, and they showed us their weapons; we stood there, talked and laughed together.” A connection seemed to have developed immediately between the tourists and the soldiers, who were of similar ages. The youths were impressed by the free and open atmosphere and by the ability of security guards to speak freely; this state of affairs contradicted the image of the oppressive soldier. Such direct encounters appeared to have created a new, different, and unique dimension of the place. The directness and openness of Israelis, including soldiers, created a new sense of place with which the German youth were not familiar because this sense of place contrasted with their public space in Germany. The young people were particularly affected by their experiences of bonding with the soldiers because such bonds destroyed the image of the tough, inhumane soldier. However, the tourists were also exposed to the difficult political reality that exists between the nations. The wall symbolizes both the fortification of Israelis and the limited spatial movement of the Palestinians, who are isolated in their zone. The youth regretted the suffering of the Palestinians, but their guides explained that

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the wall was built because of the security needs of Israel. Therefore, they pondered the incapacity or unwillingness of both parties to change the situation. Unlike issues that have national significance, the interpersonal relationships that enhanced the ability of the German youths to engage in intimate dialogue with young Israelis played an important role in the general visiting experience of the place. The overnight accommodations in private homes were the most significant aspect of this portion of the visit. L. explained, “The hospitality is excellent. The hosts are open and speak about everything. The whole hosting and the encounter, everything was great.” B. added, “Everything is close. At home, we are together, and they continue to give us food and meals. Then, we go together, hang out and have a blast.” A. stated, “I might come to Israel again. You can always talk, join any activity and any meal, hang out and talk about anything.” The presence of the youth within the personal home spaces of these hosts is a unique aspect of youth educational tourism, and this experience contributed to the connections that the youth formed with the place. The young people felt the human warmth of the hosts and participated in all of the families’ activities. Visits to private homes are a proven means of deepening interpersonal relationships between parties, and such visits received positive evaluations from everyone involved in the youth exchanges. M., a manager of youth exchange delegations who has been accompanying German groups to Israel for many years, summarized the matter as follows: The hosting in homes is the key to the success of this whole encounter. The changes we have made in the past few years, moving from sleeping over at hostels to staying over at homes, get the youths even closer and leads to them to have mutual understanding and to form personal friendships with us for many years to come.

These connections appear to have led to repeated mutual visits and the formation of friendships between the youths. Moreover, in this Internet age, many groups have been formed on Facebook and other Web sites to preserve these experiences and relationships for a long time. Direct Encounters With the Holocaust A central part of the visit involved tours and educational seminars in the main Holocaust-related memorial sites: Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Massuah Institute (Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak), and the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum. With these places defined as content places (Cohen, 2008), the subjects studied at Yad Vashem, the national monument to the Holocaust, the history of anti-Semitism, the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust in history, and the State of Israel as a place of unification of the Diaspora. These visits forced the German youths to contend with Germany’s past and to formulate a position regarding this history that was integrated

with today’s reality through direct contact with Holocaust victims. Questions with which the youth had to contend were prompted in discussions within a mediated framework and with the support of the group. L. stated, I think the visit to Yad Vashem is extremely important. At school, we have studied the Nazi period and the Holocaust. We attended a seminar on the subject before the trip, but here at Yad Vashem, I received not only further information but also direct contact with the Holocaust. Our history teacher in Germany told us about the history and the difficult period, but there was a Jewish woman here who went live the Holocaust and therefore spoke with much emotion and spoke from her heart about something that caused us to feel empathy toward her and caused great emotions in the group.

L.’s emotions show that the visit to this place inspired her empathy and understanding of the suffering of Holocaust survivors. The direct encounter broadened one’s knowledge of the Holocaust, but, more important, the interpersonal contact created an emotional link between the youths and the crime that their people committed against the Jewish people. M. reported encountering a Holocaust survivor at Yad Vashem: We were honored to meet and hear a former survivor who experienced the Holocaust himself. Mr. Pulitzer is a man who spoke to us and told us his story of his own personal experience while using black humor. This was a very significant experience, completely different from watching TV or seeing pictures in Germany.

The intensive encounters, the seminar at Yad Vashem, and particularly the direct meetings with Holocaust survivors appeared to have prompted fundamental questions among the youths. The visit to the place necessitated that the tourists feel empathy for the flesh-and-blood survivors and the society that is attempting to recuperate as a Jewish state. Again, we detected the important role of the mediator (in this case, the German mediator) as being responsible for directing the appropriate feelings toward the desired channels. The emphasis on the affective aspects of the Holocaust appeared to have engendered a catharsis. The encounters with young Israelis and particularly with Holocaust survivors, in which the Germans were welcomed warmly as honored guests without anger or projection of blame toward them, conveyed that a sense of legitimacy was granted by the Holocaust survivors to the German youths. Such acceptance enabled the youths to separate themselves from blame and encouraged them to adopt the role of preventing a future Holocaust. Being accepted by Holocaust survivors and by Jewish youths in Israel enabled the German youths to view themselves as Germans, as a part of human morality, and as partners in the trauma of the Holocaust.

GERMAN YOUTH EDUCATIONAL TRAVEL TO ISRAEL

A. stated, This was my first time in Yad Vashem, and I asked many questions there and spoke English. I was afraid. What would they say about me as a German? During the visit, you keep thinking about the blame. We always live with it despite being from the third generation. Yet the hosting families welcomed us so warmly and heartily until we even felt like one of the family, and together, we managed to accept, understand and even try to get over the past.

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E. explained, I was pleased with the Israelis’ thoughts about Germany. They believe there is a new generation in Germany and that it should not be blamed for what its ancestors did. However, they also say that the Holocaust will not be forgotten.

C., a manager of a youth organization, emphasized the importance of the educational visit. In her opinion, the direct encounters between German and Israeli youth and their common experiential activities constituted the essence of the visit. Every German youth group and delegation to Israel should participate in a shared activity, such as an educational seminar, a soccer tournament, or music or theater studies, with Israeli youth as part of their visit. She believed that this interpersonal acquaintance and the joint experience would be critical for the long-term success of the tours (interview, May 2009). Beyond the personal acquaintances that develop in these meetings, the acceptance of the German youths by the Jewish youths is the deepest and most corrective experience that might free the youths from their guilt and allow them to accept their identities as Germans. The attainment of acceptance by the Israelis was reflected spontaneously on a daily basis and with great intensity, especially on the Tel Aviv beach. When describing the beach, the youths emphasized the place’s atmosphere as a place of freedom. They felt the contrast between the open, friendly atmosphere in Israel and the conservative, closed atmosphere at home in Germany. The German youths claimed that one can go anywhere during the day and even at night in Israel. All of their random encounters with people in the street were positive, and everyone was willing to engage in light conversation and to respond with great human warmth, as opposed to the atmosphere that is present on the streets of Germany. In this regard, a youth from Minden (a small town in Germany) emphasized that the local German law does not allow youths to leave their homes late at night and to walk freely within public spaces, but such activities are customary in Israel. The sense of freedom could be found in E.’s story: “We were at the beach, and we joyfully played volleyball, all of us, the Germans and the Israeli hosts. Then, some younger men came, played and laughed with us and even offered us fruit and drinks.” K. stated,

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Obviously, they could see I’m German. Would they tell themselves that this is a German face of those who hurt us? In fact, I even expected people here to reject me. However, apparently, the answer to this was no. I didn’t feel any grudge or anger toward me anywhere; I only saw smiling faces and the desire to speak, to hear and to help.

The innocent visit to the beach occasioned the catharsis that she experienced as a result of informal encounters with Israelis. After this encounter, K. related, “I can be a proud German, who is freed from the burden of blame.” The German youths’ feelings that they could relate to the informal reality of the beach as part of the collective of the Jews, without any reservations or expression of rejection, created one of the most formative educational experiences of the tour. DISCUSSION: GERMAN EDUCATIONAL TOURS TO ISRAEL Several German studies have emphasized the idea that educational tourism programs intend to challenge tourists’ identities as Germans, thereby helping them to live with their Holocaust heritage in peace (Con-Act, 2012; Haberland, 2003; Pahnke, 1999). This study contributes to this argument by highlighting the ways in which this goal can be achieved. The tourist organizes the visit to places in a hierarchical order, with Holocaust places and the Wailing Wall at the core of the experience, while other places are interpreted as supporting the cathartic narrative of being accepted by survivors and their children. In the process, landscapes, social affiliation groups, and symbolic meanings embedded in places all serve that purpose and fuse into a comprehensive educational experience (sense of place) of acceptance and reconciliation. This study also highlights a new way of understanding the sense of tourist places. Whereas several studies have advocated the exposure of tourists to the authenticity of toured places (Farnum et al., 2005; Mid-Wales’s U.K., 2012), we show that tourist experiences of places are significantly different from those of local populations, even when tourists make efforts to enter the backyard of the toured place (MacCannell, 1976)—not to mention that most tourists are exposed only to the superficial aspects of the toured places (Cohen, 1979; Urry, 1990). Differences are caused by tourists’ exposure to places being mediated by tour guides, who transfer to them narratives that are not always common among locals (Cohen, 2008), and by tourists giving meaning to places from the standpoint of their place of origin. Therefore, German tourists give meaning to places in Israel from their standpoint as Germans, which is different from the standpoint of Israelis. We argue that tourists’ experiences always connect their attachment to their place of origin, and they reach out to their tourism destination, rendering the experience of the toured

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place inauthentic. Therefore, we adopt Schnell’s (2007) observation that places in global reality create an atmosphere that consists of the fusion of different senses of places in one locality, arguing that tourism is a case of entering into an intensive dialogue among meanings associated with places of origin and destination locations. This process also involves emotions (Brumlik, 1998; NRW, 1998; Schwartz, 2004), and we argue that these emotions contribute to the reconstruction of the tourists’ identities. In this context, the German youths’ visit to Israel is organized as an active educational process (attempt) to penetrate the atmosphere of a place’s backyard through formal and informal encounters with Israelis in an attempt to understand the deeper meaning of places, which symbolizes important aspects of the Israeli existence, particularly those aspects that are associated with the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel after the Holocaust. This interpretation of the Germans’ experience of Israel as a tourist place that fuses a set of places within Israel around the idea of acceptance and reconciliation with young German generations demonstrates the power of heightened experiences in symbolic, meaningful places to connect landscapes to community and to compare these places to home places for the purpose of viewing a place’s atmosphere from an empathic stance. The experiences during the educational German youth tour are associated with the reconstruction of the identities of tourists, as exemplified by the cathartic experiences of Germans in the Jewish state.

CONCLUSION This article examined the unique significance of educational tours of Israel by young German tourists. A qualitative analysis of visits to the main tourist sites in Israel was conducted according to our suggested model of a sense of a tourist place. The analysis and interpretation of interviews that were conducted with the youths reflected the characteristics of the youths’ sense of a tourist place. This unique experience of place during the educational tours differed from the experience of the home places of Israelis and could be constructed only at the threshold between the German and Israeli realities. At this threshold, the youths were guided by mediators, who supervised their emotional experiences and encouraged them constantly to compare their home country with the visited country for the purpose of challenging their identities as Germans and as human beings. The educational tour included diverse places that highlighted other aspects of Israeli reality in addition to the Holocaust: the cradles and centers of different religions, the native land of the Jewish people, and daily life in the cities of Israel. Despite the different contexts of the places in which the German youths traveled, the centrality of contending with the Holocaust experience blended into one narrative, which freed the German youths from feelings of guilt as a result

of being accepted by Holocaust victims and which provided an honorable solution to the issue of the Jewish people who returned to the native land, which they have been struggling to retain for generations. The experiences of the German youths in Jerusalem, on the Tel Aviv beach, and in visits to the private homes of Israeli youths blended into a central narrative of creating a reality of a new coexistence that is based on mutual respect between the next generations of Germans and of Israelis. However, beyond the particular case of German youth tourism to Israel, the characteristics of a general model of a tourist’s sense of place were revealed. This model differs from the common model of a home-based sense of place, which is associated with the reconstruction of aspects of the identities of tourists. This reconstruction of identities emerges from the dialectics between the home place of the tourists and the toured places in Israel.

NOTE 1.

To maintain the anonymity of the young participants, we use their initials here.

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