Paper short abstract:

Jewish youth tours to Israel became part of Jewish revival in Eastern Europe. How do the visits to the state of Israel, for centuries homeland existing only in religious imagination, however, to assimilated Czech Jewish youth largely unknown, change their sense of belonging to Jewish community?

Paper long abstract:

Globalization changes our perception of space. Diasporas do not have to be tightly tied to physical spaces conceived as home. While concept of home still lies at the heart of diaspora imagination and remains its organizing principle it may turn in more of an imaginary transnational space with no actual ties, such as living relatives, properties, or friends, to the physical space of home. Jewish relationship to Israel has always been more imaginary than actual. Until the state of Israel was established in 1948 it existed only in religious imagination preserved in texts and rituals. Due to Soviet occupation and isolation in most of the countries of former Soviet block it remained so even after the establishment of the state. However, when the Berlin Wall fell, once imaginary "homeland" fully materialized even for Jews of Eastern Europe and various Jewish international bodies started to use the tours to physical space of the state of Israel to revitalize silenced, in Wasserstein's words, vanishing Jewish identity in Jewish youth in Eastern Europe.

In my contribution, I am going to examine what is the sense of belonging that tourist experience of "homeland", narrated for centuries in Jewish text and ritual but to most of Czech Jewish youth today unknown, is, what kind of transnational space it creates, and how Jewish youth incorporate their imaginary lost and found homeland into their biographies, connect it to their family memory, eventually leading to migration or at least to instilling the state of Israel into their Jewish identity.