When Uri Steinberg was 8 and growing up in Neve Ilan, a village near Jerusalem, he did some work in a hotel in the village that served tourists, particularly Germans.
Something about that experience apparently shaped his career interests. (“I got into it early,” he told The Chronicle.) Today, Steinberg is the new Israel tourism consul for the Midwestern U.S., working in a Chicago office that will officially be opening this month.
Steinberg came to Milwaukee for his first visit on Dec. 18 to introduce himself to some community leaders and to “a couple of tour operators and travel agents.”
He met with, among others, Richard H. Meyer, executive vice president of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation; and Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations.
He also met with The Chronicle and explained both his own story and that of the Israel Government Tourism office in Chicago, which had been closed since 2002 and is now reopening.
Steinberg said that after his military service he majored in geography and journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, graduating in 2002. “I love the country and love to travel the country,” he said. “And I love convincing people to do that.”
Moreover, he came from “a Zionist family” and “I really wanted to work somewhere where what I do matters for the whole community.”
Switched careers
Initially, that led him to becoming senior assistant to the spokesperson for Israel’s Ministry of Justice and serving as spokesman for Israel’s attorney general’s office.
But in 2005, he decided “I wanted to do something in the foreign service.” He switched careers when the Israel Ministry of Tourism opened a class for tourism and commercial attaches.
Upon graduating, Steinberg oversaw global marketing strategies at Tourism Ministry headquarters in Jerusalem.
His accomplishments included bringing a group of 13 Japanese sumo wrestlers and their families to Israel for a “Fellowship and Peace” visit, according to a June 10, 2006, Associated Press report carried on the Israel Insider Web site.
Steinberg previously worked as Jerusalem coordinator of the tourism ministry’s North American marketing and publicity campaigns when tourism ministry officials chose him to reopen the Chicago office.
As he explained, that office was closed in 2002 at the height of the second intifada, or Palestinian Arab uprising. “There were no tourists,” so “the Ministry of Tourism decided to cut down on its representatives abroad,” Steinberg said.
Now, “things have changed in the last year-and-a-half,” Steinberg said. “Tourism is booming.”
In fact, according to a recent column by Michael Freund in the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s Tourism Ministry announced last month that in the first 11 months of 2007, the number of visitors to Israel rose to 2.1 million, an increase of 24 percent over 2006.
Moreover, Diaspora Jews are coming for different reasons now, said Steinberg. “In the past, in rough times, most of the Jewish tourists came as part of solidarity missions,” he said. “Since things have started to quiet down, we see more Jewish families coming as pure tourists.”
“We really encourage this,” he continued. “We want people visiting us as a healthy, normal country, not as a country in crisis.”
So the ministry decided to reopen the Chicago office. Steinberg said that although technically part of Israel’s diplomatic corps, the new office is not located in the same building as Israel’s Midwest consulate, nor is the consulate supervising it.
Steinberg explained that during his three to four-year stint in Chicago, he will be working to promote tourism in 13 Midwest states, and striving to reach Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.
But tourism is only part of his job. “Everyone knows that Israel has a big image problem,” he said. “We will try with advertising and public relations efforts to change as much as possible Israel’s image in the area.”
Steinberg recently married. His wife, Osnat, is a social worker, and they hope she will be doing similar work in Chicago.
The office officially opens on Tu B’Shevat, Jan. 22. Its phone number will be 312-803-7080. Or contact the office anytime by e-mail at igtochicago@imot.org.
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