When Adam Allenberg was a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about six years ago, he decided to participate in a junior year abroad program at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
As HU then had a flourishing student exchange program with UW-Madison, Allenberg became one of about 40 Madison students to go to that school that year.
Some four years later, his younger sister Jill wanted to do the same thing as part of her undergraduate study of Jewish education and modern Hebrew.
But unlike her brother, Jill had to drop out of UW to go to HU for a year and then apply for readmission to UW in order to finish her degree. Moreover, while she knew that in her field UW would readily accept the credits she earned at HU, she said that students in other fields would not be able to transfer their credits as easily.
The difference between the siblings’ experiences is a result of UW-Madison’s April 2002 decision to suspend the exchange program. According to Joan A. Raducha, Ph.D., who has been director of the university’s International Academic Programs since 1995, “deteriorating safety conditions” born of the Palestinian Arab intifada compelled the UW administration to do this.
And according to Greg Steinberger, director of the Hillel Foundation University of Wisconsin, UW-Madison wasn’t alone. Universities in “the whole country” that had created such programs cancelled them, he said.
But now UW-Madison seems to be leading a road back. Last week, on Raducha’s recommendation, the university administration decided to revive the program. New applications began to be accepted Feb. 16.
An exchange program for graduate students, the George L. Mosse Program in History, had been reauthorized earlier during this academic year, according to John Totorice, manager of the program in the Department of History.
“We’re thrilled” about this, said Steven Nadler, director of the university’s George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, who had consulted with Raducha. “It’s great for our students, great for The Hebrew University, great for our university.”
UW-Madison is the first of the schools in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), a consortium of the Big Ten universities plus the University of Chicago, to do this, Nadler added.
Steinberger said the revived program will be good for the general Jewish student life on the campus as well.
“Students who go as juniors come back as seniors and become involved in a totally different way,” he said. “There is a huge ripple effect on the campus.”
And Jill Allenberg, who graduated this past December, also said, “I think it’s really great that the university is reinstating the program…. A lot of students wanted to go to Israel but were afraid to take the risk” of not having the credits transfer.
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