Renting a Cellphone

As hopefully you all know, all MBI participants will need to rent a cellphone for the duration of the program. I recommend using Israelphones as we have a longstanding relationship with them, and they are both affordable and reliable. The rates and application forms are now available on the MBI acceptance website to the right of this post. They have an early-bird discount if you apply by June 1st. But I'm going to see if they can push that back a week or so to give you all a little more time. Regardless I would move quickly in the event I can't get them to change the date. I also will be out of the office at a seminar from Friday the 24th until Wednesday the 28th.

Back from Israel

Well visiting Israel during its 60th Birthday was a special experience and it will be special for the MBIers to be in Israel during the summer of its Birthday. The itinerary for this summer is just about finalized and there are some exciting things in store. Much of the itinerary's content is similar to last year with a few additions. One exciting thing is for the first time there will be a joint World Habonim summer camp. For several days MBI will join up with the summer programs from Great Britain, Holland, France, Hungary, and possibly a couple other countries. It will be a fun and meaningful experience to meet Habonim Dror members their age from across the globe for an extended time period. Additionally we seem to have settled on our tikkun olam project which likely will be working with Table to Table/Shulchan el Shulchan whose projects involved going to orchards and fields to pick fruits and vegetables that would not be picked, and donate them to food banks and homeless shelters. I will be posting the full itinerary soon, but these are just a couple of things to look forward.

The free weekend which I'm sure most of you have been wondering about will take place the first weekend of August on August 1-2, from Friday morning until Saturday night after Shabbat. Please don't forget to send your visitor request and bus request as soon as possible.

Also if you have not contacted me about changing your dates to/from Israel please do that ASAP. There will be a nominal fee of $50 charged by our travel to adjust the flights to an earlier or later date.

I will post again to let you know that we have put the cell phone forms up on the acceptance page, as well as to let you know when the itinerary is up there.

That's all for now.
Michael