New Impulse in Israel – A Project for Jewish Identity Background and Rationale: Many of the new immigrants who came to Israel in the last 15 years from the Former Soviet Union feel alienated from Israeli society and from Jewish and Israeli culture. One can explain this alienation as one of the central characteristics of the process of immigration in every part of the world, but in the case of the massive aliyah from the Former Soviet Union to Israel, there is an additional explanation. In their home countries, many of the new immigrants and their families were cut off from Jewish culture and Jewish life, and in fact were not at all acquainted with this culture. Their primary awareness of their own culture was confined to the fact that they were Jews and for this reason also discriminated against. Israeli society, being one in which Jews are a numerical and cultural majority, expected the one million new immigrants to adopt its culture and values, but as mentioned, the newcomers not only were unacquainted with this culture, but they even found many elements of it strange, and in some cases even injurious. In response to their new environment, a significant portion of the new immigrants took the opportunity to establish separate community frameworks for themselves in the areas of culture, education, consumer goods and community, a fact that intensified the isolation and alienation of the immigrants from the native Israeli majority. The Impulse School also belongs to the communal institutions that the new immigrants established for themselves and for their children. The School aims to give the immigrants' children an extracurricular, supplementary education that will complete what they receive through the public school system run by the Ministry of Education, providing the children with an education similar in its level and style to that which is customary in the FSU. About 400 students study in the school, and it operates 4 days a week in the afternoons. After ten years of operations, during which the Impulse School established its work and its standing, the organization is trying to find ways to integrate the educational and cultural values of the culture from which the immigrants have come with Israeli-Jewish culture, the new culture of the immigrants and their children. In the last few years, the school has begun to develop study programs that include Jewish contents. Presently the School is trying to deepen and firmly establish this course of study. For this reason the school has chosen to join forces with two veteran Israeli organizations that work with relevant and contemporary Jewish culture – BaMidbar and the Yaacov Herzog Center. These two organizations have a lot of experience in teaching Judaism to diverse populations, and with specific relevance to this project, they have experience working with new immigrants. Joining this leading group of the project will be the organization, "Shalev," which helps organizations of new immigrants to integrate themselves into Israeli society, and which has for the last few years encouraged the Impulse School to begin imparting Jewish-Israeli culture to its students. This is a first attempt at equal cooperation between Jewish Renewal organizations of veteran Israelis and grassroots immigrants' organizations, in which the immigrant organization is the central agent of the project (both the coordinator of the project and the administration of the budget belong to the Impulse School).