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One knapsack. A pair of hiking boots. Two swimsuits.
This is how to prepare for a year in a virtual war zone?
Even as his suitcases were wide open, waiting for Ron Glickman to add more paraphernalia, the 18-year-old Teaneck High School graduate pondered the risks of spending a year in Israel.
"I don't want to do anything that will put my life in danger," said Glickman, who is headed to Shalem, a work and study program for Orthodox students. "But I feel like I have to be there. I feel a close connection to Israel."
Six pairs of pants. Twenty T-shirts. Sandals. They, too, will travel to a land where discos, restaurants, and buses have been targets of violence.
Tourism to Israel has dropped dramatically nearly 50 percent, according to Israel's Ministry of Tourism and American enrollment in Israeli colleges has fallen. Teenagers like Glickman attending post- high school yeshiva and study programs seem to be bucking the trend.
About 2,400 American teenagers who were enrolled in study programs left for Israel during the last two weeks in August, according to Sheryl Stein, spokeswoman for El Al Israel Airlines. The numbers were about the same last year, she said.
Kalman Stein, principal of the Frisch School, a yeshiva high school in Paramus, said that more than half of the most recent graduating class is going to Israel on study programs, the same as in previous years.
"My anecdotal information has been that the same exact thing is happening at other high schools in the area," he said. "Almost nobody has backed out."
One program, Yeshiva Torat Shraga in Jerusalem, had...