Applications are now being accepted for the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel (BYFI).

Founded and funded by Edgar M. Bronfman, z”l, former CEO of the Seagram Company Ltd. and a major Jewish philanthropist, the Bronfman Fellowships selects 26 outstanding North American teenagers for a rigorous academic year of seminars including a free, five-week trip to Israel between the summer of participants’ junior and senior years of high school. During the program’s seminars, Fellows meet with leading intellectuals, religious and political leaders, and educators, such as Etgar Keret, A.B Yehoshua, and Rabbah Tamar Applebaum. They then participate in study and dialogue with a diverse faculty made up of rabbis and educators associated with different movements and perspectives within Judaism. Fellows also spend two weeks with a group of Israeli peers. Upon returning home from the summer in Israel, Bronfman Fellows are asked to devise and lead local Jewish or social action projects.

There are now over 1,000 Bronfman Fellowships alumni across North America and Israel, among them eight Rhodes Scholars, four former Supreme Court clerks, 15 Fulbright Scholars, 27 Wexner Fellows and 21 Dorot Fellows.

In the guide, What It Really Takes to Get Into Ivy League and Other Highly Selective Colleges, Chuck Hughes lists the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel first in discussing, “the top scholarship programs particularly noted for producing winners who year after year are among the strongest candidates for admissions to highly selective institutions.”

Applications for the 2015 Fellowship are available online at www.bronfman.org and must be submitted online by Jan. 6, 2015. High school students in the U.S. and Canada who self-identify as Jewish and who will be in the twelfth grade in the fall of 2015 are eligible to apply.