Last month, 17 Israeli rabbis visited the United States, some for the first time, for a weeklong Orthodox Union program designed to teach them more about American Jews and to help them better understand some of the barriers to the latter making aliyah and moving to the Jewish state.

“They live in their bubble. We live in our bubble,” Rabbi Yaakov Glasser, managing director of community engagement at the OU, told JNS. “It was a very beautiful thing to mix them together.”

The program, which is the vision of the late OU leader and rabbi Moshe Hauer , involved a partnership with the religious Zionist group Rabbanei Haaretz Hatova and Gesher, an Israeli organization that promotes Jewish unity.

Glasser, who planned the program with Hauer and is now running it, told JNS that the late OU lead

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