Elisa Moed, 46, claims that she has always been "a connecter," the kind of person who forges links between different kinds of people. "When I was a kid, we were the only Jewish family on our street," recalls the soft-spoken Detroit area native. That experience, she says, was her first lesson in how to serve as a bridge between the Christian and Jewish worlds. Today, married, the mother of four children aged 16, 13, 12 and 8, and comfortably settled in Israel for almost four years, Moed is doing just that with Travelujah.com, an online travel and information-sharing network for Christians around the world, featuring Israel as the Christian Holy Land.
Christian tourists [illustrative].
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
The company Web site invites its clients to "journey into the Land of the Bible with Travelujah, a vibrant Christian social community where you can learn from experts, share experiences, upload your pictures, 'Search the Bible,' and book that unforgettable journey of a lifetime to the Holy Land."
The site is heavy with articles by experts on everything from archeological sites to local wines, history to hotels, as well as a patent-pending online Bible search engine designed by Travelujah. There are also posts from recent tourists, travelers' tips and recommendations, pictures and news briefs - all by and for Christians attracted to the land of the Christian Bible.
What's a nice Jewish girl doing running a site like this? One might say that Moed's life has pointed her to it, in more or less a straight line. Although her professional involvement with Christianity is a somewhat recent development, Moed's identification with both Israel and the travel industry is longstanding and deep. While an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Moed spent her junior year abroad in Israel. She returned to Israel after graduation and spent two years in Hod Hasharon, working for a program called High School Israel. Already determined to settle here permanently, Moed was equally set on a career in tourism. She returned to the US and obtained both a graduate degree in Hotel and Food Services Management and a husband at Florida International University. While the newlyweds sojourned in Florida and began to raise a family, Moed went to work for a hotel consulting firm. Her job, which took her as far afield as Hong Kong, introduced her to virtually all aspects of the tourism industry. Moed opened her own firm in 1997 and several years later finally realized her dream of making aliya as she and her family moved from Boca Raton to Ra'anana in 2005. Moed continued her largely US-centered consultancy business from her new home in Israel.
Travelujah.com was born almost inadvertently. "I got a phone call one day from a gentleman in the Holy See," she recalls. "They were interested in developing a Christian resort in the Galilee. They needed me to help them determine the appropriate concept, to go in there and tell them what they needed to build there from the standpoints of concept, design, size, positioning within the market, market potential, and generally the best way to go about it in order to reach the people they were going after. And they were going after all Christian denominations."
The Galilee, loaded with Christian holy sites and underserved by Christian tourist facilities, seemed like the perfect place. Moed threw herself into the project, launching a one-woman whirlwind of market research. One major surprise, she says, was her discovery of a large number of Christian guest houses scattered all over Israel. "I never knew they even existed, and I'm a hotelee!" she exclaims, introducing an apparently new word to designate someone who works with hotels. Usually located at or near to Christian holy sites, these seemingly ubiquitous guesthouses offered a variety of types of accommodation and services. Moed concluded that Christian tourism was a promising emerging market. "I could see that not only was there a demand for the kind of place they wanted to build, but that there was an even greater demand for a completely different type of service that would meet the needs of this growing market." After another year and a half of extensive market research, the Travelujah.com web site was up and running. Aside from herself, the company is presently staffed, according to Moed, by "two people on the payroll, and several outside contractors."
THE VIA DOLOROSA in Jerusalem's Old City.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski
"Travelujah is an opportunity for Christians around the world to share their stories, connect with other people, write blogs, and hopefully one day travel here," Moed says. "This is the cradle of faith. There's only one Holy Land. And Travelujah is a Christian social network that offers ways for people to experience the Holy Land, either virtually or physically.
For physical experiences, Travelujah.com provides its users with an "online booking engine" to book hotel rooms and make other reservations. The pride of the site, however, is something called "Search the Bible," which Moed describes as "our own patent-pending functionality that provides Bible search results on anything someone might look for, along with all the travel-related content that has been uploaded onto the site by users, by experts, or by us. This provides users with the opportunity to plan their trips more intensively and more centered around the Bible." These features, along with the opportunity to network, share experiences and access all of the information provided on the web site before embarking on a trip, make Travelujah a pioneering and unique "one-stop shop" for Christians interested in the Holy Land. "Having this kind of tool providing all the information you need makes travel planning so much easier," Moed says.
Much of what makes Travelujah distinctive is the degree of interaction offered to the site's users, providing them not only with the ability to share experiences but also to be their own tour organizers. Says Moed: "People can use Travelujah to form their own travel groups. You could form a group interested in, say, biblical archeology, work through an expert on the web site, and ultimately form your own tour group of people interested in biblical archeology, coming together in Israel from all over the world."
