Aharon Horwitz and Ariel Beery are both 28, and they are confident that their plan to change the world is quite practical. They have staked their fortunes and the past two years on a straightforward goal: to restore to Zionism the kind of history-shaping cultural energy that the movement's early architects envisioned.

Young Zionists. The summer 2008 PresenTense group with founders Aharon Horwitz and Ariel Beery (right) prone in the first row.
Photo: Courtesy

The key, they believe, is having the right business model.

"At its root, Zionism was a belief that there is a collective potential the Jewish people have to realize, that we're a people who can change not only ourselves, but the world," says Beery. Only with the troubles of the 1930s, he adds, Zionism became preoccupied with physical survival. But the early core of Zionism, as understood by its founders, was cultural.

Explains Horwitz, "Much of the work of those people - Berdichevsky, Jabotinsky, Herzl - was a vision of a Jewish state acting in the world. The parts of Zionism that were ignored under the pressure of the Holocaust and history are those parts that will inspire people today."

And so the two founded PresenTense, a Jerusalem-based hub for a social entrepreneurship training institute, a magazine on Jewish and Israeli culture, a consulting and education service and a network of entrepreneurs, activists and professionals from around the Jewish world.

This motley grouping of initiatives under the PresenTense rubric is no frivolous undertaking, but flows naturally from the pair's analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Jewish life. As with Zionism itself, PresenTense is one part ideology, two parts organization.

AT FIRST, Beery and Horwitz speak about the disconnect between young Jews and old Jewish organizations, a barrier that tends to push the youth away from any forms of affiliation and participation in Jewish culture. Both served as national youth movement leaders by age 17 - Horwitz in Betar and Beery in Hashomer Hatza'ir - and have seen the generational gap in affiliation.

These unaffiliated youth are not uncaring, they believe, but simply live in a new situation that demands new organization and a new language.

When Israeli youth see Israel's strength and the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, "including occupying and oppressing another people, they don't understand where we go from here," says Beery, adding that a similar disenchantment afflicts American Jewish youth, who "see the beauties of American liberalism and are becoming disillusioned with the Judaism of their youth."

The PresenTense solution to this disillusionment is as new, and as old, as the Zionist impulse itself - to infuse Jewish life with a creativity, both institutional and cultural, that would appeal to a generation growing up in a personalized world with an ever-growing number of options for identification and cultural affiliation.

"When PresenTense's mission is completed," says Horwitz, "young Jews will realize their creativity in a Jewish framework," in the process advancing "a mission the Jewish people has had for a thousand years - to spread social justice, build a model of society that eliminates poverty." In returning to the old mission of Jewish life, "we're changing the narrative of what it means to be Jewish."

THE GOAL may seem lofty, but the method is surprisingly concrete. Both Horwitz and Beery have spent much of the past 11 years leading organizations and think that proper management is the key to a better Jewish future.

This is the purpose of the PresenTense Institute for Creative Zionism (PICZ), an annual professional development seminar which is an incubator for young Jewish entrepreneurs looking to transform their ideas into practical business plans.

In a rented three-story building in southern Jerusalem, the focus for six hot summer weeks is on the feasibility of a wide variety of initiatives, on how to implement Jewish creativity.

The initiatives all share two key attributes: the general Zionist outlook underlying PresenTense, and, crucially, "scalability," the ability to expand each successful idea to the broader Jewish community and the world. They range from hi-tech adaptations - JT Waldman's "Tagged Tanakh" is an on-line, hyperlinked version of the JPS Bible that can link to everything from encyclopedias to Google Maps - to low-tech rediscoveries of lost culture, such as New Yorker Chari Pere's Yiddish humor cartoons.

Some initiatives are business-oriented, like University of Michigan sophomore Eitan Ingall's student-led fund that connects American Jewish college students to Israel through investments in Israeli companies, while others, such as Bradley Cohen's plan to use popular Israeli outdoor activities as fund-raisers for the world's poorest children, are pure tzedaka.

Some are about creativity itself, as with Israeli designer Rafi Gabbay, who wants "to redefine 'Judaica' in both form and content," and wants to know why "all Jewish objects," from kiddush cups to Shabbat clocks, are "aimed at my grandmother's tastes?"

Horwitz, a Columbia graduate and founder of several tech-savvy initiatives, gives examples of what these ideas need to become reality. "We teach how to build a solid Web site in three days that serves as a good calling card; how to define why your solution is unique and worth investing in; how to tell what your target market is."

Beery, who holds a master's degree in nonprofit management from New York University, adds, "We provide [participants] with case studies on the markets they deal with. We do idea-generation, studying the roots of Jewish thought and Zionist texts. We work on skill-building - how to do a budget that won't get thrown out by an investor, development, public relations, the stripped-down tools" one needs for successful social entrepreneurship.

In this mentoring role, they say they are filling an important gap. Most of what they have to teach can't be learned in business school.

"Most business and public service schools deal with middle management, teaching how to do corporate finance and reports and such, rather than entrepreneurship," says Beery. The difference? In entrepreneurship, "you have to take risks, to go with your gut, to create something out of nothing. You have to go from zero to 60 as quickly as possible to get an idea off the ground. So it's actually about resourcefulness."