‘I Went as an Israeli and Came Back a Jew’: How BCI Shaped Community Leader Gidi Grinstein’s Life

In the summer of 1994, Gidi Grinstein arrived at American Jewish University’s Brandeis Camp Institute (BCI) as a 24-year-old Israeli naval officer preparing for what he expected would be a long military career.

Twenty-eight days later, he left with a different vision—not only of his future, but of himself.

“I went there as an Israeli and came back as a Jew,” Grinstein recalled.

That summer at AJU’s Brandeis-Bardin Campus in Simi Valley marked Grinstein’s first meaningful encounter with American Jewish life. It also set him on a path that would eventually lead him to found the Reut Group, a strategic think tank dedicated to strengthening Israel and the global Jewish people.

When Grinstein attended in 1994, BCI’s immersive summer experience spanned 28 days. Today, the program brings together young Jewish adults from around the world for an 18-day experience of Jewish living, leadership development, arts, scholarship, prayer and community. For Grinstein, a member of the July 1994 aliyah (session), those four weeks became a turning point whose influence continues to shape his work more than three decades later.

At the time, Grinstein was serving as an officer in the Israeli Navy. He attended BCI after being selected by renowned Jewish educator Avraham Infeld, who identified Israeli participants for the program.

“I’m lucky that he chose me,” Grinstein said.

Like many Israelis of his generation, Grinstein arrived with assumptions about Israelis living in the U.S. He viewed them largely through two lenses: either as assimilated or as communities living under the shadow of antisemitism, always prepared to move back to Israel if necessary.

BCI challenged those assumptions almost immediately.

“I found a very confident community with tremendous institutions,” he said.

It wasn’t only the program itself that broadened his perspective. Before and after BCI, local Los Angeles families and congregations welcomed participants into their homes and communities. For Grinstein, those encounters revealed a vibrant, self-assured Jewish community unlike anything he had expected.

That experience would later become central to his life’s work. Much of Grinstein’s leadership has focused on strengthening relationships between Israel and the Diaspora, a commitment he traces directly to that summer in California.

BCI also transformed his relationship with Judaism itself.

Growing up in Israel, Jewish identity had been ever-present but rarely something he examined deeply. During the program, Rabbi Levi Lauer, then dean of BCI, asked Grinstein to speak about Tisha B’Av. Realizing how little he knew about one of Judaism’s most significant days of mourning, Grinstein began studying.

“I was blown away by my ignorance,” he recalled.

That moment sparked a lifelong journey of Jewish learning and practice. He began observing fast days and exploring Jewish traditions more intentionally. Over the years, those practices deepened. He eventually married into a religious family, became a regular synagogue attendee and embraced Shabbat observance—developments he credits to the openness, intellectual curiosity and pluralism he first encountered at BCI.

The program also gave Grinstein something he hadn’t experienced amid the demands of military life: room to reflect.

His aliyah was the first held after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which had caused significant damage across the Brandeis-Bardin Campus. Many of the buildings in use that summer were temporary. But one enduring landmark, the House of the Book, the hilltop chapel and conference center overlooking the campus, remained.

Nearly every day, Grinstein jogged up the hill to the House of the Book, where participants gathered for informal conversations about Judaism, purpose, relationships and the future.

“A lot of what happened that summer to me,” he said, “happened there.”

Those conversations ultimately changed the course of his life.

At the time, Grinstein was preparing to sign a long-term military contract. During his weeks at BCI, however, he realized that the career he had envisioned was no longer the one he wanted.

“I was about to sign a long-term contract,” he said. “But I realized this is not what I wanted to do.”

Within a year, he left military service, a decision that eventually led him to establish the Reut Group, where he became one of Israel’s leading voices on Jewish peoplehood, Israel-Diaspora relations and the future of the Jewish world.

Just as enduring were the relationships he built at BCI. Grinstein maintained friendships with fellow participants and stayed connected with mentors like Lauer, who later became executive director of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies. Those relationships reinforced the program’s emphasis on dialogue, community and lifelong learning.

Looking back more than 30 years later, Grinstein sees a direct line between BCI and nearly every major dimension of his life: his understanding of Jewish peoplehood, his connection to American Jewry, his commitment to Jewish learning and the work that has defined his career.

He arrived in Simi Valley as a young Israeli naval officer. He left with a broader understanding of what it meant to belong to the Jewish people—a perspective that continues to guide his leadership today.