On the initiative of our Chairwoman of the Board of Trustees, former Federal Minister Brigitte Zypries, and First Lady Elke Büdenbender, who is also a member of the Board of Trustees, the Future Forum has launched the program "Building Bridges for the Future" in cooperation with the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem and The Skilled Crafts in Germany. The aim is to create sustainable structures for German-Israeli exchange in the skilled crafts sector for the first time.

The kick-off event for the program took place in summer 2022 with a symposium and reception at the "Würth Haus" in Berlin. In addition to Elke Büdenbender and Brigitte Zypries, the discussions were also attended by Minister of State Dr. Tobias Lindner (Federal Foreign Office and also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Future Forum) as well as representatives of the Embassy of Israel in Germany, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, and the Presidents of The Skilled Crafts in Germany and Berlin Chamber of Crafts.
The challenges and potentials of an international exchange as part of an apprenticeship were discussed in a roundtable with skilled crafts apprentices.
Dr. Irene Aue-Ben-David, Director of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, presented the Jerusalem meeting place, whose renovation and refurbishment is ideally suited as a start-up project for bilateral exchange in the skilled crafts sector.

As part of the budget deliberations of the German Bundestag in November 2022, the government parliamentary groups approved our application and decided to fund our innovative German-Israeli exchange project in the skilled trades.

The German-Israeli cooperation project, which will initially run for two years (2023 to 2024), will focus on the acquisition, fundamental refurbishment and renovation of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem (LBI), which was founded in 1955.
The institute is an important meeting place for science, culture and German-Israeli exchange. It stands for the research, preservation and mediation of German-Jewish history and culture. The LBI Jerusalem is located in a multi-story residential building that was built in the 1960s as a retirement home for Jews who came primarily from Germany.

For the first time, young trainees and skilled craftsmen from Germany and Israel will work together to implement a craft project in Jerusalem. In addition to the transfer of craft know-how and intercultural understanding, the project aims to build the foundation for sustainable cooperation between companies and educational institutions in both countries. In this way, strong bridges are to be built for the future and a consolidation of the bilateral exchange of young craftsmen is to be achieved.

The exchange project is being led by the German-Israeli Future Forum Foundation in cooperation with the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts.