By Eitan Hevrony 

On Wednesday November 12, Otto Friedman (Chairman of the Beit Shemesh - Mateh Yehuda Cycling Forum) and I were invited to attend the Partnership 2000 International Conference of the Jewish Agency.

The Conference, held at Kfar Maccabiah, was attended by some 250 delegates from 45 different partnerships from around the country and from their twin Jewish communities from around the world. Our Partnership was represented by ten P2K lay leaders and staff members from Israel and Washington.

During the conference, we heard lectures and attended interesting workshops such as: "Israel 15" -  Creating a vision of leapfrogging Israel to the top 15 countries in terms of  standard of living. There were also
workshops on the subject of using the web as a marketing tool for the Partnership, creating ecological programs and more.

At the end of the workshops we waited in anticipation of the award ceremony. Every year Partnership 2000 gives out awards of excellence for outstanding projects. This year we were thrilled to win first place in the competition.  

At the award ceremony I remembered to invite the conference participants to visit our upcoming conference on Cycling tourism that will take place on Thursday 25/12/08 at Belmont Hotel on Kibbutz Tzuba..

We were honored to represent both the Partnership and the Cycling Forum as well as the cyclists from our wonderful region.  We would also like to thank our partners in South Africa and Washington for all their support of our activities.
They believed in the potential of the project for years and have helped us brand the area as the cycling capital of Israel . We hope that the local authorities (Municipality of Beit Shemesh and Mateh Yehuda) and the government ministries (tourism, agriculture and infrastructure) will understand the huge potential that exists in our region for cycling. We hope they will make cycling infrastructure an important issue on the public agenda and allocate public resources to promote and develop ecological tourism, culture, health, sports and leisure through the bicycle.