Carly Cowley, a staff member at Hopkins Hillel who is helping to coordinate the trip and went on it herself, has fielded calls and e-mails from a number of worried parents.
"Only one student has withdrawn," she said last week. "I have a feeling we're going to have a few more."
Cowley expressed confidence in the tour's safety measures.
"Two hundred thousand people have gone on this trip and no one's ever been hurt," she said. "I think this is probably the safest way to go to Israel."
Philanthropists and the state of Israel founded the Birthright program as both an avenue to promote Israel and a way to build unity and feelings of cultural identity among the world's Jews. The trips are paid for entirely by donations.
Though violence has broken out in the Middle East repeatedly since the trips began, the sustained intensity of the Gaza incursion and the firing of rockets from Gaza and Lebanon into Israel have heightened travelers' anxieties.
Because the seaport town of Ashkelon is Baltimore's sister city, the local contingent had planned to stop there. But when missiles started hitting Ashkelon, organizers changed the itinerary, said Ken Krivitsky, director of Towson University Hillel.
"We're not going to put our students in danger," Krivitsky said. "Any area that is getting rocket fire right now, we're not going to."
The students will stop in most of Israel's main cities and tourist attractions. They'll visit Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the Golan Heights. They'll camp in the Negev Desert. At sunrise one morning. they'll climb Masada, a mountaintop fortress where Jews, fighting the Romans, committed mass suicide rather than surrender.
"We're going to really be experiencing a significant part of Israel," Krivitsky said. "I think that this trip is going to be extremely meaningful to the students that go. It's important for our community to show support for Israel, which is going through a significant time."
Gabrielle Matuzsan and her twin brother, Zachary, 18-year-old freshmen at Hopkins, planned to keep their reservations.
She signed up for it the day the application period opened. She'd been hearing for years from older kids about the "amazing" Birthright trips.
"As soon as there was an opportunity I signed right up," she said, adding that the violence there is "a little nerve-racking," but that her parents are even more uneasy.
"I think they want me to say that I don't want to go," she said.
