23/09/2008 | 15:47Chanan Tigay
How Israel and the Jewish federations have strengthened one another
Israel and the Jewish federations go back a very long way. In fact, the Jewish state’s unprecedented rebirth really can’t be explained without including the North American Jewish federations.“I don’t think you can tell the story of Israel without telling the story of American Jewry and the federation world,” says Shoshana Cardin, a past president of the federation system. In turn, Diaspora Jewry’s myriad success stories can’t be told without reference to Israel. While financial assistance and moral support have flowed west to east since pre-state days, pride, international stature and a sense of security in a post-Holocaust world have steadily flowed east to west.
Upon Israel’s establishment in 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion recognized that Israel was sorely lacking in high schools. He turned to what was then known as UJA (the predecessor organization of the present-day United Jewish Communities [UJC]) for assistance. The resulting Israel Education Fund enabled the building of the lion’s share of Israel’s high schools, which educated legions of the country’s future leaders. Later, UJA sold the schools to the Israeli government for $1 apiece.
That project segued into the creation of day-care centers around the country to support the young nation’s burgeoning youth population. The federation system built more than 500 such centers, some of which it maintains even today. It played an equally essential role in bringing Jews to Israel to populate those schools and
day-care centers.
“All the aliyah to Israel was funded by world Jewry,” says Yitzchak Shavit, who supervises fundraising for UJC’s overseas projects. In Israel’s earliest days, that included both legal immigration and the so-called aliyah bet – the illegal immigration best known through stories like that of the refugee ship Exodus. Aliyah bet succeeded in bringing some 70,000 Holocaust survivors to Israel.
World Jewry’s involvement in aliyah did not end with the Holocaust. It has never ended.
UJC and the Federations of North America have, in conjunction with other Jewish organizations including the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Joint Distribution Committee and Keren HaYesod and often with the help of EL AL aircraft, undertaken several massive aliyah programs, including waves from North Africa, Ethiopia, the
Former Soviet Union, Arab nations and even China.
“The connection of North American Jewry to Israel is as fundamental as the connection of one Jew to another,” says Howard Rieger, UJC’s president and CEO. “It serves as an example of what we can achieve with a homeland, something that was missing for two millenia.” Learn more about this connection at the UJC General Assembly, this November 16-19 in Israel, when 3,000 Jews from North America and Israel join together to mark Israel’s 60th anniversary with events in historic Jerusalem and cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, plus inspirational visits to the North and South to see UJC/Federation-supported programs. United Jewish Communities (UJC) represents 155 Jewish federations and 400 independent communities across North America. UJC seeks to lead this bold continental system in mobilizing financial and social resources through philanthropic endeavors, strategic initiatives and international agencies, to protect and strengthen the lives of Jews in North America, Israel and around the world. UJC is driven by the traditional Jewish values of chesed (caring and compassion), Torah (Jewish learning), tikkun olam (repairing the world) and tzedakah (social justice).
