Newsletter
Newsletter Support JNS

Judy Lash Balint is a Jerusalem-based freelance writer and author of Jerusalem Diaries: In Tense Times and Jerusalem Diaries: What’s Really Happening in Israel. She has reported from Jerusalem since making aliyah in 1998, with her work appearing in publications worldwide. She is currently a staff member at a leading Jerusalem think tank. A long time advocate for Soviet Jewry, she founded Seattle Action for Soviet Jewry in 1974 and served as Vice President of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (1980–1989). She is a recipient of the 2023 and 2024 Simon Rockower Awards from the American Jewish Press Association.

Facing almost unfathomable economic and social needs, while some government programs have kicked in, it is Israel’s civil society that is really making the difference.
More and more of us are being squeezed into a smaller area and many are questioning when it will be possible to return and rebuild.
Mourning and commemorating.
Around 250,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes, with no projected date for return.
An existential threat to our survival? Those fears were for our parents’ and grandparents’ generation.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians are now scattered in hotels and guesthouses throughout the safer parts of the country.
Almost every Israeli who has not been called up for military service feels compelled to be actively involved some way in support of the security forces or the traumatized families who have lost loved ones and their homes.
The mood in the capital is subdued, as people absorb the shock of Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault. But Israelis are starting to manifest the values of mutual responsibility and caring that have stood out in every crisis the country has ever experienced.