There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
It may seem unusual to open a national conference with tears, though less so for the Jewish people, especially after these past two years since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. This October, however, tears went from sorrow to joy mid-month, when on Oct. 13, the last 20 living Israeli hostages were freed from Gaza following a shaky, U.S.-brokered ceasefire put into place three days beforehand.
These tears were free-flowing one week ago, when more than 2,700 people convened at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Fla., for the annual global conference sponsored by Jewish National Fund-USA, held this year from Oct. 23 to Oct. 26.
Among the speakers at the opening session last Thursday morning, titled “Circles of Impact,” were released hostage Omer Shem Tov, who spent 505 days physically captive, and his parents, Malki and Shelly Shem Tov, who were held emotionally captive for 505 days, along with the rest of the families of the hostages and all of Israel.
Like other parents and family members of hostages, they became activists, relentlessly speaking to anyone who would listen; traveling to address politicians and world leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump; and appearing on talk shows, podcasts and in news interviews.
A video shown to the conference audience at the opening plenary showed Shelly crying out in Hebrew in the days after Oct. 7: Afo hu? Afo hu? (“Where is he?”), and Malki standing at the Israeli border with Gaza, calling out his son’s name through a bullhorn: “Omer! Omer Shem Tov! It’s Dad. We all miss you so much. Please come back, Omer. Come back.”
They did that to reassure him they were doing everything possible to see him again. And on Feb. 22, they finally did. Omer was released along with five other men as part of a negotiated deal.
When the three joined together on stage, the crowd went wild.
Omer, 23, said to the audience: “God gave me a present, and this present are my parents, right here.” He also thanked those in the crowd—his supporters—saying that in the darkest moments in Gaza, “I would feel the light, the prayers, the energy.”
At 120 feet underground in tunnels and held by Hamas, which he called a “cruel and brutal terror group,” he reported being in “living hell.” After 505 days “from complete darkness,” he said he came out “with an amazing, amazing beam of light”—the light of family and friends.
“You guys,” he said to the audience, “are the beam of light. So thank you for that.”
At a session two days later, on Sunday, he explained his story in detail to a standing-room-only crowd.
Ula Zusman, one of the national co-chairs of the conference and whose husband’s grandmother, Lore Zusman, was Jewish National Fund-Australia’s longest-serving volunteer at 40 years, asked those who attended from outside the United States to stand. A sizeable portion of the room did; some 20 countries were represented at the conference, according to organizers.
Smiling at the global presence in the room, she said “we can be hopeful about the future.”
She quoted Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who famously said that “all the world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.”
She compared those words to the feelings of trauma rippling throughout Israel these past two years and noted several projects partnered with the Jewish National Fund-USA, including the Eshkol Resilience Center, which provides therapy to adults and children suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The goals of improving mental health and grappling with grief in the wake of Oct. 7 are generational and long-term, said Zusman, in the hope that those receiving help can “walk that bridge and be less afraid.”
While Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in the U.S. House of Representatives, could not attend in person due, he said, to the government shutdown, he sent a video message saying he was with the audience in spirit.
“To the shock of no one but the most morally confused,” he noted that Hamas almost immediately violated the Oct. 10 ceasefire, saying the terrorist organization has not complied with the return of all remains of deceased hostages and has committed violence against Gazans. “The cold-blooded murder of Palestinians at the hands of Hamas has been largely met with deafening silence from both academia and the media,” he said.
“Despite the terror and trauma of Oct. 7,” he said, coupled with “the hypocrisy of our morally inverted world, I remain optimistic that both the Jewish people and the Jewish state will emerge from this tragedy better and stronger, more resilient and more renewed than ever before.”
The congressman stated that “Israel will outlive its enemies; it will outlive the Islamic Republic of Iran; it will outlive Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. Israel will not only survive; it will thrive as the new superpower of the Middle East.”
Torres concluded his video message with: “Make no mistake: No amount of antisemitism and anti-Zionism will defeat the destiny of the Jewish people as the authors of Abrahamic peace in the Middle East and beyond. The future does not belong to terror and violence. The future belongs to the anthem of the Jewish people, which is hope.”
The opening session wrapped up with a performance of Special in Uniform, a Jewish National Fund-USA program that integrates young adults with disabilities into the Israel Defense Forces and, in turn, into Israeli society. Their rendition of the song “I’m Coming Home” in front of a background of images of released hostages being embraced by their family members had the tears flowing yet again.
‘Screaming that they wanted to kill me’
The annual conference makes it a point to emphasize and include affinity groups—from educators and business people to teens and college students.
Samuel Rosenstein, 62, and with no plans to retire, traveled to Florida from Texas to “help bring more Israel content into the classroom, to build connections to the State of Israel, and to learn how to combat the PR blitz against it.”
He teaches eighth-graders after school, post-bar and bat mitzvah year, which he recognizes is a challenge. He said at one point, he had 18 students in class, but is now down to five. The course is funded by area synagogues and the local Jewish Federation, and he recently went on an educators’ mission with Jewish National Fund-USA that inspired him to continue the push to teach middle-schoolers.
“I want to make a difference in their lives,” Rosenstein said.
There was no teen component this year, although there was a significant push to get more Jewish teens to Israel, primarily through the Alexander Muss High School for Israel program.
Jewish National Fund-USA CEO Russell Robinson noted that in 1999, North America took 19,300 teenagers to Israel on programs of five weeks or more. Today, that number has dropped to 3,500 from all programs.
“We’re losing our teens when they are deciding who they are, where they belong and what they believe,” he said. “We must do more.”
He said that “Muss is the answer.” Programs run throughout the year and range in length from six weeks to 18 weeks. Originally based in Hod Hasharon, outside Tel Aviv, Jewish National Fund-USA opened a second campus in the summer of 2023 in Beersheva in Israel’s south—the capital of the Negev and part of a growing Zionist village.
Robinson urged investing in youth, and to that end, he announced a challenge: by 2030, to get 10,000 teenagers a year from the United States to go to Israel—part-study, part-travel.
That’s “10,000 to walk the land of their ancestors,” he said. “They will be our leaders for tomorrow. They’re going to tell our story for 4,000 more years, if we invest in them today.”
Participants in this year’s College Summit numbered 380, though many were skittish about offering their names, citing their concern for public safety.
One student, a 19-year-old sophomore and political science major at George Washington University, has dealt with antisemitism on campus. While she said she often tries to correct misinformation among her peers, it can be an uphill battle.
She told JNS that she stopped at a campus vigil marking the second anniversary of Oct. 7. On her way back to her dorm, she could hear a crowd of students shouting, “Intifada now!”
“My classmates were screaming that they wanted to kill me because I was Jewish,” said the New Jersey native. “I was crying. I was in tears.”
‘What mother wouldn’t do the same?’
A talk called “Wonder Women” on the main stage on Saturday—moderated by international broadcaster Erin Molan, an Australian television presenter who worked on Sky News Australia—featured Shirly Pinto Kadosh, a former Knesset member, the first one who is deaf; Ofri Reiner, a Nova music festival survivor who lost her 20-year-old brother, Shalev Dagan, in battle on Oct. 7; Michal Uziyahu, mayor of the Eshkol Regional Council, whose population was directly affected by the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks; and Shelly Shem Tov.
Asked earlier at the conference, as she and her husband were sitting unobtrusively in the lobby, what it felt like to be thrust in the spotlight internationally—to become instant celebrities in a way—as they fought for their son to come home, Shelly said it went both ways.
“We needed it, the love and support,” she told JNS. “The American Jewish public is part of us; we felt their support. On the worst day of our lives, the world decided not to be involved, except for America.”
As for being unlikely heroes, she waved her hand as if to discard the notion. “What mother wouldn’t do the same?” she replied.
A spotlight session, also on Saturday, titled “Beyond the Game: The Winning Team for Israel,” focused on a lineup of pro-athletes. These included Eddy Curry, an NBA All-Star; Nick Lowery, a Kansas City Chiefs football Hall of Famer; Saeid Mollaei, an Iranian-born gold medalist world champion middleweight judoka; Sagi Muki, an Israeli judo Olympic medalist; and Eric M. Rubin, managing director of Project Max, which fights racism, antisemitism and intolerance through sports. The panel was moderated by Rabbi Erez Sherman of Temple Sinai in Los Angeles and vice president of Rabbis for Israel.
Another panel titled “Europe’s Moral Crisis: Antisemitism Rising, Appeasement Returning” also drew a full house. Representatives from Belgium, Holland and Sweden discussed their Jewish communities at home and the challenges they face from their governments, society and growing Muslim populations that have exhibited radical elements. Ernest Herzog, executive director for operations of the World Jewish Congress, served as the presenter; it was moderated by Sara Friedman, CEO of the World Jewish Congress, Israel and North America.
The European speakers acknowledged that many Jews in their respective countries have their passports ready and their bags packed, wondering when and where to go.
As part of what can be called conference conviviality, people were talking about these sessions, in particular, for the next day and a half in hallways, elevators and during breaks in the program.
‘Miracles still happen’
The conference closed with the theme of “Dreams for Tomorrow.” The main speaker was another stalwart supporter of the State of Israel—British journalist, author and political commentator Douglas Murray. An hour beforehand, he spoke to a World Chairman’s Council group.
At the final general session, he was asked questions on stage by Phoebe Nissanoff, an alumnus of the Alexander Muss High School in Israel and a freshman at the University of Florida.
Murray centered on morality and values, an overriding topic, especially in the West, since Oct. 7. He specifically focused on religious liberty, saying that it has to be nurtured and preserved, that it isn’t just a natural product of human societies.
The present youth culture of self-abnegation, where leaders in past generations and what they stood for must be discarded—offering as examples intellectual icons like Thomas Jefferson, and long before him, Aristotle and Dante—does not bode well for the future. “We should be building on what they gave us,” he said.
“A country that hates its past hasn’t any future,” Murray said he was told by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in an interview.
As for Israel and Hamas, he posed the dichotomy as “a culture of life versus a culture of death.”
What happened in the Middle East as a result of the Jewish state’s military prowess in the last two years, he said, has shown that “miracles still happen in the modern era.” All the while, he said, more and more people have reconnected with their faith since Oct. 7, something he calls “a profoundly good thing.”
Imagine, he said, if a generation could be created like those who reacted well and with strength on that day, that Black Shabbat—“not a culture of grievance and accusation, but one that defends what’s good and right.” Imagine that in democratic societies.
He said that he often gets asked by Jews, “Why are you on our side?” To which he replies, “Who wouldn’t be?”
