More than 13 months after Hamas’s terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it’s natural to look back on the previous year. But Russell Robinson, CEO of Jewish National Fund-USA, told JNS as some 2,500 Israel supporters descended on Dallas this weekend for JNF’s Global Conference for Israel that it’s important to think ahead as well.
“A year ago, we were talking about people who may not move back to their homes in the Gaza Envelope,” he told JNS of the communities near the Israeli-Gaza border. “A year later, because of our work, because of the real determination of everybody in Israel and across the world, 80% of the people have moved back to their homes.”
The events of Oct. 7 “shook us; it changed us, and tomorrow is really what it’s all about,” Robinson added. “It was a trauma and a wake-up call, and we’ve answered the call.”
The nearly 125-year-old nonprofit’s U.S. arm is working on a 34,000-square-foot community center in the Gaza Envelope. It has already funded nine parks, two synagogues and two day-care centers, which have all been completed.
A new “resilience” therapy and healing center is out for contract, and work is underway on what JNF says will be a state-of-the-art sports facility in Sha’ar HaNegev, between Beersheva and the border community of Ashkelon.
“It’s not just for the people when they move back home. It’s going to be for the people who want to move to Sha’ar HaNegev tomorrow to go, ‘Wow, look what they have,’” Robinson said.
JNF’s mission is in part to expand Israeli populations on the periphery of the Jewish state.
Robinson told JNS it is imperative to begin rebuilding in the Gaza Envelope and in Israel’s north, which has been under fire from the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah for more than a year, even during a war.
“It’s the thought process of the Jewish people. We believe in tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t know what the world is always going to be, but we have children in the hopes and beliefs of what tomorrow is. So our strategy is simple. Believe with us. Believe in tomorrow. There’s no stopping and waiting.”
‘The big brothers’
An opportunity to create an enduring bridge over what a growing gap between Israeli and Diaspora Jews emerged from the very tragic circumstances of Oct. 7 and the war, according to Robinson.
“We were always raised on ‘them’ and ‘us,’” he said. “We were the big brothers, so to speak. We have our organizational life, and part of it is that we need to give because of oy vey,” Yiddish for “dismay” or “grief.”
But 4,000 Americans going to Israel through JNF-USA programs in the past year to volunteer has changed the dynamic, according to Robinson.
“I want you to imagine volunteers cleaning up some people’s homes that they don’t know,” he said. “Some of the mothers came home early because they were going to clean their home and they found Americans cleaning their homes and ovens, their refrigerators, their floors, making their beds.”
“I want you to imagine they took—on their own dime—time away from their family, from their work, to go to a war zone,” he said. Many Israelis came home to find those volunteers “working in the dirt and replanting and helping pick fruits and vegetables.”
“If you underestimated the unity of the Jewish community, you were wrong,” he said.
In turn, U.S. volunteers are often asked in Israel about struggles in the Diaspora.
“When I go to Israel, the first question Israelis now ask is, ‘Are you guys okay?’ because they’re seeing what’s happening here,” Robinson said, of surging, global Jew-hatred.
“We may have different kinds of right and left, but I think the wake-up call was that we are all one,” he said.
Robinson told JNS that JNF had to turn people away from its sold-out conference this year.
“The greatest thing for professionals is to get these nasty notes that say, ‘I’m a major donor. You’ve got to let me in,’” he said.
“We have hundreds of people on a wait list,” he added. “There is not a tired Jewish community. There is a striving Jewish community that wanted to come together in a conference like this.”
