September 25, 2008
Vazha and Irina Mamisashvili and their sons Nikoloz, eight, and David, five, will celebrate this Rosh Hashana in their new home at Kibbutz Masada in the Jordan Valley.
Just eight weeks ago they were living in Georgia when the fighting broke out. They decided it was time to move to Israel.
“We wanted to do what is best for our children,” Irina said. Today she is working at the kibbutz guest house and is in ulpan with her husband learning Hebrew; their children are starting school.
As we begin a new year we can be proud that we, the Jewish people, are united together through hard times as when it’s good; that Israel is there for the Jewish people wherever they are, and the Jewish people are there for Israel.
If we have learned one thing from these recent years, it is how deeply and how viscerally the fate of the State of Israel is intertwined with Jewish people all over the world.
When the bodies of the two missing soldiers — abducted by Hizbullah in an attack that sparked the Second Lebanon War — were finally brought home, the sense of closure, disappointment, and acceptance of their fate was not only felt throughout Israel but also shared among Jews in communities everywhere.
When the fighting broke out in Georgia, the State of Israel and the Jewish people were there for the Jews in danger. Hostilities in the Georgian province of South Ossetia broke out on a Thursday night, and by Saturday the Jewish Agency evacuated the 200 Jews of Gori to the safety of Tbilisi, the capital. Three days later, some of those same Jews who were evacuated from the war zone arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport as new immigrants, beginning a new life in the State of Israel. They were among the 200 Jews from Georgia who the Jewish Agency will have brought to Israel since the start of the crisis.
Our underlying challenge is to keep the flame of Zionism burning in the hearts of Jews around the world, the vast majority of whom live in peace and relative prosperity. It is in these places that we need to establish and strengthen an inalienable link between the next generation of Jews and Israel, so that, like their grandparents and parents, they will love Israel and view it also as their home.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently declared that the Israeli government would take a more active role in forging the Zionist identity and connection to the state of Israel among Jews in communities abroad. The Jewish Agency, in Olmert’s view, would serve as a platform for this strengthened connection and relationship between Israelis with Jews abroad.
For the Jewish Agency this means becoming more involved in North America by providing greater and more meaningful Israel content through education and opportunities in Israel.
It means bringing more than 120 Israeli teachers to teach Hebrew in day schools, having (a record) 1,500 Israeli youths come for the summer to serves as counselors in Jewish camps, and bringing dozens of young Israeli emissaries to serve in communities and on college campus all across North America.
We bring young adults to Israel for a semester or a year of studying, volunteering, or working. We offer Jewish youths before, during, or after college opportunities to study and live in Israel.
On the community level, it comes in the form of nearly 50 partnerships between Jewish communities in New Jersey and towns and local councils in Israel. It also comes through the financial support we give to the Taglit-Birthright Israel program.
It is these efforts, aimed mostly at people during their formative years, which lead some North American Jews to culminate their Zionist connection with aliya. For this very important group we want to make sure they get the highest level of service and make their ultimate Zionist dream a reality. That is why we recently announced our new partnership with Nefesh B’Nefesh so that, together, we can achieve the best possible results in helping immigrants from North America.
When the Jewish Agency was awarded the Israel Prize, our country’s most prestigious honor to organizations and individuals, on Israel’s 60th Independence Day in May, we were cited as the “organization which helped realize the vision of the return to Zion.”
In 60 years that vision has not been eclipsed; it has not dulled. With partners like the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ and in Jewish communities all over the world, we will work to see the next 60 years as bright and vital a fulfillment of the Zionist ideal as the last 60.
With that mission in hand — with the unity of the Jewish people with a strong Israel at its heart as our goal — we cannot but succeed. If we diligently work toward a united, mutually responsible, and viscerally connected am Yisrael, it most certainly will be a wonderful new year.
Zeev Bielski is chair of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
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