Visiting Israel’s threatened north
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Visiting Israel’s threatened north

Jewish Agency board chair Mark Wilf of Livingston sees both displacement and hope

The Jewish Agency for Israel’s chair of the executive, Doron Almog, left, and board chair Mark Wilf, right, stand with Ethiopian olim newly landed in Israel. (The Jewish Agency)
The Jewish Agency for Israel’s chair of the executive, Doron Almog, left, and board chair Mark Wilf, right, stand with Ethiopian olim newly landed in Israel. (The Jewish Agency)

Last month, Mark Wilf of Livingston returned home from a trip to Israel.

That’s not inherently unusual. Members of New Jersey’s Jewish community go back and forth between here and there with nearly metronomic regularity, and since October 7 there’s been a constant stream of local people going to Israel to help, support, and bear witness.

But Mr. Wilf, a former president of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest and the immediate past chair of the Board of the Jewish Federations of North America, now is the chair of the board of governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel. This trip, his third since the atavistic barbarity of the attack that killed 1,200 people on October 7, has the power of the agency — and of other American Jewish donors and agencies — behind it.

This board of governors meeting, Mr. Wilf said, was one of two the Jewish Agency routinely holds each year. This year, “we used a couple of days in Jerusalem to meet with our partner organizations — the JFNA, Keren Hayesod, and the World Zionist Organization” — those are the Jewish Agency’s partners and largest funders — “to discuss strategy, and to talk as a group about the agency’s needs in Israel and around the world.”

Mr. Wilf talks to Israel’s former ambassador to Ethiopia. (The Jewish Agency)

Since October 7, the Jewish Agency has helped victims of terror in both short- and long-term ways, providing both immediate aid and ongoing support. “Since then, we’ve distributed over 8,800 three-year grants,” Mr. Wilf said.

But the emotional heart of the trip was to three communities in Israel’s north that had been affected by October 7, the threat by Hezbollah that followed, and the state of suspended animation in which they’ve been living since, he said.

Danyelle Neuman, the head of global fundraising strategy for the Jewish Agency, was one of half a dozen agency colleagues who accompanied Mr. Wilf on that trip. “There are missiles falling in the north, and about 70,000 people have left their homes,” Ms. Neuman said. “They are living with no sense of certainty.”

The destruction in the south, in the Gaza Envelope, was far worse than up north, she said, “but at least there are plans about when they can go home.” Kibbutzim will be rebuilt, and even now, members of the community are living close enough to each other so they can see each other. People displaced in the north have been widely scattered throughout Israel, and there are no plans yet about when they can go home. The threat from Hezbollah hangs over the lives of both the people who have remained and those who have left.

Mr. Wilf and other Jewish Agency leaders tour communities in southern Israel. (The Jewish Agency)

“Mark’s feeling is that he wanted to hear these things firsthand,” Ms. Neuman said. “So first we drove to an immigration center in Sefad that works with Ethiopian immigrants.”

“I have a personal connection with them,” Mr. Wilf said. “We spent a lot of time bringing another few thousand Ethiopians home in the past couple of years, in Operation Tzur Israel.” That program brought about 3,000 Ethiopian olim to Israel from 2020 to 2023; Mr. Wilf was aboard its last flight. “Maybe some of the people on that flight were in the absorption center,” he said.

“We met with 10 people, who were between 16 and 25 years old,” Ms. Neuman said. “Each of them told us who they are and when they came to Israel. Some of them spoke incredibly good English, and their Hebrew was perfect. They’ve been in Israel between one and two and a half years. One girl is serving in an intelligence unit in the IDF — she spoke perfect English. Another young man was hoping to become a pilot. Two of the boys were going to a summer camp program through the Jewish Agency.

“It was wonderful to be in a room like this, full of young people who will build their lives in Israel. Here we were, sitting literally in a bomb shelter in Safed, and Mark was asking them if they feel safe, and they just wanted to know about us.

Mr. Wilf, JAFI COO Yehuda Setton, and Neta Katz Epstein, its chief program officer, stand with campus shlichim and their students. (The Jewish Agency)

“They will be incredible Israeli citizens, and it was a strong moment of pride for us.”

Next, “we went to a small kibbutz called Kabri, three or four kilometers from Nahariya. At this point, it has mainly been evacuated — self-evacuated. The government didn’t evacuate them — they just didn’t feel safe.”

That is not an irrational feeling. About six hours before we talked, on July 11, Ms. Neuman said, “rockets fell in Kabri”; the Israeli press reported that an Israeli was critically injured. It’s within range of Hezbollah’s drones and rockets.

“We met with a family there whose daughter participated in our Youth Futures program,” which matches at-risk children with teen mentors, Ms. Neuman said. “A mentor works with a child and the family for three years. The children have different issues — sometimes they’re social, sometimes other things — but it is very clear that everyone in the program suffers to a certain extent from something that requires outside intervention.

Mr. Wilf stands with Israel President Isaac Herzog. (The Jewish Agency)

“We went into the family’s home. It’s a lovely home, and they give us a lovely spread.

“The father is in the kibbutz’s internal security force, and he refuses to leave.” The mother works hard, outside the home. There’s also a brother, and a dog.

The family is isolated. “Almost all of the other families have left, and the schools have been shut down.” At times the daughter has been able to go to school, but that’s fairly infrequent. “There is not a lot of structure in her life,” Ms. Neuman said. “She had been suffering socially before October 7.”

But the mentor provides structure, and attention that her parents do not have the time or bandwidth to give. “They all acknowledge that the mentor plays an important role in their lives. The mentor is her lifeline.” The mentor works through the Jewish Agency.

Jane and Mark Wilf are at the 2023 Celebrate Israel parade, where he was an honorary grand marshal.

“The Jewish Agency created these programs 20 years ago, and we never could have foreseen how they literally are saving this girl’s life,” Mr. Wilf said.

The third stop was in Nahariya. “There is an absorption center there that takes in new Russian and Ukrainian immigrants,” Ms. Neuman said. “We talked with two from Russia and one from Ukraine. We asked the Ukrainian immigrant, ‘You literally left the bombing of Ukraine to come to the bombing of Nahariya. Would you have come here, knowing what was coming here?’

“He said, ‘We are happy in Israel. No, we would not go back.”

Ms. Neuman has strong memories of that day. “As we got into the car, Mark says to the director of the absorption center, ‘Thank you so much.’ And the director says to him, ‘No, we are the ones who should be thanking you. We haven’t had the lay leadership of the Jewish Agency come to the north since October 7.

New olim wave flags as JAFI welcomes them. (Nir-Kafri/Jewish-AgencyforIsrael)

“‘Thank you for being with the people of the north. We really need you.’”

The dangers in the north are real. “The week after we visited, rockets were shot at Safed, the power in the absorption center went out, and there were fires in the city,” Ms. Neuman continued. “And then, two and a half weeks later, there was the rocket that killed somebody in Kabri.

“We happened to go up north on a peaceful day, but for the people who live there — or who lived there — the volatility, the uncertainty, the lack of knowing what’s going to happen next is profound.”

The connection that he and other Jews feel to Israel is similarly profound, Mr. Wilf said.

Mark Wilf and Doron Almog share a podium. (Guy Yechiely)

He’s proud of the federation system and the work its members do. In the last few weeks, missions from both the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest and the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey have made the most recent of many post-October 7 trips. “They are vital partners of the Jewish community. New Jersey has some of the strongest communities that always have been supportive of Israel and of Jewish communities overseas,” he said. “The Jewish Agency is very grateful for the tremendous support.”

That’s the communal. There’s also the personal.

“For me, as the second-generation Holocaust survivor, on a personal level, having a strong state of Israel and a strong Jewish community, especially with all the antisemitism we see now, is vitally important,” Mr. Wilf said.

“Thank God, we have a strong state of Israel now. That’s something that our community didn’t have 80 years ago. I feel it viscerally and personally.”

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