by Robin Nobel As a grants officer for the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe, a family foundation that supports the preservation and promotion of Jewish heritage across Europe, my travel schedule can sometimes read like the Easyjet flightpath. From Barcelona to St Petersburg and from Rome to Glasgow, I visit projects throughout the continent but few site visits have left me as perplexed as a recent one to Budapest. I was in the Hungarian capital in order to monitor our on-going support of academic Jewish studies there. From the moment I stepped off the plane, I was witness to signs of a changing Hungary, one which was rapidly being remoulded in accordance with newly introduced legislation and which had become a much less easy place for our foundation to function. … [Read more...]

by Noga Zivan It is a source of ongoing debate within the Jewish NGO community as to how far we should be focusing our efforts on supporting our own people, whatever our understanding of that phrase means, and how much we should be looking to take responsibility for the wider world around us. During a recent sojourn in Kathmandu, Nepal, however, I got the opportunity to get to know one Jewish NGO which sees these things as far from contradictory. … [Read more...]