Nearly a year and a half ago, at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly in Tel Aviv, Israeli President Isaac Herzog unveiled a new dialogue initiative — Kol Ha’Am (Voice of the People) — to address the growing rifts within the global Jewish community amid the bitter turmoil over the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul plans and general tensions between Diaspora Jewry and the State of Israel. 

That summer, Herzog’s team organized “strategic labs” around the world, bringing together leaders and significant figures from a variety of Jewish communities to discuss and dissect the pressing issues facing the Jewish people in order to develop work plans to address them.

And then on Oct. 7, thousands of terrorists breached the security barrier around the Gaza Strip, entering Israeli communities and massacring over 1,200 people, injuring thousands more and taking over 250 hostages. The unprecedented attacks served as the opening salvo of an ongoing war in Gaza and fighting along Israel’s northern borders, and also sparked a wave of antisemitism around the world.

“Everything that was planned was irrelevant,” said Shirel Dagan-Levy, the CEO of the Israeli nonprofit that was formed to execute the initiative, Voice of the People, in a virtual press briefing on Wednesday. “For six months [after Oct. 7] nothing was done with regards to Voice of the People, and we had lots of thoughts of ‘How do we re-initiate this thing?’”

This week, Herzog, Dagan-Levy and her team relaunched the Voice of the People initiative in a similar but updated format from the original plan. As with the initial concept, the goal is to identify and address global challenges facing the Jewish people and cultivate the leaders needed to do so.

To start, the organization created an open survey — offered in six languages — asking the respondents to list “the most pressing challenges facing the Jewish people today,” to select the top five most significant challenges out of a list of 10 and describe how “recent events” have made an impact on their Jewish identity and sense of community.

“My goal is that 15.6 million people will fill out the survey,” Dagan-Levy joked, referring to the estimated global Jewish population.

Next month, the group will begin hosting virtual salons to discuss these topics and it will also begin a process of recruiting a 150-member council to lead the effort. The international committee, which will meet monthly, would comprise 50 representatives from Israel, 50 from North America and 50 from the rest of the world. Every two years the council members would change. The organization plans to announce its inaugural cohort by the beginning of next year.

The baseline requirements are that the members be over 18, that they consider themselves to be Jewish and that they “believe in the right of Israel to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people,” Dagan-Levy said.

“Some will come from the business arena, some will come from education and some will come from arts and culture,” she said. “But we want people who are indeed attached to what’s going on with the Jewish people, and they want to be proactive and change what’s going on.”

The organization said it will also select 10 young people — ages 20-30 — to serve as fellows, who will be “cultivated to assume leadership roles” and will assist the council. In addition, a small number of “mentors” will be selected by Herzog to “bolster the council’s activities,” according to Voice of the People.

“We are currently engaged in safeguarding the State of Israel and reinforcing the strength of the Jewish people amid a challenging war and rising antisemitism. Simultaneously, we face critical issues that demand our attention,” Herzog said in a statement. “In response, we are establishing the Voice of the People council, which will focus on ensuring the Jewish people’s ability to thrive in a changing world. The survey we are launching today will shape the council, and therefore shape the discussions impacting the future of the Jewish people. I encourage everyone to participate and contribute to help build our collective future.”

Dagan-Levy said the process of selecting the 150 council members will include both targeted recruitment and an open application. An “algorithm” will also be used to ensure that the council is representative of the Jewish people taking into account “geography, gender, Jewish beliefs, approach to life, personas like builders, people that are superstars in their field of work — all kinds of ideas that we have for what we think could comprise a kind of a mini-ecosystem of the global Jewish world within the council,” she said.

Voice of the People’s organizational partners are the Jewish Agency for Israel, where Herzog was previously chair of the executive, and the World Zionist Organization. The initiative is backed financially by the Israeli Azrieli Foundation, the Wilf Family Foundations and the Patrick & Lina Drahi Foundation. The initial funding for the “strategic labs” was provided by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation; Dagan-Levy said the grant-maker was not supporting the initiative further.

While Dagan-Levy said the Oct. 7 attacks prompted Voice of the People to halt its activities and reorganize, the information that the initiative gathered in its initial “strategic labs” has still informed its work.

“They were the base and research for everything that was built,” Neta Danciger, the head of marketing at Voice of the People and one of the original members of the initiative, said at the press briefing. “It’s valuable data that was collected in 15 countries around the world, and we used it for many strategic plannings and to build the mechanism that we’re presenting today. So it was not lost.”