This message was supposed to be delivered in person.

The Rashi Foundation was planning to attend the 2026 Jewish Funders Network conference in San Diego— to sit across from peers, share what we’re seeing on the ground, and have the kinds of conversations that only happen face to face. We didn’t make it. The situation in Israel made that impossible.

Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images

An Israeli man raises a fist from the window of his home in Kiryat Shmona after a night of rockets fired from Lebanon on March 12, 2026.

So consider this our dispatch from the field.

The Rashi Foundation, founded in 1984, works across education, welfare, and workforce development to promote social mobility and equal opportunity in Israel. Our Israeli-based team works with our heads and our hearts, building sophisticated strategies and intimate on the ground relationships in parallel.

Both our heads and our hearts are telling us that right now, the needs in northern Israel are most acute.

Long before Hezbollah fired a rocket in the current war, the Galilee faced structural challenges that often plague rural regions everywhere – brain drain, underinvestment, and a quiet exodus of the talented young people every community needs to flourish.

It’s a region of enormous potential, held back by decades of neglect and a shortage of the skilled, committed workforce that the modern Zionist economy requires.

And since Oct. 7, 2023, the challenges are coming from every direction at once.

Communities along the Lebanese border were evacuated for nearly two years. Families uprooted. Children destabilized. Businesses shuttered. Roughly 30% of residents, disproportionately young adults and families, have not returned. Close to 40% of businesses have not reopened.

And now, with Hezbollah once again bombarding the region, communities are spending days and nights under fire, running to shelters as rockets and drones target their homes. In recent rounds, northern Israel has faced repeated barrages, including days in which well over 200 rockets and drones were launched toward them.

This renewed assault creates an existential question for the future of the region.

Three factors will determine that answer, after the security question: meaningful employment, robust education and unwavering community resilience. These are foundations of demographic renewal and regional strength.

They require genuine multi-sector collaboration among philanthropy, local authorities, and the business sector. And any future success will require the government to prioritize necessary resources and collaboration over political jockeying.

For 40 years, the Rashi Foundation has helped identify the highest leverage interventions, earning the trust of local communities, cultivating the necessary relationships that turn good ideas into policy, and developing the grantmaking sophistication to know where investment moves the needle.

Our experience and relationships in the area taught us that collaboration is necessary to create the conditions that allow life to flourish once again in a region of innovation and prosperity: jobs worth staying for, schools that inspire confidence, and communities strong enough to recover and grow.

The people of northern Israel have already demonstrated something remarkable. Despite two years of evacuation, economic collapse, and renewed bombardment, they have not given up on their home. They are not asking to be rescued. They are asking for the conditions that make return possible.

Getting the North right is one of the most important things Israel must accomplish to make the Zionist dream in the 21st century real. A Jewish state that cannot hold its periphery, that loses its northern communities to Hezbollah and brain drain and government neglect, is a diminished state.

We are still in an ongoing war but when the security situation is stable again we can hope that  the existing infrastructure will do this work. The relationships, strategic clarity, and hard-won credibility are already at work. The communities are ready. What’s needed now is the sustained commitment, from every direction, to see it through.

If we succeed, the North will not simply return to what it was before. It can become a more robust, more vibrant region, one that draws families and young people back not only because of opportunity but because of the quality of life it offers. 

With its breathtaking landscapes and unique nature, the North has all it needs to become not just a place to where people return, but a place where they actively choose to build their lives for a healthy future.

Michal Cohen is CEO of the Rashi Foundation.