Twenty months ago, the State of Israel and Israeli civil society were caught off guard and unprepared by the surprise Hamas invasion of Oct. 7 in the Gaza-border areas. Now, as Iranian missiles strike Israeli cities in the center of the country, local authorities, nonprofits and philanthropic organizations are far more capable, having already put systems into place to confront such emergencies.

The “rainy-day scenario” they had envisioned was now here. “The systems are pretty prepared, and also, I think, in terms of the resilience of the community as a whole, we’re just more prepared. We’re not freaking out from every alarm,” Sigal Yaniv Feller, executive director of the Israel office of the Jewish Funders Network, told eJewishPhilanthropy.

Yaniv Feller noted that because of the distance between Iran and Israel, the military is often able to give people alerts ahead of time that there may be sirens in the near future, giving people more time to prepare themselves. “The Home Front Command has done a pretty good job of explaining what to do in setting up the alerts system,” she said. “People know to get closer [to fortified areas] and then know to go inside the safe room and have whatever they need [ready]. So far, I don’t see a big need for philanthropy to step in [at the moment].”

Last year, amid growing fears of a potential multifront war with Iran, philanthropic organizations together with local authorities began putting into place systems with funding from donors for the “rainy-day scenario,” she said. These included kits to keep children occupied if schools close and they are confined to bomb shelters, as well as chemical toilets, generators and other emergency gear. 

“These grantees got grants to be able to set these systems in place in case doomsday comes. Some are within municipalities, some of them are youth movements, some of them are different community centers. It has been multi-sectorial efforts over the past 18 months,” she said.

According to Yaniv Feller, it was understood that if there are multiple fronts of injuries, access to the scenes may not be easy and they will need to rely on a community-level first response, she said, and so a lot of investment also went into recruiting teams of volunteers on the municipal level, having motorcycles that can easily reach and access emergency locations and setting up WhatsApp groups to facilitate communication in situations of emergencies.

So as war broke out with Iran over the weekend, those systems of coordination and alignment between all the heads of governmental offices, heads of civil society, heads of philanthropy and heads of business sector were already in place and were just reactivated to begin a coordinated response, Yaniv Feller said. A Zoom call is set up for tomorrow between governmental agencies, the umbrella organization of the nonprofit sector and the umbrella organization of the volunteer organizations, she said, to assess the situation.

“What we’re seeing now is that a lot of this is just kicking in immediately and the municipal level is reacting pretty amazingly,” she said, noting that at this early stage of the situation assessments need to be continuous as things develop. “So at the moment, if I look at the needs, most of the needs are covered by Home Front Command, coupled with the municipality backed by the Ministry of Welfare and a little bit on the angles of that, you can see nonprofits, civil society, but on very small scale because we don’t need much. I think the nonprofit sector went into scenario planning of understanding what that might look like. That was catalyzed by philanthropy asking these tough questions and the nonprofits generating a plan. A lot of that system, from a very modest observation point that’s two days old, [is functioning].”

While a significant amount of money has been invested over the past 20 months to prepare for the current scenario, some grantmakers have already started directing additional funds to the communities that have been hit by the Iranian attacks. On Sunday night, UJA-Federation of New York’s board of directors announced that it was allocating $10 million in emergency funding to emergency services, hospitals, trauma care, welfare and to volunteers working with children and evacuees. 

“In the days and weeks ahead, we’ll continue to allocate funding where it’s most needed,” Eric Goldstein, CEO of the New York federation, said in a statement. 

Yaniv Feller noted that it remains to be seen whether all the systems will continue to work in the long term, with the number of people injured and evacuated rapidly multiplying, from 262 casualties on Saturday to 742 by Sunday afternoon.

In addition, she said, most of the municipalities that have been hit in the center of the country are strong, functional, professional municipalities, as opposed to the situation in the early days of the Israel-Hamas war, with weaker periphery municipalities needing assistance. She said that every affected family has been awarded a NIS 50,000 ($14,000) stipend by the welfare department of their municipalities for their immediate needs, which has already been approved by the Ministry of Welfare.

The bigger needs will come later, and the important assessment work by philanthropic organizations is ongoing, Yaniv Feller added.

Becky Caspi, director of the Jewish Federations of North America’s Israel office, told eJP that her grantmaking organization has focused recently on helping Israeli nonprofits become more resilient and flexible. Since Oct. 7, 2023, JFNA has raised $873.4 million and allocated $742.9 million, according to its latest report.

“A very significant goal of ours since Oct. 7 is to coordinate, to be flexible. If there’s another philanthropy that has an expertise or a very strong focus in an area, we want to see that area and those needs get covered and are happy to either partner or move on to another area,” Caspi said. “Sometimes you need more than one responding organization to meet the needs of an entire population.”

As opposed to after the Oct. 7 terror attacks, the current scenario does not deal with conflicts only on the southern and northern borders but rather an entire country under fire, Caspi said, which may continue over a long period of time. And so the investment in a network of volunteers has been of special importance, such as with the Yedidim organization, which was initially created to help people with automobile troubles — flat tires,dead batteries and such — but has since morphed into a more encompassing volunteer organization. The group has been helping with the current situation by making sure bomb shelters are usable, such as freeing jammed or rusted doors and windows, Caspi said. JFNA helped Yedidim enhance its digital management tools so it is prepared to handle larger volumes of requests, she said. JFNA also helped develop an app, WEME, which helps manage volunteer deployment with the Israel Volunteer Council and is used by dozens of organizations and local authorities.

“Many of our prior investments are bearing fruit right now,” Caspi said, noting the cooperation with organizations such as the Jewish Agency and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. “They have a very strong presence, very strong ties with the government and programming already underway that they can, as they have throughout the 619 days of this war, pivot to meet new and emerging needs.”

Similarly, Brothers and Sisters of Israel — originally an anti-government protest movement that created a major volunteering operation in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks — put together an emergency cabinet early Friday morning with capable, flexible volunteers, said Aaron Nahumi, the group’s emergency operations manager of 

“Let’s [say] we are not exactly sleeping and we have very many teams,” he said. “There are very many associations in Israel doing a great job. We are very flexible, very quick in response, very flexible in thinking, doing very many kinds of improvisations, and not afraid of things which we don’t know.”

For instance, the organization has set up points of contact in shelters and hotels to assess and fulfill the needs of those displaced, he said. They are leveraging a network of volunteers to facilitate quick responses to emergent needs, Nahumi added, with volunteers assisting residents whose home have been hit with essential items such as clothes, medicine, diapers and toys for children and food through their command center. The group is also providing transportation for families who have had to move out of their homes and setting up host families to provide temporary lodging.

The fact that Iranian missiles have primarily struck urban areas rather than the periphery has forced Brothers and Sisters to alter its approach.  That includes increased coordination with municipal authorities and various agencies.

Another group of about 400 young adult volunteers at the Hineni (“I am here”) Center of the B’nai Akiva Youth Movement has been receiving requests from wives of reservists who need help with their children, said Tchiya Baruch, director of the civil command center. The volunteers have also been sleeping over in homes to help with the elderly — who sometimes live alone — or families with children with disabilities who need assistance reaching public shelters during the air raid sirens, she said, and are often the first point to assess the families’ needs.

The contact is conducted in coordination with other nonprofits and local authorities, Baruch said, who direct them to the needy families. The youth movement has also set up a center in Tel Aviv where its collects items needed by the families, she added.

“There is no doubt that our youth experience terrible anxiety in this situation, but all children in Israel are experiencing the sirens and a lot of families have members who have been drafted into the army already,” she said. “We see that the best way of helping them confront this is by having them help others. Even a small child can bake cookies and bring them to his neighbors whose father is in the army. This really helps.”