When their community in the Upper Galilee near the Lebanon border was evacuated on Oct. 7, Aviva and Yoel Auerbach were forced to close their pizza restaurant — their family’s sole source of income.

They were among hundreds of businesses in Israel who turned to the philanthropic-social venture SparkIL for help in the form of no-interest loans.

In the first chaotic days of the war, the venture saved their family from going under until government funding became available, according to Yoel Auerbach. “At that point in time, the loan was like oxygen that enabled us to breathe and survive, until the government started to also help us with our situation,” he said in a statement.

Now, as the war in the north continues to escalate with no end in sight, the peer-to-peer lending platform has expanded its support for Israel’s small business owners by launching an additional NIS 10 million ($2.67 million) emergency loan fund for businesses based in the north.

While much of the focus has been — and rightly so — on southern Israel, where the biggest tragedy occurred especially at the start of the war, Israelis evacuated from in the north have nevertheless also been struggling to maintain their livelihoods, even as people are beginning to return to communities near the Gaza border, according to SparkIL CEO Na’ama Ore.

“We understood at a certain point that the businesses and people in the north were hardly getting any assistance from anywhere — not from the government or from anywhere else,” Ore told eJewishPhilanthropy. “They’re in total despair because they have no idea when things are going to come back and when and where they are going to be able to work and their businesses are [floundering.]”

Home to approximately 90,000 of the 660,000 small- and medium-sized businesses across the country, the north has long been overlooked as a crucial contributor to Israel’s economic vitality, SparkIL maintains. The small businesses in that region employ 500,000 people, some of whom have been evacuated from their homes. Thousands of businesses on the northern border have been abandoned for the last eleven months, she said.

Two months after the Oct. 7 attacks, SparkIL launched its first NIS 10 million ($2.67 million) emergency loan fund for all small businesses in Israel that were affected by the war. To date, that effort has rallied more than 2,000 microlenders from around the world to contribute a total of about $5.5 million to over 300 businesses, according to the platform. Through the newly announced fund specifically dedicated to assisting businesses in the increasingly beleaguered north, business owners or other self-employed individuals in that region are now eligible for an immediate, interest-free loan of up to NIS 100,000 ($27,000) per business.

“We saw for quite a few months that we were getting more and more requests from people in the north who needed help. Some of them because their businesses are closed and though they have the way to pay back loans they need a way to survive, and some who are reopening a business or trying to reopen a business more in the center [of the country] because they’re evacuated and they don’t know when they’ll come back. So we decided that they’re the ones that now need the support,” Ore said.

Established in 2022 in partnership with the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Ogen Group, the SparkIL platform enables users to participate in crowdfunding interest-free loans that aim to make a continuing impact on underserved populations across Israel. Their loan fund for businesses in the north is supported by partners in both the nonprofit and corporate sectors, including the Jewish Federations of North America, the U.K.-based UJIA, Payoneer and KLA.

“We also got grants from corporate America, which was amazing. It is super exciting for us to understand that people, corporates — not Israeli corporates — reached out to us and are helping us with their foundations,” said Ore.

Ore noted that in addition to providing assistance for Israeli business owners, the SparkIL platform provides an avenue for cultivating Israel-Diaspora connections by enabling individuals across the world to directly support the small business of their choice in Israel by going onto their website and looking through the requests from assistance from different businesses ranging from a roadside café in the northern kibbutz of Kfar Giladi, to an Arab theater group in Nazareth and owners of a beekeeping initiative in Yesud HaMa’ala in the Hula valley. Loans can be as small as $25.

After repayment of their loan, lenders can choose to reinvest their money into other businesses — ensuring that their initial loan has ripple effects indefinitely — or to withdraw their funds from the platform, said Ore.

“I think that at the end of the day, what we do at SparkIL is to support the people, the dreamers, the believers that believe in themselves,” said Ore. “We’re there to give them the extra hand in order for them to be able to fulfill their new life, their dream, their expansion, wherever they are at that point.”

 The uniqueness in their platform is that it also allows the lenders to connect to individual people and business owners on a personal level, she said, and they receive updates on the businesses to which they have lent money.

“In the end it is not a business. It’s people. It’s families. It’s absolutely beautiful to see how people are responding to it. That is why we have decided to harness the passion and generosity of both Diaspora Jews and Israelis who are eager to help, empowering them to become social investors through our platform,” she said. “Each loan represents the importance of our mutual guarantee as an Israeli society and as a Jewish people to support each other, and especially to support the business owners in the north who are now facing a total collapse of their regional economy.”