Good Thursday morning!

For the past three months, The Jewish Agency for Israel has garnered attention for helping to resettle the 20,000 Ukrainians and Russians who have streamed into Israel — shifting its immigration apparatus into overdrive. But on Wednesday, the quasi-governmental agency celebrated a very different kind of aliyah — one on a much smaller scale, and a long time coming.

Jewish Agency staff spent the past few days accompanying 181 Ethiopian immigrants from the northern city of Gondar to the capital of Addis Ababa and, finally, to Ben Gurion Airport, where they landed yesterday. It’s the first group of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel in more than a year, and the first of at least 3,000 who are slated to arrive.

The immigrants will live for two years in government-run absorption centers, where an older generation of Ethiopian-Israelis, who came in the mass immigration waves of the 1980s and 1991, will help teach them Hebrew, provide employment training and acclimate culturally.

In a way, Jewish Agency COO Yehuda Setton told eJewishPhilanthropy, the Jewish Agency’s experience acclimating Ethiopian immigrants helped lay the groundwork for absorbing the tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians who’ve landed in Tel Aviv. To help the Ethiopians succeed in Israel, the Jewish Agency designed an employment training program that helped them get jobs in tech, in part by learning English. The agency also created a system to identify Ethiopian immigrants’ talents in order to match them with jobs. These programs are now being adapted for the new Ukrainian residents.

“You have to build unique models for them,” he said. “You work with them on language, and also culturally. We began with Ethiopia and it was easy to expand to Ukraine.”

The two waves of immigrants — from Ethiopia and Ukraine — are handled by two separate teams of the Jewish Agency, and pose challenges that are at once very different and somewhat similar, Setton said.

“The difference is that most of the Ethiopian immigrants have dreamed for years of reaching Jerusalem, reaching Israel — whether it’s to reunite with their families or because of their religious Zionist feeling,” Setton said, whereas many of the Ukrainian arrivals “didn’t have it on their agenda, and simply wanted to save their own lives.”

In both cases, however, “you’re absorbing two populations that at this point, materially, don’t have anything — two populations that, mentally, need a lot of social work,” Setton said. “In Ukraine they’re coming from a war, and in Ethiopia, the cultural gaps… are vast.”

Setton accompanied the Ethiopian immigrants from Gondar to Israel, and said the experience gave him “chills.” He described one immigrant who hadn’t seen his mother, who lives in Israel, for 15 years. He was afraid to tell her he was coming until he got on the plane. “You can see,” Setton said, “that they’re ready for this emotionally.”

SIGN ME UP

Why two federations 500 miles apart spent $3 million on a Jewish Eventbrite

Screenshot

In 2019, Scott Kaufman, then the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, gave a series of talks about how to increase local Jewish engagement. His set of proposals included an idea for a Jewish event-management platform, in the vein of Eventbrite, called Jlive. When he gave his speech in Montreal, he met a donor who was interested. Three years later, Jlive is used by 90 organizations across Montreal and Detroit, where it has advertised more than 1,200 events, reports Lev Gringauz for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Eliminating overlap: Before Jlive, to register for programs, “We [made] people fill out the same form. And if they go to a different organization, they fill out another form,” Kaufman told eJP. “It feels like medical records, you’re always filling out the same thing over and over again.”

Granular data: Alongside standard event management and registration features, Jlive is also a reflection of the Jewish community’s focus on data-driven decision making. By hosting organizations on a platform that is specifically for Jewish events, Jlive can aggregate and analyze granular demographic trends for individual agencies, like the age and location of attendees, as well as for entire communities.

That price tag: The project has cost $3 million so far, and most of the budget has come from private donors from around the world. Kaufman said the spending hasn’t eaten into the Detroit federation’s social service allocations. In 2021, according to its annual report, the federation had $38 million in total allocations, including more than $20 million that went to community service and a category called “additional local support.”

Read the full story here.

LAND OF ISRAEL

Shavuot made me a Zionist. Here’s why.

PikiWiki Israel, Shavuot 1968; photo-by Amos Gil

“Shavuot made me a Zionist… Well, maybe it wasn’t just Shavuot, but that holiday played an important role. Why? Because when you grow up in the Southern Hemisphere, the Jewish holidays make you keenly aware of being in the wrong place; especially those that, like Shavuot, have a strong seasonal component,” writes Andrés Spokoiny, president and CEO of Jewish Funders Network, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Growing up: “In my Jewish school, we carried baskets with bikkurim, the first ripe fruits, in the dead of winter and sang joyful songs of harvest when the wheat was months away from maturity. We marched in the schoolyard wearing the kova tembel (the slightly ridiculous Israeli pioneers’ hat) and sang ‘make way, we bring the first fruits from the confines of The Land!’ For better or worse, it instilled in us the idea that there’s something irretrievably lost in your Judaism if you are far from the Land of Israel. It was as though our kindergarten teachers wanted to show us how ridiculous a Jew is outside of his homeland.”

Connection to the Land: “To be sure, most Jewish holidays have a connection to the Land of Israel and its cycles of nature. It wasn’t less disorienting to celebrate Passover as the holiday of spring amid falling leaves and autumn storms, but there was something unique about Shavuot that made evident the incompleteness of a landless Judaism.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Closer Look: MacKenzie Scott’s generosity is to be commended, especially when she supports groups with undeniably worthy missions, such as New City Kids, a New Jersey-based foundation that combats child poverty and delinquency, writes Aron Ravin in National Review. Yet many of her donations — like those that support land reparations to Native Americans — are more political, less traditionally philanthropic and also unlikely to actually achieve real change, Ravin states. “Charity has stopped being something we volunteer for our communities or to people in desperate need. It’s just becoming yet another low-risk method for people to engage in politics.” [NR]

Is it Closing Time?: There are more than 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S., which means there’s a lot of duplication of efforts, Wayne Elsey writes in NonProfitPRO, and nonprofit leaders need to know when it’s time to shut down. “Closing a nonprofit for the right reasons isn’t easy. It all comes down to assessing your organization and determining if you’re going in the right direction. The best way to do this is by conducting a thorough self-evaluation for your  organization. Should you decide to close your nonprofit, you should do so before the end of the year to save yourself the regulatory headaches of unwinding the organization in the following tax year…Nonprofits exist to help society, and if they don’t reach their goal, people need to move on. Some nonprofits can achieve their goals within a specific time frame, but typically it takes longer than that. Nonprofits need to stay relevant and continue growing to maintain donors’ trust in them.”[NonProfitPRO]

Welcoming Refugees: Jewish communities and individuals are mobilizing resources to help refugees who are resettling in the United States, Rahel Musleah reports in Hadassah Magazine. One such effort comes from three New Jersey synagogues in the South Orange-Maplewood (SOMA) area — Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel, Beth El Congregation and Congregation Oheb Shalom — which host a Welcome Circle for an Afghani family affiliated with HIAS, the Jewish refugee aid group. “Rabbi Daniel Cohen of South Orange’s Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel noted that ‘The Torah mentions welcoming the stranger over 36 times, and frequently adds ‘because you were slaves in Egypt.’ It’s clear that those who know the pain of being powerless, and have suffered as a result, have a responsibility to help and uplift others once they are in a position to do so. We consciously wanted to do this work as a synagogue community.’ The SOMA group previously welcomed Soviet Jews and, five years ago, two Syrian and one Iraqi family. One of the Syrian daughters now teaches in Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel’s preschool. Cohen said he has a personal obligation, too. His grandfather escaped Lithuania in the early 1900s. ‘No one helped him then. For his grandchild to be in a position to help is really powerful.’” [HadassahMagazine]

Pic of the Day

Ilia Yefimovich/picture alliance via Getty Images

German Minister of the Interior and Community Nancy Faeser lays a wreath on Tuesday during a memorial ceremony in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Remembrance in Jerusalem.