Good Monday morning and happy Juneteenth!

Excited chatter in Hebrew, English, French, Portuguese and a variety of other languages filled the patio of Jerusalem’s Hotel Yehuda last night, as 150 professionals from around the world came together for the first gathering of the ROI Community in three years. The ROI Community, a network of Jewish leaders and activists, is a project of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

ROI summit participants — ranging from Jewish professionals to startup founders to community activists — will engage in four days of programming, collaboration and conversation centered around the idea of building community. Past years’ summits have produced social initiatives to rebrand Russian-Israeli culture, provide aid to Ukrainians — and have even led to some marriages. The network of more than 1,700 alumni spans more than 60 countries, dating back to the first ROI summit in 2006.

“As a philanthropist, I am constantly working with my team to determine what is the best way to produce real, tangible impact. And one of the things we have found is that investing in talented people works,” Schusterman Family Philanthropies Chair Stacy Schusterman said at the summit’s opening session last night. “We also believe that networks serve as effective multipliers. They amplify the work of individuals, create the type of friction that fosters innovation and enable effective solutions to be strengthened and scaled. This is the type of impact we are striving for.”

The 2022 cohort includes individuals who had completed the application process earlier this year, in addition to applicants who had applied for the 2020 cohort prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and were invited to reapply this year. There was no cohort or summit last year. As case numbers are rising in Israel, COVID-19 precautions were present at the summit, with all participants receiving an on-site test prior to entry.

In between musical performances by oud player Yohai Cohen, ROI Director Beri Rozenberg, an alum of ROI’s 2016 cohort, introduced the 2022 summit’s key themes: “Release, Reimagine, Reconvene,” a nod to the shmita year, the agricultural sabbatical in Israel during which Jewish law requires that fields lie fallow.

“Shmita translates literally as ‘release,’” Rozenberg said. “We’re commanded to release ourselves in several ways: Release our hold over our land and over other people, release our mind from its preconceptions and release society from its rigid structures. We are also committed to reimagining — reimagining our future together, and to bring new and fresh ideas. And finally, we are recommended to reconvene… We convene as a community over shared values, mission and action.”

LOAN SPARKS

New platform seeks to connect microfunders with Israeli small businesses

Fabrice Peresse/Getty Images

David Elmalich was fresh out of his army service when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. With endless amounts of free time, he dove into mycology, the study of mushrooms. In the two years since he began researching the fungi, Elmalich, along with his partner, launched Funngiz, an online shop selling exotic and medicinal mushrooms. His biggest hurdle, he writes on the new crowdfunding platform SparkIL, is meeting demand. He credits SparkIL, the peer-to-peer lending service that officially launches today, with helping to navigate the Israeli bureaucracy and red tape that is often insurmountable for young entrepreneurs, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Melissa Weiss reports.

Making an impact: In addition to helping small businesses get off the ground, SparkIL’s founders hope to strengthen the connection between Jews in the Diaspora and Israel. The platform facilitates small interest-free loans for a range of new businesses working to break into their industries. SparkIL, which was founded through a partnership between The Jewish Agency for Israel and The Ogen Group, an Israeli nonprofit loan fund, directs potential lenders to a range of target groups in Israel, from businesses owned by new immigrants to small groups that work with people with disabilities.

Origin story: SparkIL is the brainchild of Amira Ahronoviz, the director-general and CEO of The Jewish Agency for Israel. Ahronovitz grew up in the southern Israeli city of Beersheva, where she said she watched small-business owners struggle to find success. “The characteristic of those areas is that a lot of the people, their way to make a reasonable income is to have a micro-small business of their own,” Ahronoviz told eJewishPhilanthropy regarding where she grew up. “But yet, I’ve learned very early in my professional career, that accessing credit [for] those more vulnerable populations, or more risky populations, is a challenge.”

Read the full story here.

FACE-TO-FACE DIALOGUE

Rekindling the Black-Jewish relationship in Cleveland

Courtesy of Rekindle

“The American Jewish community talks a big game when it comes to our participation in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. We teach our children that America’s Black and Jewish communities were strong allies, marching together in Selma and fighting for justice together on Capitol Hill. On Juneteenth, we celebrate the liberation of the African-American community, and remember the work that remains to be done for our country to truly live its values,” write Matthew Fieldman and Charmaine Rice, the conceivers of Cleveland’s Rekindle Fellowship, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Why Rekindle? “The two of us — a Jewish social entrepreneur and a Black diversity and inclusion specialist — conceived of the Rekindle Fellowship to bring our communities together to engage in face-to-face dialogue and forge new relationships. Our goal is to reinvigorate, rejuvenate and, yes, rekindle the ties between the Black and Jewish communities in order to create meaningful social change, accelerating our collective impact and increasing equity. The fight for civil rights in America is not over, and in order to move the needle on these persistent issues, we need stronger collaborations with communities that are not our own. Together, we can respond to the assault on so many of our civil rights – voting rights, reproductive rights, healthcare, public education and more – more effectively than alone.”

Read the whole piece here.

Pic of the Day

Courtesy of Roy Hellman/IMPJ

The Israel Reform Movement held its 24th biennial conference, Veida, at Kibbutz Shefayim near Herzliya this past Shabbat. Nearly 1,500 Israeli Reform Jews from 45 Reform congregations across the country attended the event, and were joined by 160 Reform Jews from partner organizations in Israel and abroad.