As I sat down to write this on Oct. 1, at least 180 Iranian missiles were in the air heading toward Israel, and I couldn’t help thinking of Barak Loozon, director of the Israel office of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund. When Iran — and Hezbollah and the Houthis and Hamas — launch missiles at Israel, they don’t discriminate. Haredim and secular Jews are at risk. Arabs and Israelis must head to shelters. And to hear Loozon tell it during our Zoom interview on Sept. 18, this reality seems to undergird much of his work: In Israel, like it or not, everyone’s in it together. And if the country is going to function at its best, the society, which is now painfully divided on a host of fundamental issues, needs to be more cohesive. That, he says, is where the S.F.-based Federation, and American Jewry more broadly, can add value. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Chanan Tigay: I just returned from Israel, and I saw how things are going on the ground. People on all sides are suffering terribly. How are you?
Barak Loozon: I’m not great. I was born and raised in Israel, and I’ve raised my own kids, five boys, in this Zionist narrative, very much connected to the people of Israel, to the land of Israel. To have five boys these days in Israel is extremely hard. Two of them are soldiers. One just came back from Gaza after 10 months. Four members from his platoon were killed, another three were injured. He’s not great, and we’re supporting him as much as we can.
Almost each and every Israeli, they feel part of them has been abducted, is not at home. It’s so personal, so close to all of us. The hostages are still not home. For almost 100,000 evacuees, they literally are not at home. They are refugees in their own land. It’s true for so many wounded, the soldiers and their families, and also for the bereaved families.
And yet, the work goes on. Could you tell us a bit about what the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund of San Francisco does in Israel?
The San Francisco Federation was the first among 150 other Jewish Federations of North America to open an office in Israel 40 years ago. Since then, the Federation has been representing the core values of the Bay Area Jewish community in Israel.
In the last decade or so, we’ve been extremely focused on building a shared society in Israel, a more cohesive society, bringing the different quote-unquote tribes of Israel together to find the common good. We help the ultra-Orthodox integrate into society, as well as the Arab community, as well as the Ethiopian community. We do so with the understanding that it’s not just that these marginalized communities need to change themselves in order to enter Israeli society, but rather that Israeli society as a whole needs to change. This was really the bulk of the work that we did up until Oct. 7.
And then?
And then everything changed.
Many of us are still stuck in a state of shock; we’re kind of cemented to Oct. 7. Something happened on Oct. 7. People called the army, and the army didn’t answer. People called the police and nobody picked up the phone. We had the sense of being stateless, even if it was for a few hours, and that created a sentiment that we still carry.
The Federation [responded] first by fundraising close to $22 million from the Bay Area. That was an amazing endeavor by this community to show up for Israelis. The Federation decided to take two directions. First, we contributed 80% of our fundraising to the Jewish Federations of North America. They allocated these funds very professionally, and we’re very happy with how this money was utilized. But we also wanted to use 20% of our fundraising to reflect the DNA of the Jewish community in the Bay Area. We wanted to make sure to strengthen the underprivileged communities that we work with.
For example, we work with the Arab Bedouin community in the Negev. Because we have such direct contact with them, we got the telephone calls and heard how many were killed [on Oct. 7] and how many were abducted. Immediately, we helped a grantee of ours called Desert Stars, a group of amazing young Bedouins, to set up more than 150 mobile shelters in the Negev. Afterward, JFNA and the Jewish Federation of New York put money in. This is how we have utilized our connections to mobilize help as fast as we could.
I’ve reported fairly extensively on the Bedouin community in Israel, and one thing I find is that they are pushed and pulled in ways that no one else in Israel is. They are citizens of the Jewish state. They are also Muslims and Arabs. Were there other organizations in the Arab Israeli community that you were involved with after Oct. 7?
We worried that there would be a major violent escalation among the Arab community in Israel, and especially within mixed cities of Jews and Arab in Haifa. So we worked with eight other funders to build a new initiative called On Guard (Al Ha’Mishmar) to fund and support local Jewish and Arab task forces, to make sure that mainly the younger generation of Arabs would not go out to the street.
After Oct. 7 there was fear all around — all of us kind of went back to our formative traumas. So Israeli Jews went back to the Holocaust, in our mindset. The Arab community in Israel went back to 1948. There were a few months when we were extremely suspicious [of each other].
The Federation has helped many Arabs integrate into the medical sphere. After Oct. 7, most of the Jewish doctors were called for reserve duty. CEOs of hospitals were telling me that their staff meetings were in Arabic, because the doctors and nurses and the administrative staff were all Arabs. And don’t forget who they were treating. They were treating Jewish soldiers who came from Gaza, where some of the [Arab] doctors actually have family. I think the reason it worked was because many of us had laid the infrastructure of relationships and trust between the two societies over the last two decades or so.
What other organizations have you been involved in supporting since Oct. 7 that are in some way exemplary of what the S.F. Federation is trying to accomplish in Israel?
The DNA of the Jewish Bay Area means we fund through the following lens: helping marginalized communities, building infrastructure (instead of simply supporting programs) and supporting innovation. As the emergency evolved, we evolved our philanthropic giving in accordance with it.
In the first stage, we were meeting the basic needs of the most vulnerable communities that were hit in the south part of Israel during Oct. 7.
In the second phase, after over 100,000 Israelis were evacuated from their homes to hotels, we supported building an education infrastructure. At one hotel, they emptied the swimming pool and turned it into a kindergarten.
In the third stage we have focused on trauma. One organization we funded identified a need to provide trauma relief work for the first responders who were exposed to the horrors of Oct. 7. I’m talking about the Zaka [rescue and recovery NGO], the mainly ultra-Orthodox men who were first on the scene, collecting the body parts and bringing them back for burial. I’m talking about dentists, who identified the bodies by their teeth.
Thousands of professionals went through a huge trauma, a secondary trauma, and were not taken care of. So we decided to fund an organization. They are taking groups of these first responders to the desert in Israel, just next to the Dead Sea, to work through the physical trauma, the mental trauma, and I’d say the spiritual trauma, the whole level of finding meaning in continuing to live.
We also have focused on trauma relief for the families of the missing. We found this amazing academic lab at Dortmund University in England led by an Israeli professor, Karen Shalev, that specializes in what they call the missing person. We flew her to Israel. We helped her establish a training [center] for therapists in Israel specializing in the missing person.
In your role, you have an up-front view of how the Israel/diaspora relationship plays out on the ground in Israel. Can you talk about how that relationship between Israel and the diaspora has been impacted by Oct. 7 and its aftermath?
What Hamas did on Oct. 7 was press a 3,500-year-old button. They turned us back into a Jewish community. We didn’t wait for any government ministry to do anything. We just started baking challah for the soldiers. We’ve collected socks. We’ve created war rooms. I mean, it’s crazy what people are capable of when we’re together.
Another thing I want to say is that what happened on your end, on college campuses, universities and so on, has made its way to Israel and to the hearts of the Israelis. Suddenly I think that many Israelis felt that we’re all one in many ways. We’re just Jews who happen to live in Israel, but we could actually be in Berkeley right now and experiencing what you guys have been experiencing.
For many Israelis, it was a turning point in the understanding of being part of something so much bigger than Israel.
But there’s another thing that I think Israelis have experienced. The major voice of American Jews was always coming through the lens of the Democratic, more liberal, more progressive party. Now, the progressive camp in Israel feels that they are being betrayed by the liberal, progressive camp outside of Israel — not Jews, the general public.
For example, Federation helped organizations of women here in Israel to research and write white papers for the U.N. in order to acknowledge the sex crimes that happened on Oct. 7. Federation had to give this money because the global partners of these organizations turned their backs on them.
I’m sure you saw reporting from the Forward that the JFNA raised more than $850 million for Israel after Oct. 7, but that 40% of those funds hadn’t been spent as of late August. Can you talk about how funds from the U.S. are actually disbursed and why there might be delays?
This is exactly the 80% that I was talking about that we forwarded to the JFNA. The reason some of the funds were not deployed was because they were waiting to see what would happen in the north. There are so many evacuees, and we know that having them come back home to their communities will require tons of money and support. So I think [withholding some spending] actually was very smart.
It’s been almost a year since Oct. 7. What is the most practical thing American Jews can do right now to support Israelis?
One, trust that we will prevail. We will prevail even though there’s a deep darkness right now. There’s a lot of sadness, frustration, there’s grief and pain, but there’s light that is waiting for us. I’m not talking just about the Israeli people. I’m talking about the Jewish people at large. There’s a huge potential here for a restart, to reclaim Jewish peoplehood.
The second thing, and it’s not political, is the acknowledgement, or the understanding, of how dependent we in Israel are on the support of the United States, both the Jewish community and the support for Israel from the U.S. administration.
The third thing, if you ask me how to help, we need to alter the next chapter of Israel. We need to rebuild Israel, and we have to do it together. We want to make sure that now, when we rebuild our broken systems, when we build our broken cities, we’re going to do it together, hand in hand, all of the factions of Israel. Because really, this is the superpower of [our] people. Let’s find ways to stick together, here in Israel and across the Jewish world.