With spring on the horizon, the trees in Israel are blossoming, the flowers blooming, and the green fields as lush as ever — almost as if refusing to succumb to the many challenges that continue to pervade everyday life. Or perhaps this defiant beauty is nature’s way of offering solace and strength.
In a similar way, the people of Israel — still reeling from the events of October 7 and the ongoing ordeal of 59 hostages still being held in Gaza — have begun, slowly but purposefully, to rebuild.
I'm in Israel for the Jewish Agency Board of Governors meetings, and taking the opportunity with UJA senior leaders to identify where our future support can make the most meaningful impact and to evaluate how our existing investments have taken root.
It’s a good harvest. Many of the programs we’ve been funding since the beginning of the war — trauma support, educational and recreational programming for displaced children and their parents, rehab services for injured soldiers — are making a tangible difference. And we’re also planting seeds for the future.
In meeting after meeting with leading organizations across the southern, central, and northern regions, we’ve repeatedly heard Israelis articulate a shared vision: We’re not going back to October 6. Rebuilding means forging ahead, and this is the moment to address longstanding gaps in service and inequities that have plagued certain communities, particularly in the north and south of Israel, for decades. At the end of this nightmare, we will emerge stronger.
All of which speaks to a pioneering spirit that is quintessentially Israel.
Up north, we visited Majdal Shams, a Druze community of about 12,000 people, which suffered a devastating loss on July 27, 2024, when a Hezbollah rocket struck a soccer field, killing 12 children and injuring dozens more.
As the mayor took us around, he shared that four of the children killed that day were from the same family. Unimaginably, one of the first medics to arrive at the scene discovered his own daughter’s body. This tight-knit community, which has long lived peacefully alongside Jewish neighbors, and whose sons proudly serve in the Israeli army, was forever changed.
We met Raad Sabag, a grandfather, holding his 6-year-old grandson, Lioua. They were just three meters away from the direct hit, after a last-minute decision to stop at the park before playing soccer. Raad hugged his grandson with all his might, saving him. But for months following the attack, they both suffered from hearing issues due to the blast’s impact. Their hearing now returned, Raad still takes Lioua to play at the soccer field every afternoon.
The mayor shared plans for a greatly expanded soccer complex and playground, alongside a permanent memorial: a field with a broken heart embedded in the grass, laid with 12 stones — each one matching the height of the child it represents. By placing the memorial near the soccer fields, the community is ensuring their grief will be allayed by the joyful sounds of children playing once more.
The mayor told us they had raised half the funds needed to complete the project by the one-year anniversary but needed the remaining half to proceed. In that moment, we pledged UJA’s support to ensure the project’s completion, standing with Majdal Shams in both remembrance and renewal.
Elsewhere, we saw how our support is helping to create more than 200 educationally innovative modern kindergarten facilities — both in razed towns in the south and across the north, engines of growth and healing for those communities.
