Leadership Talk by the Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel (2009–2018)

Abstract

There are many faces of the end to antisemitism—and many faces in the struggle. So it’s impossible to speak about all the faces. I’ll speak about one very important aspect: all the cooperation or coordination between Israel and Jewish communities in this struggle. First, as the head of the Jewish Agency Organization, which connects Israel with Jewish communities all over the world and helps those who want to make aliyah, let me mention a couple of very dramatic figures for Europe. A few years ago, after an awful terrorist attack in a Jewish school in Toulouse,1 I was there a couple of times, and it was so obvious that these children would have not been killed if there were minimal measures of defense in place. For example, if the electrical gates actually worked. Additionally, the cameras were fake, and this lonely terrorist who learned all this information from internet came a number of times and saw that it was possible to gain entry, and as a result there was a terrorist attack. After this attack, we checked and found that the school was too poor to spend money for its security. So the Jewish Agency created security funds for places, and we try to help, and give some minimal help to the communities which need this help to protect themselves. Of course, we are using our network and that of other Israeli agencies, like the foreign ministry, to make sure that we check that the funds which are needed are used correctly. Currently, we are deal-