Israel Active

93-year-old Shalom Shtamberg celebrated his bar mitzvah 80 years late.  When he was 13 he was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. After reading from the Torah in Haifa he danced with family and friends.

Letter seals excavated in Jerusalem’s City of David National Park dating back to 700 BCE are to be displayed at the annual City of David archaeology conference. Biblical names like "Achiav Ben Menachem" prove refugee Northern Kingdom Jews had senior Jerusalem positions.

120 years ago, on 25th Aug 1897, the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland began a Jewish transformation. The sheheheyanu blessing was read, thanking God for bringing the Jews to this time. “We are coming home,” Herzl declared in the Congress. and famously stated later: “At Basel, I founded the Jewish state.”

3000 years ago, the Israelite King David used Israeli “outside of the box” thinking to penetrate the seemingly impossible defenses of the Jebusite city that would become Jerusalem – the capital of the Jewish State.

To mark the 120th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress that Theodor Herzl organized, 120 men and women named for him gathered in Herzliya, Israel, to celebrate his legacy.

Multicultural, energetic, inspiring. So much is happening in Jerusalem you will be amazed to see it packed in to 50 seconds.

“Operation Wedding” a film by Israel’s Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov is currently showing in Israel and will shortly tour the USA. The film portrays Anat’s parents and 14 others who were jailed for planning to escape Soviet Russia by plane in 1970. World protests led to the mass Aliya of Soviet Jewry.

Hans Beretele was so disgusted with his father’s Nazi past, that he came to Israel and converted to Judaism.  His daughter Gaya now serves in the Israel Defense Forces.

Hours after she arrived at Ben Gurion Airport on Thursday, Neda Amin, an Iranian-born journalist and dissident who feared being deported from Turkey to Iran, thanked the Israeli government for granting her refuge, adding that she has Jewish roots and would love to live in Israel.

At a ceremony at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, 180 students graduated the 2017 StandWithUs Israel Fellows. They join over 1,600 Alumni of the program from the last eleven years. The StandWithUs Fellowship has become the leading program in Israel for public diplomacy at Israeli universities.