Meet 25 Faces of Jewish Activism
These people personify the notion that activism is part of the Jewish DNA!
“Judaism marked the beginning of a revolutionary idea that laid the groundwork for social reform: humans have the ability and therefore the responsibility to stop injustices in the world. The Jews were the first to decide that it was their responsibility as the Chosen People to fight against inequality in the world.”
“This mentality revolutionized social reform and brought it into existence as a way for human beings to positively shape their world. The ideas laid by the Jews continued to impact people for centuries and are especially relevant in the modern world.”1
— Meghan Conner, St. John Fisher College
1. Adina Sash
Adina Sash is an American Orthodox Jewish activist and social media influencer. In 2017, she launched the social media campaign #FrumWomenHaveFaces that went viral on social media, raising awareness of the practice of erasing women’s faces adopted by some Orthodox newspapers and magazines.
Sash maintains a consistent social media image, under the Instagram handle FlatbushGirl, attempting to make change in her community. She is known for challenging Orthodox Jewish standards for women, receiving attention from The New York Times and Mayim Bialik of The Big Bang Theory.
2. Aaron Paley
Aaron Paley is the founder of Yiddishkayt, a 25-year old organization working to connect the past to the present. He believes that yiddishkayt — the culture, language, art, and world views of Eastern European Jews, as they lived in Europe and in the places they settled — has a crucial role to play in our world today.
Yiddishkayt serves the public by cultivating the work of new artists and scholars of culture that preserves, promotes, and broadcasts the legacy of Yiddish culture while embodying the spirit of diversity, solidarity with immigrant communities, and intercultural sensibilities common both to Los Angeles and the world of Yiddish.
3. Nicole Nowparvar
Nicole Nowparvar is the co-founder and president of Chaya Community, a nonprofit organization that strives for an empowered Jewish Iranian community by deepening one’s sense of self and cultivating meaningful connection. They stand for openness, compassion, growth and celebration. Chaya accomplishes its mission through running events, each focusing on a different topic, and facilitated by field experts, counsellors, coaches, healers, and professors.
4. Dr. Shmuel Rosenman
Dr. Shmuel Rosenman is the chairman of the International March of the Living — an annual educational program bringing individuals from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust, and examine the roots of prejudice, intolerance, and hatred.
Since its inception in 1988, more than 260,000 alumni from 52 countries have marched down the same three-kilometer path leading from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Holocaust Remembrance Day — Yom HaShoah — as a tribute to all victims of the Holocaust. The program aims to help strengthen Jewish identity and connections to Israel, and to build a community of future Jewish leaders.
5. Dyonna Ginsburg
Dyonna Ginsburg is the CEO of OLAM, a network of 60-plus Jewish and Israeli organizations working in the fields of global service, international development, and humanitarian aid. Inspired by Jewish values, and committed to high ethical standards, OLAM convenes and mobilizes leaders and organizations to take meaningful action in support of the world’s most vulnerable people.
6. Naomi Stuchiner
Naomi Stuchiner is the founder of Beit Issie Shapiro, Israel’s leading developer and provider of innovative therapies and state-of-the-art services for children and adults across the entire range of disabilities impacting on over half a million people annually.
Beit Issie Shapiro promotes social change though a three-pronged approach: development and provision of cutting edge services, changing attitudes in society and advocating for better legislation, and sharing knowledge throughout Israel, as well as internationally, through research, consultation and training.
7. Sharon Zohar
Sharon Zohar is the Executive Director of Brit Olam, an organization based on the belief that volunteerism and an active civil society are a necessary condition for a just and morally sensitive global society.
Brit Olam’s activities include sustainable and community-based projects designed to reduce poverty, hardship and vulnerability in fragile communities; humanitarian relief to victims of natural and man-made disasters; and dispatching volunteers to support and empower children, families and communities in need. Throughout the years, Brit Olam has operated in more than 20 countries in Africa, Latin America, and South East Asia, both in relief operations and development programs.
8. Tamar Dekel
Tamar is the founder and co-Director of CoCuDi – The Center for Cosmopolitan Cultural Dialogue, which promotes a tolerant, just, and peace-striving society that recognizes and respects the unique identity and culture of every person. CoCuDi’s mission is to overcome barriers of misunderstanding, prejudice, and distrust that cause societal injustices, by creating programs rooted in cultural identities and characteristics, primarily in Israel and emerging economies in Africa.
9. Dr. Tomer Malchi
Dr. Tomer Malchi is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of CultivAid, an Israeli nonprofit organization operating in East Africa. CultivAid specializes in capacity building, as well as knowledge and technology transfer initiatives, with a focus on agriculture, water, and nutrition. CultivAid emphasizes the construction of local/regional knowledge infrastructures as an essential mechanism for empowerment and development.
10. Ran Cohen Harounoff
Ran Cohen Harounoff is the co-founder of Early Starters International. He has been involved in early childhood education his entire adult life; an entrepreneur in education, Cohen Harounoff has established schools, a network of preschools, and early childhood training programs around the world.
Early Starters International takes lessons learned and cutting-edge knowledge from the Israeli education system and applies it to diverse communities across the globe. With expertise working in poor communities, their goal is to make early childhood education playful and intentional — with an eye to resilience building, community building and innovation.
11. Yehudit Zicklin-Sidikman
As a leader and activist in the Empowerment Self Defense movement, Yehudit Zicklin-Sidikman has been creating a safer world for over three decades. She is a philanthropist and social entrepreneur dedicated to teaching Empowerment Self Defense (ESD), violence prevention, and personal safety strategies to all who want and need them.
Zicklin-Sidikman is the founder and CEO of MyPwr Ltd, a social tech startup focused on creating an app that brings ESD to everyone. She is also the founder and president of ESD Global Inc., a U.S.-based non-profit that makes in-person ESD training accessible worldwide, and the founder and former CEO of El Halev, an Israeli NGO that provides ESD and martial arts instruction to women, children, and other vulnerable populations.
12. Yosef Abromowitz
Yosef I. Abramowitz — an American-Israeli human rights activist, educator, and entrepreneur — is recognized as one of the pioneers of the solar energy industry in both Israel and East Africa. Named by CNN as one of the six top global “Green Pioneers,” by PV Tech as “one of the most inspiring solar CEOs” worldwide, and as Person of the Year by the Israel National Business and Energy Conference, he is co-founder of the Arava Power Company, Israel’s leading solar developer.
Nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize, Abramowitz heads Energiya Global Capital, an impact investment platform that provides healthy returns to investors while advancing the environmental and humanitarian goals of providing affordable green power to underserved populations as a fundamental human right.
13. Jacob Sztokman
Jacob Sztokman is a high-tech executive turned social-entrepreneur, driven by the fundamental belief that we must take responsibility to help alleviate human suffering around the world. On a visit to Mumbai in 2011, he toured the city’s slums and was deeply moved to work on the issues of poverty and illiteracy among the children of India.
Troubled by what he saw and motivated to help make a difference, Sztokman consulted with grassroots Indian NGOs and together developed a model for combining long-term and short-term solutions by creating development programs in education, nutrition, hygiene and health care. This formed the basis of the Gabriel Project Mumbai, which began operation in June 2012.
14. Mark Hetfield
Mark Hetfield is the President and CEO of HIAS, a refugee agency founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 1881 to assist Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. HIAS has touched the lives of nearly every Jewish family in the United States, and now welcomes all who have fled persecution.
He first joined HIAS in 1989 as a caseworker in Rome, Italy. Since being named HIAS' President and CEO in 2013, Hetfield has led the transformation of HIAS from helping refugees because they were Jewish to helping refugees because we are Jewish. HIAS now assists in resettling refugees of all faiths and ethnicities, and is a major implementing partner of the United Nations Refugee Agency and the U.S. Department of State.
15. Sivan Ya’ari
Sivan Ya’ari is the founder and CEO of Innovation: Africa, a nonprofit that brings Israeli solar, agricultural and water technologies to African villages. She has been working in Africa for more than 20 years. Over the past decade, she has brought clean water and light — using Israeli technologies — to more than three million people across 10 African countries. Ya’ari and her organization, Innovation: Africa, have received multiple awards, including the Innovation Award from the United Nations.
16. Yotam Polizer
Yotam Polizer is the global CEO of IsraAID. Founded in 2001 as a coalition of Israeli organizations working in disaster relief and international development, IsraAID has grown into an independent NGO and the largest humanitarian aid organization in Israel.
Following the September 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, he led IsraAID’s humanitarian mission in Lesbos, Greece, to support Syrian refugees on the island, and also established IsraAID Germany, which provides long-term support for Yazidi and Syrian refugees in Germany. Over the course of nine years at IsraAID, Polizer has also built and led programs in Japan after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan, in Sierra Leone during the 2014 Ebola crisis, and in Nepal following the 2015 earthquake.
17. Talia Levanon
Talia Levanon is the director of the Israel Trauma Coalition, an organization that offers a holistic, collaborative approach to building a continuum of care for individuals and communities affected by trauma.
They provide direct trauma care and counseling, deliver professional caregiver training, established and managed the Gaza envelope Resilience Centers, deploy regional emergency preparedness programs and respond to crises worldwide by offering emergency services, rehabilitation and training. Levanon directs all of ITC’s initiatives by building collaborative partnerships that form the foundation of sustainable support for trauma victims, both in Israel and abroad.
18. Janice Kamenir Reznik
At the urging of Rabbi Schulweis, her teacher and eventual co-founder, Janice Kamenir Reznik retired from the active practice of law to establish Jewish World Watch and be the Jewish response to genocide and mass atrocities. Jewish World Watch is an expression of Judaism in action, bringing help and healing to survivors of mass atrocities around the globe, and seeking to inspire people of all faiths and cultures to join the ongoing fight against genocide.
19. Rabbi Jamie Cowland
Rabbi Jamie Cowland is the founder and CEO of Justifi, an innovative, international, not-for-profit collaboration run with the mission of connecting the next generation of jewish change-makers with the people and places where they can make a lasting impact, one incredible experience at a time.
After visiting Thailand, interacting with the amazing organizations working there and meeting so many children in need of help, Cowland and his wife, Ilana, founded Justifi to give Jewish students life-transforming trips where they could experience the struggle for basic human rights, idealism, leadership, and the Jewish approach to tikkun olam (“fixing the world”).
Justifi works in partnership with grass-roots organizations on the ground in Thailand, India, Peru, Nicaragua, South Africa, and Sri Lanka, and has a growing alumni network of more than 1,000 Jewish social innovators and idealists living around the world.
20. Professor Zvi Bentwich
Professor Zvi Bentwich is the Founder and President of NALA, an organization which aims to break the poverty cycle by eradicating Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) and other diseases of poverty. The NALA holistic approach works towards eliminating the root causes of those diseases, leading to sustainable poverty reduction, and healthier livelihoods.
He is a leading advocate for public health and human rights, and is past chairman of the Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights. Bentwich received the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israeli Ministry of Health for his special contributions to medicine and to the health system in Israel.
21. Danny Kahn
Danny Kahn is the Chairperson of NATAN Worldwide Disaster Relief. NATAN is an Israeli all-volunteer NGO helping people all over the world rebuild their lives with dignity following natural and human-made disasters. Their professional and experienced volunteers go where they are needed, when they are needed, to provide medical, dental, psychosocial and education aid.
Previously, he spent 20 years working for the Israeli Intelligence Service, where he was deeply involved in international relations with long-term missions in North America, Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa. Among other duties he helped lead the rescue of Jewish communities in Muslim countries. Before joining NATAN, Kahn was named the Director of International Development, Geneva, of World ORT, one of the largest education and training non-governmental organizations in the world, where he ran rescue and development projects in Haiti, Mali, Niger, and Guinea.
22. Dr. Aliza Belman Inbal
Dr. Aliza Belman Inbal is the founding director of the Pears Program for Global Innovation in Israel, which harnesses Israeli innovation to address developing country challenges. She founded the program after a career as a Senior Evaluation Specialist at the World Bank, a career diplomat for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, a speechwriter for Prime Minister Rabin, and a consultant for international development organizations.
In 2013, Belman Inbal was named by Ma’ariv newspaper as one of the 100 most influential Jews in the world for her work to support Israeli innovation and entrepreneurship targeting critical barriers to international development.
23. Erin Zaikis
Erin Zaikis is the founder of Sundara. With their RISE fellowship, Sundara supports and empowers early-stage female entrepreneurs working in water, sanitation, and hygiene who live in low-to-middle income countries — providing mentorship, business education, seed funding, and access to a network of experts.
24. Paul Anticoni
Paul Anticoni is the CEO of World Jewish Relief, the British Jewish community’s international humanitarian agency. They support the world’s poorest Jewish communities, predominately in Eastern Europe, as well as working beyond their community, inspired by the Jewish values of caring for the stranger and recognizing the dignity and potential of all people.
25. Gidi Grinstein
Gidi Grinstein is the Reut Institute’s founder and president. He has been involved in public policy and political affairs in Israel for many years, including leading the Israeli team in designing the Birthright Israel Program and notably transforming the original vision into a model that is now the largest and most successful project in the Jewish world. The Reut Institute is an independent think-tank that’s out to make “an indelibly Israeli and Jewish contribution to the future of humanity.”
Conner, Meghan. “The Impact of Judaism on Social Reform.” Fisher Digital Publications, Verbum: Vol. 13 : Iss. 1 , Article 11. December 1, 2015, https://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/verbum/vol13/iss1/11.