The horror at last Saturday's Pittsburgh synagogue massacre bound the American Jewish community with the Israeli people and gave tangible expression to the day-to-day work of Israeli-American Council Executive Director Shoham Nicolet.
"We're one big Jewish family, and at these difficult times, Jews from all branches and all across the political spectrum need to unite to find comfort and strengthen each other," Nicolet tells Israel Hayom in an interview given during a visit to Israel.
Nicolet says the IAC brings Israelis, Israeli-Americans, and American Jews together in a bond that not even periodic crises can break.
"Israeliness will not survive outside the borders of Israel without a base in and ties to Judaism," he says.
"In the U.S., you need to be very active to be a Jew. We have Israelis who make Kiddush [the Shabbat eve prayer] with their families for the first time at age 40, as part of evenings we organize in the U.S. called 'Israeli Fridays.'"
The Friday night events are just one example. Nicolet stresses that the organization was established by Israelis abroad, does not aim to make anyone religious or change their way of life, is apolitical and does not claim to represent any particular branch of Judaism. It has one agenda: to preserve the ties between Israel and Diaspora Jewry and give due praise to Israeli contributions to the United States.
"The hateful murder in Pittsburgh struck at the heart of our community," Nicolet says.
"Of course, the most important, immediate thing [to do] is to embrace the community and the families of those who were murdered.
"There are two other efforts that should be made at the same time. The first is to unite the ranks. The murderer killed Jews, without looking into their political affiliations or level of religious observance. Our response should be the same: to close ranks beyond any politics, disputes, or faith.
"The second thing we'll need to do is to step up our war against all forms of anti-Semitism."
The IAC has long since noticed that Israelis living in the U.S. are considered increasingly less foreign in local Jewish communities, and that the Israelis' attitudes toward Americans has changed from mockery to affection. The Israeli-Americans serve as a "living bridge" of immense importance, as Nicolet calls them, between Israel and other Jewish communities.
"The bridge was a vision. Today, I look at it from a broader perspective. A bridge is ultimately something with a limited scope and a certain size, but an organization keeps growing. We already have 20 branches and have reached 61 cities. More and more American Jews, non-Israelis, are joining us. We are no longer in the position of a bridge, but one of leadership - a new leadership force among American Jewry. U.S. Jewry speaks 'American,' and Israelis speak 'Israeli.' I want to believe that the two sides want to talk to each other. It's like taking an American plug and shoving it into an Israeli socket or the opposite - you need a converter, and the Israeli-Americans perform that function," Nicolet says.
Q: Are Jews and Israelis in the U.S. interested in the same things and bothered by the same issues?
"It's important for an Israeli living in the U.S. to care about local news, to understand that they're part of the American Jewish community. … If we work strategically through the community, we can get unlimited 'bandwidth.'"
Around 600,000 Israelis live in the U.S., the second-largest population of Israelis in the world. The IAC, founded in 2007, operates in 27 states and has a membership of 250,000, making it an integral part of the Zionist enterprise.
Nicolet believes the Israeli-American community should be seen as part of a wider context, the general Jewish one.
"We send delegations of Israeli-Americans and American Jews to Israel with the goal of forming ties," he says.
"For the Israeli-Americans, it's an opportunity to take a new look at the whole issue of Jewish leadership. Each Jewish federation is different, every community is different. There isn't a single 'Jewish community' in the U.S. It has a lot of color and complexity, and that's part of the snarled communications between Israel and American Jewry."
Q: Are the Israeli-Americans becoming another stream or branch of Judaism?
"There is a sort of branch developing that has this Israeli element of coming through a door and not needing to decide which category you belong to. No one asks you if you're Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, Republican, Democrat. Americans really love self-definition."
Q: How do you define Israeliness?
"It's characterized by a few things. First, it lives and is nourished when Israel is at its core. Second, the Hebrew language, and the Jewish legacy and Israeli culture that are part of it. It entails activism, the desire to create change, not accepting reality as a fait accompli, and a desire to change it according to what every one of us wants to see. Israeliness is also characterized by innovation and initiative.
"In the end, most of our community is secular. The need for a legacy comes from the understanding that we have to maintain a Jewish identity as part of Israeliness. In Israel, at 12 noon on a Friday, you know it's Friday. On a Saturday you don't need to look at a clock, you can feel Shabbat in the air. When kids go to school on Purim they know what holiday it is. The density of the particles in the air changes depending on what day it is. In Israel, everyone loves Yom Kippur and Saturday mornings and afternoons, and even the 'down' of the evening before the new week begins.
"You don't get that in the U.S. If you aren't active and don't ensure that your child knows what Purim is and when Shabbat falls, they won't know."
The IAC has a partner organization, the Israeli American Coalition for Action, which works to promote issues of importance to the community. In recent years, the IACA has persuaded about 20 states to pass laws limiting or outlawing state government contacts with organizations that boycott Israel, although that success has come under some criticism.
Q: Have you been too successful in your anti-BDS legal initiative? Even some courts argued that it was problematic in terms of freedom of expression.
"Actually, I don't think we went far enough, if BDS still exists. Our success is a sign that we're effective, and we're effective in a lot of places," Nicolet says.
"When I see an anti-Semitic message, I can't think about it in terms of Israel. Instead, I look at my son. I ask myself how he'll grow up to be a Jewish Zionist in the U.S. 10 years from now.
"When I hear about parents who say their kids are afraid to wear kippahs on their college campuses, I say, 'Wait a second.' It's no longer about Israel fighting a political war against one country or another. There is a growing sense that the community is under attack, and that's the advantage of the Israeli-Americans. That's why they are a strategic asset to Israel, both because of the bridge to American Jewry and because of our ability to come forward as Americans rather than some sort of split identity. Today, I'm American. My kid is more American than Israeli."
Nicolet says he and his friends in the community see their role as going far beyond preserving Jewish or Israeli identity. The IAC is an organization that to a large extent helps shape reality.
"Our influence extends beyond the Israeli community. We don't just talk about saving the Israeli community in the U.S. as we did 10 years ago. We've already realized that the community is a strategic asset. Last month, three Jewish federations made strategic decisions that Israel was not on their agenda. That worries us a lot. We think we fill that vacuum exactly."
The IAC's next annual conference will take place at the end of November in Florida, after the midterm elections and Thanksgiving. The timing is excellent to win the hearts of Israelis living throughout the 50 states. The conference, which will also address the Pittsburgh massacre, will feature many American public leaders who care about Israel, as well as high-ranking Israeli guests.
"It's a conference that attracts the widest spectrum there is in the Jewish world around the issue of Israel. It will begin on Nov. 29 [the date in 1947 on which the U.N. voted for the partition plan that established the State of Israel]. We are starting with an entire event devoted to the anniversary of the U.N. vote. Entire families are arriving to talk about it. There will be a lot of young people and high school students. Every Israeli and every Jew will feel at home," he says.
Nicolet believes that everyone needs to remember that it takes two to tango, and that both Israel and Diaspora Jewry need to reroute themselves to improve relations.
"My argument is that each side could do things better. When I served as an officer in the army, we'd argue a lot. A third of us were guys from the settlement Eli who said how important the buffer zone [in southern Lebanon] was and how withdrawing would put Israeli communities in the north in danger. Another third were guys from central Israel who said it was stupid to stay in the buffer zone. And another third just sat and looked on. It was a lively debate. But in the end, everyone got on the truck and went in. … That's what we want to bring to the table: the 'Israeliness' that allows us to have debates like these.
"You can come and argue about the nation-state law, but if you sit and watch from the sidelines, let democracy decide."
It is impossible not to see how satisfied Nicolet is with what he and his partners have accomplished.
"Let's take the model of the IAC. When we started 11 years ago, we had the status of 'weaklings' who left. 'You left [Israel] and we don't want to talk to you,' Israelis would tell us to our faces. 'You belong in Israel. We won't work with you.'
"They did everything but spit in our faces. We could have gotten angry, but through a long process we have made an enormous change to the paradigm between Israel and Israeli-Americans."
