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After a whirlwind 72 hours, including meetings on college campuses, and with officials from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League, the minister returned to Israel last week with a heightened sense of purpose. “We decided that despite all the difficulties we want to travel” abroad and meet face-to-face with diaspora Jews, Yankelevitch told JI shortly before her departure.
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“In no normal year would I be able to open the school year in so many different places.”įor the first time since she took office in May, Yankelevitch traveled abroad last week, spending three days in Los Angeles meeting - while socially distanced - with Jewish community leaders and officials in and around the city. “On September 1, on the first day of school in Israel, I visited three schools for their openings - and then I sat down and I was in Helsinki, Germany, France and Uruguay,” she recounted. “I came into the job with a lot of ambition, with a sense of mission.” The first thing she did, Yankelevitch said, was to figure out “how do I transfer everything going on in this office immediately to the world of Zoom, to the world that is practical for this incredibly complicated period?”Īnd that transformation, she said, has also had its upsides. “It has been six very challenging months. Yankelevitch, 42, entered the Diaspora Affairs Ministry during a particularly challenging and restricting period for Israeli-diaspora relations, as the COVID-19 pandemic hampered not only her own travel but also largely put a halt to Jewish groups and officials visiting Israel. And that’s what I intend to invest a lot in, in building that connection and creating that partnership.” We can have an incredible power, if we can look at ourselves as one big group - that may have disagreements, and that’s OK, that’s part of the story, it could be that we won’t always agree, and sometimes we’ll agree to disagree, and that’s also OK, sometimes we won’t even agree to disagree, and that’s OK too - but if we see ourselves as one big group, we will benefit from that. “We’re 15 million Jews, and that’s powerful. “I see the Jewish nation as 15 million Jews, not 7 million and 8 million ,” she told Jewish Insider in an interview earlier this month in her Knesset office. Six months into her job as Israel’s diaspora affairs minister - and with the future of the current government, and therefore her tenure, in jeopardy - Yankelevitch is optimistic and enthusiastic about taking on such a mammoth task. Omer Yankelevitch has lofty ambitions for uniting Israeli and diaspora Jews.