Good Monday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on the Israeli government’s decision to consider memorializing Diaspora Jews killed in antisemitic attacks around the world, and feature an op-ed on teaching about Israel from Sharna Marcus. We’ll start with Yotam Polizer receiving the 2023 Charles Bronfman Prize.
Yotam Polizer, CEO of IsraAid, the Israeli humanitarian aid group, was awarded the 2023 Charles Bronfman Prize at a gala event at the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last night, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Dan Brown reports from the event. Polizer pledged to donate half of the $100,000 prize money to his organization.
In his acceptance speech, Polizer announced that IsraAid planned to more than double its budget and deepen its operations around the world in the next five years, after tripling them in the previous five years. “Five years ago, IsraAid was an organization with a small team and a budget of less than $7 million. Today, five years later, our budget is almost $21 million. So we tripled ourselves. But it’s not just our budget, it’s our impact and our growth. And five years from now we plan to reach and become an organization of $50 million,” Polizer said.
“The first donor to this exciting growth will be myself. I will donate half of the prize that I won, $50,000. So we only need $49 million and counting,” he said, drawing chuckles from the crowd.
In his speech, Polizer stressed the work being done by IsraAid employees around the world, from Kenya to Turkey to Ukraine to South Sudan, saying “this prize is first and foremost for each and every one of them.” He also highlighted the concept of post-traumatic growth, the idea that after a disaster occurs, “there’s always an opportunity, not just to get things back to where they were before, but an opportunity for growth. There’s an opportunity for real resilience, and that’s what we’ve been seeing time and time again all over the world.”
The eponymous prize was established 20 years ago by Charles Bronfman’s children, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, and their spouses, Andrew Hauptman and Claudine Blondin Bronfman, respectively, to honor their father on his 70th birthday. The Sunday night event was attended by many past laureates of the prize, as well as Rodaba Noori, a member of Afghanistan’s women’s robotics team who was covertly rescued by Polizer during the Taliban takeover in August 2021, as well as the former Afghani Ambassador to the U.S., U.K. and Russia, Said Tayeb Jawad.
In his remarks, Stephen Bronfman said he was proud that the prize’s judges selected Polizer for the award because IsraAid allowed “the world to see [the] raising of the Israeli flag at disaster sites, showing the world that Israel is there.”
Charles Bronfman concluded the award presentation by introducing Polizer’s wife and young children, saying, “Behind every successful Jewish man is a Jewish mother,” to laughter and much applause.
Read the full story here.
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