Good Thursday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on a new Anti-Defamation League campaign to combat antisemitism in the workplace and Jewish leaders’ response to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s defense of Hamas. We feature opinion pieces by Barak Sella and Rabbi Liz P.G. Hirsch. Also in this newsletter: Rabbi Yonah Hain, Richard Fishman and Evan Gershkovich. We’ll start with a new initiative to help Israelis hurt financially by the ongoing war.
More than 2,000 Israelis have applied for no- or low-interest loans from the nonprofit lender Ogen this week, as the ongoing war with Hamas has displaced tens of thousands of Israelis and wreaked havoc on the national economy, the organization’s CEO told eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.
This week, Ogen — formerly known as the Israel Free Loan Association — launched the Swords of Iron Emergency Economic Relief Fund, referring to the Israeli military’s official name for the war, which is meant to provide assistance to Israeli individuals, small businesses and nonprofits. Ogen has already raised $10 million for the fund through philanthropy, which CEO Sagi Balasha said the organization can “leverage” to provide several times that in loans. However, Balasha said this amounts to a “drop in the bucket” in light of growing needs.
The goal of the fund is to provide at least 1,000 no-interest loans to individuals and families, 300 loans to small businesses, and 133 loans to nonprofits, which they estimate will help more than 30,000 people, according to Ogen.
“This crisis started on the 7th and a day after it started, on the 8th, we already met and understood that… there will be an enormous economic crisis in the entire country, not just in the Gaza periphery,” Balasha told eJP this week. “Of course, the Gaza periphery is the center of this war, but businesses all around the country are shut down. More than 350,000 people were called up to the reserves, and many, many types of small businesses are inactive or losing a big chunk of their revenue. And people who cannot make a living.”
The government’s response to the economic ramifications of the war has been limited so far, according to John Gal, a Hebrew University professor and the chair of the social welfare policy program at the Taub Center think tank in Jerusalem.
The emergency fund launched on Oct. 22 and “within 24 hours, there were like 2,000 applications. Not all of them fit, not all of them meet the criteria, not all of them will end up getting lonas, of course, but we are bombarded because we are practically the only ones right now,” Balasha said.
Read the full report here.
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