Good Tuesday morning.
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we interview philanthropist Yossie Hollander about combating antisemitism in the United States and report on a new lawsuit against the University of California Berkeley. We feature an opinion piece from Mike Leven about shaping the Jewish future. Also in this newsletter: Michael Moritz, Martin Olliner and Patricia Illingworth. We’ll start with a new logistics effort to bring needed supplies from the U.S. to Israel’s home front.
A major effort is underway to provide Israelis with a supply chain from the U.S. to meet needs on the home front in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks. Dubbed “Operation Falcon,” the initiative is being run by venture capitalist fund Maniv Mobility, Israeli health-tech investing firm TARA Group, the Jewish Agency for Israel and FedEx, which earlier this month began sending kits to Israel with emergency supplies for the civilian home front, including thousands of first aid kits and hundreds of generators. The operation plans to fly 10 planes per week with goods throughout the war, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Haley Cohen.
Michael Granoff, an American-Israeli tech entrepreneur and managing partner of Maniv Mobility, which he established in Tel Aviv in 2015, told eJP that in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, “the obvious answer of how to respond was to use our network of transportational logistics to try and make it easier to get Israel things it needs to fight the war.” Maniv Mobility, which also has a New York office, invests in mobility startups across five continents.
“We tapped our network and found that everybody was itching to do something to help. We used all that goodwill to build what we term a ‘magic carpet’ to facilitate the efficient, inexpensive movement of important emergency supplies to Israel, mostly from the U.S.,” Granoff, who said the Operation Falcon team has been working 19-hour days, continued.
“I had never worked a Shabbat before in my life,” Meir Dardashti, a principal who joined Maniv Mobility in 2019 and is now working on Operation Falcon around the clock, told eJP. “It’s a different level. I usually work hard but not this hard.”
“We’re creating a plug-and-play experience to get important goods to Israel but that exists on both sides of the Atlantic because part of the problem is here in Israel. To clear customs, you need the right connections here in Israel,” Dardashti said, noting that’s where the Jewish Agency for Israel’s involvement comes in.
“It is so clear that the target of this special cooperation is precisely aligned with urgent needs,” Yaron Shavit, deputy chair of the executive at the Jewish Agency, who is leading the project on behalf of the agency, told eJP after attending a special Knesset committee hearing on the mobilization of Israeli society in late October.
“Both the chair of the committee, as well as the wounded mayor of the Eshkol regional council, where 17 of the kibbutzim and moshavim were severely hit, strongly emphasized the importance of strengthening emergency responder teams — and that is exactly what we aim to do,” Shavit said.
Read the full report here.
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