Dear JNF Campaign Leaders:

SUMMER BLITZ

The Summer Blitz Campaign, which runs July 1 – September 30, has begun. Summer Blitz is designed for lay leaders to raise funds by soliciting new gifts and closing outstanding general and major donor level gifts. A lay leader (Makor, Campaign Cabinet) will be assigned to communities for one or two days for 1:1 meetings, parlor meetings, and other fundraising opportunities that are organized by the local professional. Local lay leadership support is critical in setting up productive meetings. The Blitz Campaign is a great time to follow up with potential donors who have attended events throughout the Spring and who have travelled to Israel in the summer. The goal is $1 million toward the Billion Dollar Roadmap. This is the final campaign for the 2019 fiscal year, and it is critical in achieving our $83 million annual campaign goal. As of July 11, the National Campaign is at $73 million.

NATIONAL CONFERENCE and CAMPAIGN PLANNING SUMMIT

As a reminder, this year’s Campaign Planning Summit will take place in conjunction with the National Conference in Washington D.C.  The National Conference runs Friday through Sunday, September 13 – 15, and the Campaign Planning Summit will take place Monday, the 16^th from 8:30am – 3:30pm. In addition, an open meeting of the Board of Trustees will take place as part of the agenda of the Campaign Summit. If you have not already done so, please register for National Conference now and plan to stay Monday for the Campaign Summit and Board of Trustees meeting. You can still catch a 6:00 pm flight home.

You can register for the National Conference and the Campaign Planning Summit by clicking here:  https://www.jnf.org/events-landing-pages/2019-national-conference

SPRING CAMPAIGN

Our Spring Campaign 2019 has ended with great success!! A very special thank you to our Community Campaign co-chairs, Laura Salzer and Jim Riola, Spring Campaign Captains, Board Presidents, JNFuture National Board, JNFuture Regional Chairs and AMHSI for your hard work and commitment to Spring Campaign over the past 8 weeks!

In total, we renewed 601 lapsed gifts for $2,003,696! In addition, we brought in 2,156 new gifts at $250 or more for $8,718,627. This brings our Spring Campaign total to $10,722,323. We surpassed our FY2018 numbers by over $1.2M.

MAZEL TOV to our Spring Campaign winners Adam Moskowitz and the entire Mountain States team, and to Maida Richlin on closing the most gifts by a lay leader.

LAY LEADER TRAINING SEMINAR WITH CEO RUSSELL ROBINSON & KEN SEGEL

Please join us for the next Lay Leader Training Seminar on July 17 at 12 noon eastern, featuring JNF CEO Russell F. Robinson and the Chair of the Israel Relations Committee, Ken Segel, who will provide an update on JNF Projects and Partnerships. Please register for this ZOOM Conference Call at http://support.jnf.org/site/Calendar?id=36692&view=Detail

BE INSCRIBED

We are excited to announce the launch of Be Inscribed, the JNF project to write Torah scrolls on Masada. As part of JNF’s product line, everyone has the opportunity to inscribe a letter, word, verse and so on - Even the entire Torah.  Click on this link to see a great promotional video and to learn more. https://beinscribed.org/

Please share with family and friends that in addition to planting trees in Israel, they can also honor a loved one by contributing to the writing of a Torah on Masada.

Shabbat Shalom,

Our summer session kicked off their first full week on campus by volunteering at Save a Child's Heart and Leket. Later this week they will continue on to Jerusalem for their first overnight tiyul.

We also wished our April session farewell as they concluded their eight week session. We are already excited to welcome them to our AMHSI alumni community!

Savor Israel’s remarkable sips, bites, and sounds on the Culinary, Wine & Music Tour, scheduled for May 2020. Learn more.

This Monday and Tuesday, July 15 and 16, are Amazon Prime Days — now known as the Black Friday of July. Amazing deals will be available -- and you can support JNF while you shop! It’s a win-win. Make sure to shop through this link: smile.amazon.com so that Jewish National Fund gets credited with the donation. 

This week on IsraelCast, host Steven Shalowitz visits the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya to speak with Dr. Eyal Sela, an expert on treating victims of Syrian violence resulting from the Civil War in Syria. Listen to Dr. Sela’s perspective on the moral imperative of treating patients with an adverse view of Israel – and how helping them impacts their views and their lives. Tune in here.

Traveling to another city and want to see what JNF events are taking place there? Just visit jnf.org/inyourarea for a quick look at how to stay engaged while on the road.

This week we launched the first group of Jewish National Fund affiliate Special in Uniform for the Druze sector. We look forward to expanding the program in the Galilee within the framework of Jewish National Fund's Go North strategic initiative to strengthen and grow the Galilee region. The new soldiers are from Maghar and will serve in Michve Alon base, an IDF military base located near Safed in the Galilee. The new soldiers will be part of the logistics team in the base. Some of the commanders of the base are Druze and they are helping us to make the process much smoother.

This week, Jewish National Fund affiliate Eretz Ir ventured to the Galilee in search of the right building for the new Lauder Center for Employment in the beautiful old city of Akko.

Together with JNF, the Municipality of Akko, and the JNF Western Galilee Tourist Information Center, the Lauder Employment Center will create new jobs for Northern residents. We are so excited to create an employment revolution in the North. 

In 1956, David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of IsraeI, said: “If only Israel could desalinate water, the whole human race will be blessed.”

In this week’s Parshat Chukat, we sadly lose Moshe and Aaron’s sister, Miriam—she dies and is buried in Kadesh. Her death is (not coincidentally) juxtaposed to Israel losing their water source—Miriam’s well—and their turning against their living leaders, Moshe and Aaron.

Who was Miriam? What is her legacy? There aren’t too many clues about her throughout the Torah. We know she was a prophet and the sister of Moshe and Aaron, but her prophesies weren’t recorded. She famously led the woman through the sea with song. She errs, as any human does, by speaking evil words, lashon hara, and is subsequently forced out of the camp due to her punishment of leprosy, tzara’at. 

But there are deeper ideals from Miriam’s narrative that can be learned from her recorded actions, and ideas that marry the connection between her and water. From a young age, Miriam was able to care for those more vulnerable than she, as was the case with her baby brother, Moshe, in the Nile, as well as the babies she and her mother helped care for in Egypt. Miriam was able to step up and challenge others regardless of her position—as she did with Moshe’s leadership—even though she was a female in a male world. Miriam also was able to praise G-d and lead during a less than ideal time—while escaping Egypt and heading into unknown land—with song and dance, the most joyous of expressions. Indeed it was Miriam’s Well—the one that disappeared upon her death—that watered the nation’s thirst all those years in the desert.

Water followed Miriam her whole life—watching in secret at the Nile, guiding the song-filled journey through the water, and the well of her namesake. It’s no wonder that this powerful force of a woman and leader was represented by the most basic of human needs—water.  A leader who quietly provided a foundation for those more vulnerable while providing them with strength and vitality in their wanderings - that was Miriam, and that is the power of water.

Today, 64 years after David Ben-Gurion envisioned the impact of the potential desalination plants, Jewish National Fund fulfils Ben-Gurion’s dream of achieving water independence for the State of Israel and having abundance water for all, like our own Talia Tzour Avner says, “With the help of JNF, Israel has been able to mitigate some of its water challenges and has become a global trailblazer in water technology and conservation.” As leaders in the area of water preservation, we can learn much from Miriam’s role as we become role models for the world to look towards in the area of water preservation and conservation.

Shabbat Shalom,

Yossi