Published: 9 June 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Philanthropy and political support cannot be the only building blocks. Israel has a responsibility to relate to Jews around the world as partners in a joint venture.
Two events took place In Israel on May 14, 1948. One is well known. In Tel Aviv, David Ben Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. That same day another entity was created: the Jewish diaspora.
The word diaspora, as referred to in modern times, is a category of people that exists in relation to a homeland. Diasporas are interconnected to their homelands through formal and non-formal ties. Once a Jewish nation-state was born, so was its diaspora. At the time of Ben Gurion’s announcement, only 7% of world Jewry lived in the newly declared state. The rest were scattered around the world, with North America having the largest concentration of Jews after the catastrophe of the Holocaust.
The new state was not intended just for those 650,000 Jews present at its creation. Moreover, the state, from the start, was a project of the Jewish people worldwide. They initiated the project and stood behind the struggle for its creation. William Safran, one the founders of the study of contemporary diasporas, laid out a list of characteristics describing how they function.
Two items from this list are relevant here. First, Safran asserts, diasporas are expatriate minority communities whose members regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and as the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return when conditions were appropriate.
Second, they believe that they should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their original homeland and to its safety and prosperity.
From the onset, relations between the diaspora and the state were characterised by two strands, both of which corresponded with Safran’s theory: aliya (immigration) to Israel or supporting the project from afar.
In Israel’s Declaration of Independence there was a call to Jews around the world: “We appeal to the Jewish people throughout the diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and up-building and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realisation of the age-old dream - the redemption of Israel”.
