Gabe Freund: Leaving behind a better world
Gabe Freund’s journey spans Israel’s complex social landscape to leading social justice work in Australia. Now CEO of Stand Up, he reflects on Jewish identity, democracy, and the power of community to drive meaningful change.
Gideon Cohen
Gabe Freund was appointed CEO of Stand Up in August.
Published: 21 April 2026
Last updated: 21 April 2026
To start off, do you want to tell us about your Jewish identity growing up?
I grew up in Perth and went to a Jewish school there. I grew up in a traditional Jewish household. We had Shabbat every week, we did the chagim. I went to shul a handful of times during the year. I went to an Orthodox Jewish school, the only Jewish school in Perth.
There I really got a grounding in aspects of Jewish law and philosophical tradition, even though I wasn't from a particularly observant orthodox family. Judaism was clearly an important value to us, and very much associated with family, history, and community.
I was also involved in a Jewish youth movement, Habonim Dror, and what I loved about that, is that at school I got a very straight and narrow, up and down version of Orthodox Judaism. And in the youth movement, I got a sense that Jewish values and identity can be a driver for looking at the world as it is, and wondering about how to make it better.
I think those two sides, the grounding in Jewish tradition and practice from school, with the more idealistic way of looking at the world and the importance of tikkun olam, both of those shaped my sense of what it means to be Jewish today.
Today, as an adult, what does your Jewish identity mean to you?
I lived in Israel for a long time. After graduating high school, I went on a gap year in Israel, and then came back to Australia for a couple years, and then made Aliyah. Moving to Israel was a big part of expressing my Jewish identity and values and finding fertile ground for seeing how Jewish values can shape democracy on a wide scale.
And there I really got a taste for seeing Jewish identity and Jewish peoplehood more on the macro scale. Thinking about, how do we, as a people and as communities in different countries, understand ourselves and how do we understand our role in society?
So, for me today, Jewish identity operates on two levels. There's the level of grounding and rooting me in my own family story, the historical context, and where I am today and what it means to be a Jewish person. But the other side of it is thinking collectively about being a part of a community. It’s a sense of belonging and anchoring within the world and within society.
I think what community offers in a world that is highly isolated and individualised is a sense of place, and belonging and togetherness. For me, the community that I'm a part of, among others, is the Jewish community, and that gives me the ability to think not only about myself, my own actions, but how does this group that I'm part of, how does it find its place within the broader social fabric of Australian society?
If you want to actually make long-term change by shaping people's hearts and minds, then you need to have shared projects and shared goals.
After making Aliyah, you attended university in Israel – what did you study?
I have a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Haifa where I focussed on linguistics and literature. Haifa is this interesting place where life unfolds quietly. It has a significant Arab population.
When I studied there, that was my first major personal encounter with the Arab population of Israel. They make up twenty per cent of the population. They’re a very significant minority, and obviously deal with a lot of complexity of what it means to be an Arab minority inside Israel, and that raises a lot of questions about democracy.
Democracy is not just about who you vote for and the system of government, it's about the way that we operate as a society and as groups of people. I think an Arab minority in Israel, figuring out how to participate in democracy that is fair and equal, but also addresses some of the challenges that they face as a minority, is a really pressing question. I encountered that for the first time, majorly, at the University of Haifa.
After my first degree, I studied a Bachelor of Education, focusing on informal education systems, at a place called Beit Berl College. The program I did was based on a unique model of dialogue-based learning. It’s a student-led program, so you have faculty and staff that helped develop the syllabus, but most of the learning is student-led in discussion circles, as opposed to lecture halls and tutorial rooms.
After you finished university, you co-founded the Advot Center for Grassroots Democracy and Shared Society in Akko – tell us about that organisation.
The Advot Center is a not-for-profit in Akko. Akko is a mixed Jewish-Arab city. It’s the most mixed city in all of Israel. It’s an ancient city that’s been around for 5,000 years, and it’s a port city. So, it’s always had people from all over the world speaking different languages, different customs, following different faiths, meeting together. And it still very much is that today.
At the Advot Center, we were trying to create the social infrastructure to strengthen the participatory aspects of democracy in the city, giving people the tools and platform to shape their city collectively.
Akko is one of the poorer major cities in Israel, and so it faces a lot of the challenges that disadvantaged places tend to: poverty, crime, unemployment, drugs. But all of the groups who live there, whether they’re Jews or Arabs, or any of the subgroups within those two sides, all of them face similar challenges.
So, we were trying to create tools that build bridges between those different groups so that together, they could address the challenges of life there and work towards a better future for everyone.
If you want to actually make long-term change by shaping people's hearts and minds, then you need to have shared projects and shared goals, because that gives people an opportunity to overcome challenges together and problem solve together. So that was our model.
We had a community garden and a pop-up bike workshop for the kids, and we had language sharing and learning programs. We taught Hebrew in a social framework to Russian-speaking immigrants, and we had Arabic learning groups for Jewish adults, and Hebrew practice groups for Arabs.
We would bring them together regularly to exchange and learn from eachother and share about each other’s cultures. We worked with youth a lot as well. We did youth programming, bringing Jewish and Arab youth together.
Social impact is about leaving behind a better world than the one that we inherited.
You then became CEO of Hechalutz – tell us about your work there.
Hechalutz is an education organisation. It’s also a not-for-profit, based in Israel. It was founded by graduates of youth movements around the world who came to Israel and wanted to reform the way that Israel is taught and talked about among young Jewish people around the world.
There was a recognition that the old structures and models don't necessarily apply to a generation that has many more questions, and are perhaps critical of aspects of the Israeli government’s policy, or relationship with Palestinians; recognising that it exists. That strategically, it’s better to shape education in a way that allows for those conversations to happen against a constructive, warm, safe background, rather than cutting out voices or denying disagreement.
Basically, the idea that having constructive dialogue and even disagreement and debate is, and always has been, a critical part of Jewish education. So, we worked a lot with youth groups, community centres, synagogues, Jewish schools, doing programming in Israel, and also running educational trips in Europe, trying to create a richer and more complex discourse around Israel for Jewish youth around the world.
Fast forward to today, you’re now the CEO at Stand Up, which is very exciting. When did you first step into the role? What does the job look like day-to-day?
With my family, I made the decision to come back to Australia about a year ago. We’d been in Israel, lived through October 7 and the war and everything that happened after that, and then for personal reasons, we decided to come back here.
I had about seven different people message me that Stand Up was looking for a new CEO, because they all felt that it was just a very good fit for me. I had known about Stand Up. I’d been an admirer from a distance for many years of the work that it does to channel Jewish compassion to improve Australian society and deal with injustice here.
I had conversations with people who worked at Stand Up in the past, and with the chair of the board, Dean Levitan. Those conversations just made it clear how important Stand Up is, especially in this extremely complex moment for the Jewish community and for Australian democracy more generally. I felt like that would be a great next step for me, and a great place for me to bring my ideas, passion and skillset to the fore.
The day-to-day at Stand Up is very varied and interesting. This is a very complex moment for our community figuring out our place in Australia, at a time of heightened tension, polarised discourse and fragmentation of our democratic fabric.
We need to figure out how we ensure our own safety as a community. How do we ensure that we don't lose our ability to look outwards. But also, how do we thrive in a way that allows us to contribute more broadly to Australian society and make it as fair and equitable a place as possible for all communities?
So, day-to-day, I could be meeting with members of other community organisations or people from other minority groups we work with. Just this morning, I had a meeting with leaders from AUJS because we are codesigning a program to bring Jewish and non-Jewish student leaders together to learn about each other, to build relationships, to think together about how to create an environment that is safe and fair and conducive to the constructive work that's required to improve this country for everyone.
How do we create Jewish leaders who are proud of who they are, strong in their Jewish identities, and driven by justice and a desire to make a positive impact here in Australia?
If someone hasn’t heard of Stand Up, can you give an explanation of what it is and what you do?
Stand Up is a Jewish organisation that was founded 30 years ago under the name Keshet to support survivors of the genocide in Rwanda. The idea being that we exist to mobilise the collective compassion of the Jewish community towards making the world better.
From there, it has evolved to address various social justice issues inside Australia, whilst also thinking about how do we create a strong and resilient Jewish community that's capable of contributing towards social justice more broadly.
For 20 years, one of our flagship programs has been Derech Eretz, where we take young Jewish leaders, mainly from Melbourne and Sydney, up to two Gomeroi Aboriginal communities in northern New South Wales that we have partnered with for a very long time. They refer to us as the Jewish Mob in those communities.
The function of the program is to provide holiday programming to the youth of those communities. They do sports activities, educational activities, but it's really more of a cultural exchange. We go up there and meet with leaders and Elders, hear their stories, and shine a light on the importance of truth telling and understanding each other, also addressing some of the challenges on the path towards justice and equity for the First Peoples of this country.
Historically, we've worked a lot with groups of refugees, supporting their arrival and integration into Australian society. Today, we're looking more specifically at how we cultivate a cohort of Jewish leaders who are grounded in Jewish ethical practice and values with a perspective towards delivering that on a societal scale. So, how do we create Jewish leaders who are proud of who they are, strong in their Jewish identities, and all driven by justice and a desire to make a positive impact here in Australia.
We like to end with the same question – what does social impact mean to you?
I think the same thing that I was told when I was five or six years old, that when you go camping, there's this idea of ‘leave no trace’. On Habo camp, we would always leave the campsite cleaner than when we arrived.
I think it’s the same concept for me, social impact. Social impact is about leaving behind a better world than the one that we inherited. That’s maybe cliche, but it’s really how I think about it, because it captures what we’re trying to do.
We’re trying to heal wounds, and we’re trying to piece together a fractured world and recognise that we can't do everything. It’s not about some cure-all approach, but it is about doing what we can to make it a bit better, to address some challenges, to improve lives in whatever way that we can. So, for me, social impact is leaving behind a better world than what we found.
About the author
Gideon Cohen is a Melbourne-based journalist and a content creator and editorial assistant at TJI. He holds a master's degree in journalism from the University of Melbourne and his work has appeared in various publications including Broadsheet and The Jewish Chronicle.
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