‘Net’ Gain For Abraham Fund

Ami Nahshon: Group scrapping annual dinner gala.

Ami Nahshon: Group scrapping annual dinner gala.

by Staff Report

In a sign of the economic times, a leading Israeli-Arab coexistence nonprofit is scrapping its annual fundraising dinner gala and replacing it with what it’s calling a “global online outreach event.”
The Abraham Fund Initiatives is producing an hour-long extravaganza fundraising event featuring a 15-member choral group and two Israeli ministers — and everyone is invited to watch for free on the Internet.

In an e-mail to donors and others, the group announced it is trying a different approach to fundraising this year rather than having another dinner “in these tough economic times.” The event will showcase the organization’s efforts at fostering coexistence in Israel between Israeli Jews and the country’s 1.2 million Israeli Arabs.

“We’ll bring you to an Israel that people

rarely get to see — passionate Arabs and Jews working together to make coexistence a reality,” promised the e-mail.

Ami Nahshon, the organization’s president and CEO, said Professor Avishay Braverman, Israel’s minister for minority affairs, and Isaac Herzog, its minister of social welfare, will discuss the importance of integrating Israeli Arabs into the fabric of the country.

“We are seeing higher rates of university graduates among Arab citizens — both men and women,” Nahshon said. “But their access to jobs in the knowledge economy — technology and the bio-sciences – is extremely limited. You have Masters and Doctoral graduates teaching junior and senior high school math and science because they can’t get appropriate jobs in the private sector at their level of expertise.”
The program will also feature a 15-member Israeli Jewish-Israeli Arab girls’ choir from Jaffa known as the Voices of Peace.

“They sing in Hebrew and Arabic and we will interview one or two of them to ask why they participate in coexistence activities,” Nahshon said.

The program is also expected to focus on a three-year project of the Abraham Fund that promotes bilingual education in the country.

“There are now 11,000 Jewish kids studying Arabic, just as all Arab kids are required to study Hebrew,” Nahshon said. “That figure represents about 5 percent of all Jewish students in Israel. Our goal is to have the Education Ministry mandate the learning of Arabic for all Jewish public school students.”

It costs about $1.5 million to teach the 11,000 Jewish youngsters Arabic — the Abraham Fund covers half of that and the Education Ministry and local municipalities covering the rest.

“The benefits of this alternative fundraiser are clear,” Nahshon said. “It exposes our issues to a larger and more diverse global audience and they will have no parking problems and not have to worry about calories.”

It will also save the organization about $50,000 — a dinner would have cost about $65,000 while the video special is expected to cost about $15,000, Nahshon said.

The program will be presented at noon on Dec. 9. To register to view the program, e-mail ngeller@abrahamfund.org.

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