A couple of months ago, I happened to be in New York over a Shabbat, and along with my brother and his family, got invited to a Friday evening dinner which was being hosted in honor of some participants in a program called GESHER, which means “Bridge” in Hebrew.
As you’ll hear in our conversation with JJ Sussman today—which I invited him to have after he and I had both returned to Israel—GESHER was originally created by a now legendary Israeli educator to build bridges between religious and secular Jews. But in recent years, GESHER has expanded its work in several ways, including building relationships between Israel and the Diaspora.
Here’s part of how GESHER explains the trips:
The “Gesher to the Diaspora” course offers Israeli leaders and influencers a rare opportunity to deepen their understanding of Jewish life outside of Israel and to strengthen the bonds that unite the Jewish people. Through learning, listening, and direct encounter, participants develop a deeper sense of shared responsibility and mutual belonging between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.
The course brings together Israeli decision-makers and public influencers from across society, including local government, security and defense, media, education, and culture. Participants represent the full spectrum of Israeli Jewish life, including secular, religious, and ultra-Orthodox communities, men and women, and people from both the center and the periphery of the country.
The program culminates in a six-day visit to a Jewish community abroad, where participants meet with both professional leadership and everyday community members, visit central institutions, and engage in open and honest dialogue. The experience is supported by academic research and evaluation to ensure lasting impact.
The true measure of success is what happens after the course. Upon completion, participants become Gesher Syms Fellows, empowered to lead with empathy, courage, and vision. They return to their communities with a renewed commitment to civic engagement, bridging divides within Israeli society and strengthening Israel’s relationship with the Jewish world. To date over 500 leaders have participated in the course.
The Israelis at the dinner were fairly senior people in business, military, government and more. They were the kinds of people, I assumed, who, sure, might well have learned a lot from a trip like that, but who certainly had a fairly decent sense of American Jewry even prior to the trip.
But I was wrong. Virtually every person spoke about how little they’d known—or even thought—about Diaspora Jewry prior to the trip, how their visit to American Jewry had been a genuine wakeup-call, and how moved they were by the shared values and work of these two halves of the Jewish people. It was an evening moving and memorable far beyond what I’d anticipated, and it struck me that in this time of worry and division across the Jewish world, hearing about GESHER’s work is cause for genuine optimism and thus well worth sharing.
You can visit GESHER’s website here. We hope you enjoy our conversation with JJ Sussman.
Photo by Daniel Gordis
JJ Sussman is the International Director of Gesher. JJ has worked in Israel’s High-Tech sector for the last 18 years at firms including SanDisk, Jerusalem Global and Israel Seed Partners. JJ has always been involved in projects to help the Jewish people and was the International Director for Unity Day in its first year. He made Aliyah from New York 20 years ago and now lives in Modi’in together with his wife and six children.
The link at the top of this posting will take free subscribers to an excerpted portion of today’s conversation.
For paid subscribers, the link at the top will take you to the full conversation; below, paid subscribers will also find a transcript for those who prefer to read, as always.