President Isaac Herzog’s Voice of People draws 2,500 applicants

Voice of the People, which Israeli President Isaac Herzog initiated last year, received 2,500 applications for its second round — more than double the number for its inaugural cycle, organizers said.

The first cohort, which had 20 initiatives, concluded with an international conference in Budapest, Hungary, in October. Network participants are divided equally among Israel, the United States and the rest of the Diaspora.

Applicants are screened by an algorithm and only then evaluated by staff, “precisely to eliminate Jewish politics,” one of the program’s initiators said.

One first-cohort initiative was OneBayit, a nonprofit founded by Joshua Buchalter, a recent immigrant to Israel from South Africa, which connects Jewish travelers with Jewish families abroad for Shabbat and holiday meals.

“Last year, OneBayit was just an idea. This year, I got to present what we’ve built and how far we’ve come,” Buchalter said of the Budapest conference, which Herzog attended.

Gvira Milworm, CEO of Temech, a nonprofit that helps haredi women enter the Israeli job market, served on the inaugural council and will remain on it for the second cohort. Neither Temech nor Milworm receives funding from Voice of the People, she told JNS; the benefit, she said, has been “making connections that I would not have made any other way.”

Temech said the network has a level of diversity rarely found in Jewish nonprofits, and Milworm hopes the second cohort will include more haredim.

That diversity was by design, Herzog said in Budapest. He recalled not recognizing most of the names recruited to the council — a sign, he said, that they came from outside the Jewish peoplehood circles he knew well.

“We wanted to see people outside the system who go in and take a leadership role,” he said.

— Canaan Lidor, JNS