Nefesh B’Nefesh co-founders see eye-to-eye as they work to help every Jew come home

Tony Gelbart, a businessman and chairman and co-founder of Nefesh, and co-founder and executive director Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, appeared to really enjoy each other’s company on Nefesh’s first charter flight since Oct. 7, which landed in Tel Aviv on Aug. 20.

At 30,000 feet, they laughed frequently at each other’s jokes and huddled to talk often. In the Nefesh conference room, where Gelbart wore a suit jacket and Fass was in shirtsleeves, rolled up, the two often finished each other’s sentences.

“We are not very good actors,” Fass said of his relationship with Gelbart.

Fass, whose ordination comes from Yeshiva University, where he also earned degrees in biology and education, was associate rabbi at the Boca Raton Synagogue in Florida, where Gelbart was a congregant.

“There’s a tremendous mutual respect between the two of us. There’s mutual love between the two of us,” Fass said. “We, for the last 23 years, have only missed speaking to each other on Shabbat or yuntif.”

“We talk at least once every day — about the organization, about Israel, about politics, just bouncing ideas that might not have anything to do with the organization, somehow it somehow gets back to the organization,” he said.

“We bring different talents to the table, and we know how we complement each other,” Fass said. “You can count on one hand, I think, when we really had moments of not tension, just disagreements. We usually see eye to eye. We feel the same way.”

“This organization is definitely not about me or about Rabbi Fass,” Gelbart said. “The idea is to focus on the olim that are coming.”

Fass said that it’s important to focus on the “product,” though he was loath to use that word. “The product comes before us,” he said. Organizations that are based mainly on leaders can fall apart, whereas focus on a product is “pure,” Fass added, noting that he saw it as a good thing that some people didn’t recognize him the prior day, when the charter flight landed.

“You can be insulted at first, but you’re like, oh that’s great,” he said. “You take pride that the organism exists on its own.”

Though convincing other leaders to abandon ego is perhaps like convincing a camel to go through the eye of a needle, the Nefesh co-founders said, in response to a question, that they think they do have a recipe for success.

“We run it like a business but with a heart,” Gelbart said.

“CFO. CEO. CMO. Everything you would imagine how a business is run. The transparency. All the workings of a really good business. But you run with a heart, because we’re not selling a pen. We’re not selling a glass. We’re dealing with people and their lives, and that’s the most important thing you can deal with,” he said.

“We built a roadmap. We have a vision for 10 years from now. … We look at the long term. We want a computer system that’s good not for 1,000 people but for 10,000 people, for 20,000, for 100,000 people. We want infrastructure for that, and we will build to that.”

The organization, which has brought 90,000 immigrants from North America to Israel, went through some admitted early mistakes, including being too trustworthy, according to its leaders. But it now has proprietary technology that draws interest and queries for advice from a wide range of parties, including foreign governments (which the co-founders wouldn’t identify).

“Our budget and our programming and our staffing is exploding exponentially,” Fass said. “Two years ago, our budget was 50% where our budget is today. … It’s an accelerated growth spurt in any business model.”

Nefesh reports that it has 156 staff members around the world.

“For me, the challenge is just bandwidth,” he said. “It’s just our ability to catch up to so many of the projects and the dreams that we have. It’s a humbling but beautiful position to be, like we’re the girl that everyone wants to go to the ball with.”

Nefesh tried bringing in external fundraisers but it never worked, according to the co-founders, who say everything they do is fundraising. Some 13 years ago, the nonprofit took the advice of philanthropist Angelica Berrie — whose late husband Russ Berrie sold plush “Russ Bears” toys — who said that “aliyah isn’t digestible.”

“It’s too historic. It’s too big for a donor to feel that their dollar is going to be impacting aliyah,” Fass said. “She said, ‘You have to compartmentalize it into projects and to start looking at it as a project focus’.”

That mindset was “transformative” for the organization and allowed it to look at different projects, according to Fass.

“The danger of that is that it’s not grassroots small donations. You have a lot of eggs in very few baskets,” he said. “That’s the danger with this kind of model. It’s higher yield but higher risk.”

Fass said that Nefesh doesn’t want to “cannibalize” other Jewish organizations that need the smaller donations. “We say it all the time. We’re leaving money on the table,” he said. “For others to have. It’s not altruism, it’s also balancing your time.”

The Nefesh co-founders were asked which organizations they see as a peer group, against which they benchmark their success.

“If you pigeonhole yourself looking at what other immigration entity or institution there is, you’re not going to find it, because this is very rare. It’s a unicorn,” Fass said.

“We built something here that people would love to copy. It’s copyable in some ways and some ways it’s not, but you could take portions and fit it into the model that you need,” Gelbart said. “The technology that we have here — that’s pretty interesting.”

Nefesh has a lot of technology — “unique, we built it ourselves, it’s quite amazing,” Gelbart added.

Though Gelbart isn’t the rabbinic half of the “odd couple,” he turned to an almost Talmudic explanation.

“Even within ourselves, we can’t compare ourselves with ourselves,” he said.

A reporter suggested that the Nefesh co-founders sounded like they were running a technology company.

“Well look around,” Gelbart said. “It is technology merging with the heart.”

He turned to Fass. “Notice he’s been saying ‘investors’ — not donors — and ‘partners’,” Gelbart said.

Journalists at the discussion with Fass and Gelbart included The Jewish Star Editor and Publisher Ed Weintrob, JNS News Editor Menachem Wecker, Algemeiner international affairs reporter Ailin Vilches Arguello, and social media influencer Yechiel Jacobs (@jacobsyechiel).

See also:

•Iowa to Jerusalem: With 4 dogs in cargo, Binghams oozed joy on arrival in Promised Land

•Nachum Segal's 'JM in the AM' program broadcast from aboard the aliah charter flight.