reaching out

Published: Wed, 12/16/20

Hi ,

With just a couple of weeks left to the 2020 tax year, I'm sure that your inbox is being flooded with emails from worthy organizations and causes. I don't want to take up too much of your time (I realize that there are only a couple days left of Ḥanukah), but I would like to catch you up on some of the things the Vision Movement has been doing.

Just after our successful election campaign to enter the World Zionist Congress finished, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. As this was a couple months before our ATID student leadership program was scheduled to conclude and many of our participants began leaving the country, we signed up for Zoom to keep the sessions going.

Then we decided to turn that lemon into lemonade by opening up this year's program to Jewish students and young professionals all over the world. The two new tracks of our online leadership program have already begun and the online educational process (an obvious adjustment for a program as experiential as ATID) has been progressing even better than we had hoped!

As our online magazine continues to grow (in 2020, the number of our newsletter subscribers more than doubled!), we added an additional podcast on the weekly Torah portion, where Rav Yehuda HaKohen focuses on the personalities of Biblical figures and the unique personal challenges and growth they experienced in the course of building the Hebrew nation. This weekly podcast is in addition to The Next Stage, the podcast Rav Yehuda has been hosting every other week on identifying the current objectives of Jewish liberation.

We recently sent one of our student leaders, Shlomo Yitzḥak Kofman of NYU, as a delegate representing our movement at the virtual World Zionist Congress. As of now, there's a plan to have an Extraordinary Congress in 2021 (extraordinary because the Congress generally only meets every five years), which we plan to attend as well.

In addition to all of this, we're currently putting the finishing touches on a short animated video explaining how systemic anti-Semitism operates and how that's relevant to the State of Israel and questions pertaining to Jews and whiteness.

We couldn't do any of this without you! Your support, sharing our social media posts, forwarding our newsletter to friends and family, financial contributions - every little bit helps, and we've come a long way this year, despite the many challenges.

We ask that you please help us continue to grow in 2021 and consider sending in a contribution to the Vision Movement here.

Thank you and Ḥanukah sameaḥ,
Danit Grady