In a few weeks, I will leave Jerusalem for Charlotte, North Carolina – a city I have known for only two weeks, yet am preparing to call home.
At a time when every departure from Israel risks being interpreted as a political statement – as an expression of despair, protest, or escape – I want to be clear about what this move means to me.
I am not running away from Israel or from the complexity of life here. I am moving toward a responsibility: helping ensure that Israel remains a living, human, and meaningful part of Jewish life in one American community.
This October, I will become the founding director of the new Israel Center at the Jewish Federation of Greater Charlotte. The Center will work with local organizations, educators, community leaders, and Israeli partners to strengthen existing relationships, create new ones, and expand opportunities for Israel education and engagement.
Israel is increasingly encountered abroad as a question that must be answered. It appears through war, government decisions, campus confrontations, antisemitism, political debate, and controversial statements.
These issues are real, consequential, and impossible to ignore. But when they become the only ways through which people encounter and understand Israel, an entire country – and the millions of lives within it – gets flattened into an argument.
Israel is more than its government, just as Israelis are more than the positions attributed to them. It is a place where people raise families, build businesses, teach, create, grieve, volunteer, complain, and dream about a better future. It is a society filled with disagreements and contradictions, extraordinary solidarity and painful divisions.
Humanizing Israel does not mean sanitizing it. It means refusing to reduce it.
The relationship between the United States and Israel is being debated and reassessed almost daily. Governments, diplomacy, and security cooperation will continue to shape that relationship.
But official ties cannot sustain it on their own. Its durability has always depended on something deeper: people who know one another, communities that remain curious about one another, and relationships strong enough to survive disagreement.
That is particularly important for American Jewish communities.
If Israel is present only during moments of crisis or political controversy, it will understandably feel distant to many people – especially younger Jews. A meaningful relationship with Israel cannot be built through demands for automatic agreement, nor can it survive through avoidance. It requires knowledge, experience, and room for honest conversation.
American Jews should not have to choose between uncritical advocacy and complete disengagement. There must be space for affection and frustration, identification and questioning. A mature relationship can hold all of those things. An abstract one quickly collapses into slogans.
With legacy comes great responsibility
My own connection with Charlotte began on a much smaller scale. In 2025, I arrived there for a two-week assignment on behalf of the Jewish Agency. I expected a brief professional experience. Instead, Charlotte stayed with me.
I encountered a warm, thoughtful community with a genuine desire to deepen its relationship with Israel – not simply by adding more events, but by creating more meaningful opportunities to learn, meet, and engage.
People wanted to encounter an Israel larger than the one presented in the news. They were also willing to ask difficult questions and genuinely listen to complicated answers.
I left feeling that those two weeks had opened a door rather than completed an assignment. Now, I am returning through it.
The new Charlotte Israel Center has been made possible through the legacy of Irving Bienstock, entrusted to the Federation by his family. A Holocaust survivor and pillar of Charlotte’s Jewish community, Irving devoted much of his life to Jewish memory, education, and service.
His legacy is now helping create something intended to endure: deeper relationships with Israel, stronger Jewish identity, and future generations of Charlotte leaders who feel knowledgeable, connected, and responsible for a shared future.
I do not take that responsibility lightly. I feel the weight of what his family has entrusted to the Federation and of the role I am being asked to play in carrying it forward. My task is to help ensure that what grows from Irving’s legacy is worthy of the values behind it.
Establishing a new center might create the temptation to begin by inventing something entirely new. That is not my intention. Charlotte already has committed organizations, educators, rabbis, lay leaders, Israelis, and community members doing important work around Israel. My first responsibility will be to listen, understand that landscape, and build trust.
The Center should serve as a connector and catalyst: strengthening what already exists, helping organizations work together more effectively, and creating opportunities that none could develop as successfully alone.
A crowded calendar is not the same thing as a strategy. We will need clear goals, honest evaluation, and a shared understanding of whom our work is intended to reach.
That will mean developing educational opportunities that present Israel in its fullness, giving educators and community leaders useful tools, strengthening institutional and personal relationships with Israeli partners, creating encounters that extend beyond occasional visits, and making room for informed, critical, and constructive discussion.
Some initiatives will come from the Center. Others will emerge from the community or from partners in Israel. The measure of success will not be who receives credit, but whether people feel better equipped to understand Israel and more able to build their own relationship with it.
Israel also needs this work. A country encountered only through political arguments becomes easier to caricature and harder to care about.
Direct relationships cannot eliminate disagreement, but they make indifference and dehumanization more difficult. They remind us that what happens between Israel and the American Jewish community is not merely a matter of foreign policy. It is primarily a relationship between families, institutions, histories, and people.
Perhaps it sounds idealistic to place so much faith in human connection at such a fractured moment. But I have already seen what a brief encounter can set in motion. Two weeks in Charlotte became a lasting relationship. That relationship is now becoming a new chapter for my life and for the community that welcomed me.
I am not leaving Israel behind. I am carrying it with me – not as a political case to defend but as a home to introduce honestly.
The writer is an Israeli journalist and communications professional and the incoming founding director of the Charlotte Israel Center. He previously served as the spokesperson for Masa Israel Journey and as a Jewish Agency emissary in Australia and New Zealand.
