Intel Minister Stern talks ambitions of chairing Jewish Agency

• Published date: 07 October 2021
• Author: JEREMY SHARON
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

And during the course of an in-depth interview, focusing on his candidacy to head the Jewish Agency, Stern is keen to underline those achievements, many of which have dealt with key issues facing the Jewish people.

As a senior officer in the IDF, following his service as a combat solider, Stern founded the IDF's conversion program intended, in the main, for immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

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He led a project to introduce bone marrow transplant match testing to the IDF enlistment procedure, an effort that has saved more than 2,600 lives to date, more than half of whom are Jews from the Diaspora.

Stern formulated the Edim b'Madim (Witnesses in Uniform) project which sends IDF soldiers to Poland to witness the concentration camps firsthand, and also headed a special committee that reformulated the IDF Code of Ethics and led to the writing of the "Yi'ud V'yihud" statement of principles, to strengthen Jewish and Zionist values in the IDF.

More than once, the minister and Yesh Atid MK cites the fact that he is the child of two Holocaust survivors as one of the primary factors in his focus on the concerns of Jewish peoplehood during his career.

"I understood from my parents that it is important that the Jewish people should have a country," he says.

"My parents educated me on the message of 'never again' in all its aspects, the physical existence of the State of Israel but also the spiritual existence of the Jewish state."

And he asserts that in Auschwitz, which his mother survived, "they didn't make distinctions" between different Jews, something that he says informs his care and concern for all of the Jewish people, whether regarding immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union and their Jewish status; the integration of Ethiopian Jews in Israel; or the connection of the Jewish state to Jews around the world.

His candidacy to head the agency is therefore a continuation of that concern and ardor for the advancement of the Jewish people.

In recent years, however, critics of the national institutions, as they are known, including the agency, have increased in number, and have called into question the relevance and necessity for such organizations, which predate the establishment of the State of Israel, so many years after the country came into being.

Stern argues, however, that Israel is unique in its connection to...