(JNS) Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of Diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, stressed the importance of Jewish education in countering the rise of antisemitism, speaking at the Yael Foundation conference on education in Limassol, Cyprus, last week. 

“As the minister responsible for combating antisemitism, I can tell you that there are many ‘band-aid’ solutions to antisemitism—some more effective than others, but the real answer to this threat is strengthening Jewish identity,” Chikli told the audience at the conference’s gala opening on Tuesday. 

“When a war is ideological and spiritual, the response must also be spiritual,” he continued.

“You—educators—are the ones shaping and securing the Jewish identity of the next generation of our people. You stand at the forefront of this vital struggle,” Chikli said. 

The three-day-long summit, dubbed “Education and Beyond,” brought together more than 200 Jewish educators and thought leaders from 37 nations.Related Articles

Chikli congratulated Yael Foundation co-founders Uri and Yael Poliavich for “the profoundly meaningful work they do to ensure that ‘No Jewish child is left behind.’ This is also the guiding principle of the Diaspora Affairs Ministry,” he said. 

Also attending the conference was Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism Michal Cotler-Wunsh.

“I spoke hoping to equip educators who are on the front lines of this unconventional warfare for public opinion that has been raging for decades,” Cotler-Wunsh told JNS on Wednesday, after her talk titled “The 8th Front: Antisemitism as a Manifestation of an Existential War.”

“It’s not only about remembering our story. It’s about identifying which parts of our story were hijacked and weaponized and the importance of reclaiming elements of our identity but also the spaces in which we live,” she said. 

Whether in democracies, or other countries with shared values, Cotler-Wunsh said, spaces have been hijacked and weaponized with antisemitism, which has been the most reliable sign, throughout thousands of years of history, of a rising threat to humanity, freedom and dignity of difference.

“We thought that antisemitism was gone, but this generation of teachers will have to equip students of all ages with the new reality of being able to identify and combat what they are seeing in school, on the streets and maybe later on in universities,” she said.

The response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led onslaught on Israel, Cotler-Wunsh said, revealed many hard truths about international institutions, university spaces and online spaces.

“We now have the responsibility to make sure that masks are not put back on and that we can understand the connection between the systematic hijacking and weaponization of international institutions, the systematic radicalization of university spaces, and the online spaces used by very bad foreign actors to create real-world havoc,” she said. 

In speaking of the hijacking and weaponization of international institutions, Cotler-Wunsh mentioned UNRWA, the U.N. aid agency for Palestinians, which “not only colluded with Hamas, allowing them to build 400 miles of terror dungeons below hospitals and educational institutions, but actively participated on Oct. 7 in holding hostages in homes, in hospitals, in shelters.

“We must promote responsibility, accountability and transparency of what is being funded on university campuses so that they can reclaim their mission of teaching people how to think, and not what to think,” she continued. 

Cotler-Wunsh pointed out that it is not only about Israel or antisemitism, rather this trend in the U.S. is a danger as in other democracies and other societies.

According to Cotler-Wunsh, what is needed is the reclamation of American foundational principles that intersects with the imperative to combat antisemitism and the unbelievable false moral equivalence that tells the State of Israel to coexist with Hamas, a Nazi entity on its border. 

“This false moral equivalence has to stop; it has emboldened these genocidal terror proxies. Proxies of the Islamic regime and other authoritarian regimes are looking and understanding that if the strength of democracies can be used as a weakness to undermine it, they need not even shoot one bullet for the foundations of democracies to collapse,” she continued.

“This is a global issue. The declared intent of Iran’s Islamic regime is to destroy our shared civilization and build on its rubble a reality in which I believe none of us want to live,” she said. 

As part of her mission as Israel’s envoy for combating antisemitism, Cotler-Wunsh told JNS that she continues to travel around the world to address the needs of communities that are facing this wave of hate.

“Over the last six months, I have continued to travel to engage with legislators, law enforcement, police chiefs, mayors, the Jewish community and educational leadership to be able to make sense of what has enabled this tsunami of antisemitism,” she said.

“The mission of this foundation is to reach every single Jewish child, including in remote communities of 400 people and 40 kids in school, and not just the child but their family, and creating a community reflects quite an amazing understanding of the mutual responsibility we have for one another,” Cotler-Wunsh said. 

Cotler-Wunsh spoke about the necessity to reclaim Zionist identity, pointing out that “the State of Israel, as stipulated in the Declaration of Independence, is the nation-state of the Jewish people, a thousands-year-old indigenous people who speak the same language, Hebrew, read the same book, the Tanach [Bible], from the same land, Israel, and who practices the same rituals.”

While making these connections with educators on the front lines at a difficult time, Cotler-Wunsh said, and acting as boots on the ground in a war that is raging for public opinion, the Yael Foundation has enabled gathering in communities large and small.

“We mustn’t overlook any individual. It gives me a great deal of hope to know there is a foundation dedicated to each and every Jew that should not be overlooked and should not be forgotten,” she said.