What We Inherit, What We Begin

A Rosh Hashanah Message from the President of World WIZO

Dear WIZO family and friends around the world,

As Rosh Hashanah approaches, I send you and your families my warmest wishes from Israel.

In the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, we say Hayom Harat Olam, words that evoke the birth of the world.

It is a remarkable image, because a new year does not actually hand us a new world. We enter it carrying history, memory, responsibility and everything the previous year has left behind. And still, Judaism speaks the language of birth.

Perhaps that is the challenge of renewal: not to erase what we have inherited, but to decide what we will begin with it.

Over these past years, we have learned to speak often of resilience, and rightly so. In Israel, we have watched communities endure, families carry extraordinary burdens and ordinary people perform extraordinary acts. Across the Jewish world, from Australia to New York, communities that once felt secure have also seen assumptions about safety and belonging profoundly shaken.

We should honour that resilience. But the amount of suffering people can absorb can never be the measure of our success.

The deeper question is what we build from it.

After the bombing of the AMIA building in Buenos Aires in 1994, where 85 people were murdered, the community rebuilt its headquarters on the same site. It remembered what had been destroyed without allowing destruction to define what came next.

That is the distinction that matters.

We must fight antisemitism wherever it appears, but we cannot make its disappearance a condition for living fully as Jews. We may not control the hostility directed at us. We do have power over whether it makes us smaller and more uncertain, or more knowledgeable, connected and determined to build confident Jewish life.

That is also a profoundly Zionist idea.

Zionism was never simply a response to antisemitism or a search for refuge. It sought to restore Jewish agency, the capacity of the Jewish people to shape our collective future in our ancestral homeland. The Uganda controversy made that distinction clear early in Zionist history, when the movement ultimately rejected the idea of substituting another territory for the Land of Israel.

A refuge could save Jews. Zionism sought to restore the Jewish people.

That distinction matters again today.

We should reject the demand that Jewish identity be detached from peoplehood, Hebrew, history and Israel, as though Judaism were merely a private religion and Zionism an unrelated political attachment that can simply be left at the door.

Sovereignty, however, was never the end of the Zionist project. It gave us the ability, and therefore the responsibility, to ask the harder question:

What kind of society will we build with it?

WIZO has been answering that question since before the State existed.

Our founders organised Jewish women across countries around a shared Zionist purpose. Federation by federation, they brought Zionism into homes and communities, developed women’s leadership and turned belonging into practical responsibility for rebuilding the homeland.

That remains the task of our federations today. To nurture confident Jewish and Zionist identity. To encourage Hebrew learning. To raise new generations of women leaders. To give young Jews the knowledge to understand Israel and the confidence to belong without apology. To ensure that the connection to Israel is lived every day, not summoned only in a moment of crisis.

The tools change. The purpose does not.

Sovereignty transformed the scale of what became possible. The Jewish people could now govern, build institutions and take responsibility for society in our own land. WIZO became part of translating national independence into everyday life through education, early childhood, youth villages, women’s advancement and the institutions that give people the opportunity to develop their abilities and shape their own futures.

We are a Zionist movement connecting Jewish communities to one another and to the sovereign centre of our national life, and turning that connection into responsibility.

Israel is the national home of a people larger than those who live within its borders. Those of us who live here and those who live elsewhere experience different realities, but none of us stands outside our common future.

Security is indispensable. So is an identity that gives people a reason to gather behind the doors we protect.

Our children should encounter Jewish life first as a source of belonging, knowledge and possibility, not merely as an argument they are constantly required to defend.

That is how a living movement renews itself.

It does not preserve the past by freezing it. It carries its deepest purpose forward and gives each generation the confidence and freedom to make that purpose meaningful in its own time.

And that brings us back to Hayom Harat Olam.

Birth does not erase what came before. It carries life forward and makes something new possible.

To our federation leaders, members, volunteers, donors and partners, thank you for your leadership, generosity, commitment and the trust you place in me as I lead this historic Zionist movement. Your work is proof that continuity is not repetition. It is the ability of an enduring purpose to create new possibility.

I wish you and your loved ones good health, security, joy around your holiday tables and the precious freedom to make plans with confidence.

May 5787 be a year of less endurance and more creation. a year in which we build the future from all we have inherited, rooted in who we are and courageous in what we begin.

L’Shanah Tovah Tikatevu.

Anat Vidor,

President, World WIZO