(RNS) — After 12 days of fighting between Israel and Iran, and with a potential ceasefire in the offing, the Jewish Federations of North America announced it would allocate $10 million in emergency funding to meet the needs of Israeli Jews.
The JFNA, the umbrella group for 141 Jewish federations across the United States and Canada, said on Monday (June 23) that the money comes from its Israel Emergency Fund set up in the days after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Since that attack, the JFNA has raised $897 million from American and Canadian Jews to help Israel recover and rebuild. About 90% of that funding has already been spent, which is increasingly going toward recovery and resilience building. Now, the organization is once again funding more immediate needs of food and housing, what it calls “lifeline services.”
“We had evolved into working more on midterm and long-term needs,” Rebecca Caspi, senior vice president and director general of JFNA’s Israel office, told RNS. “Now we’re back to urgent needs. But our goal is for Israel to stabilize and to be able to get back to meeting those needs that relate to recovery as soon as possible.”
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