Dr. Nachman Shai, Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs, spoke at the IAC National Summit in Florida on Thursday night.
“I’m trying to cover the whole world. There are 8 million Jews living outside of Israel, 6 million in this country and 2 million all over the world. There are thousands of Jewish communities all around the globe. If I try to visit each one of them, it will take me a few generations. So we talk to them on the phone and on Zoom and in other ways. We try to keep them together.”
“I can tell you from the bottom of my heart: I don’t see anything more important today than keeping the Jewish people together. We have to keep brothers and sisters together all around the globe. There are only 15 million Jews in the world, much fewer than we were before the Second World War, and we all remember what happened there,” said Shai.
Asked by journalist Tal Schneider about Israel’s role in fighting antisemitism outside Israel, he said, “We are building a whole apparatus within our ministry. It is unacceptable that the Jewish state has no official government authority to deal with how to combat antisemitism in the world. It’s my mission to look into it and see what we can do.”
On the make up of the current Israeli government, Shai said, “We get along very nicely with each other. We don’t shout at each other and we realize that 28 Jews can sit together in one room and work together. Miracles happen.”
He noted how the government has managed to bridge gaps in Israel. “The entire spectrum of Israeli society is now well represented in the Israeli government.”