“Jewish society needs the Negev and it must bring people here,” said Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), in a series of interviews published in 1970 as “Recollections.” “This is a vital part of our redemption in Israel.”
Ofir Fisher, 30, agrees completely. As he explained to The Chronicle on Monday, Israel’s southern desert region — which comprises 60 percent of Israel’s land area, but holds only eight percent of its population — is, along with the Galilee region in the north, the future of Israel, Fisher said.
So he and three friends founded in 2000 the Or Movement, dedicated to the development and strengthening of the Negev and Galilee regions. The name is the Hebrew word for “light” and comes from one of Ben-Gurion’s letters in which he urged a complainer to “stop fighting the darkness and add light,” as Fisher put it.
And doing this isn’t just a matter of economics for Fisher. “We feel we are bringing back vision to Israel,” Fisher said.
“In the last 20 or 30 years, we have lost vision,” he said. In the past, “no matter what happened, we knew that Israel is the right place to be” and that sense has dwindled, he contended.
“Today, we feel that by reclaiming the land and reconnecting” to it, Israelis can recapture that vision and “have what to stay for,” he said.
JNF partnership
Fisher was in Milwaukee this week to speak to local Jewish National Fund members, leaders and donors. JNF is the Or Movement’s “strategic partner” in its endeavor and its “biggest partner” in the United States, Fisher said.
That partnership began about three-and-a-half years ago, when Fisher met Russell Robinson, JNF CEO, and Ronald S. Lauder, JNF president. It took only a “three minute conversation” to learn that their goals and plans were similar, said Fisher.
Both organizations, in fact, want to have some “250,000 people” move to the Negev “in the next ten years,” Fisher said, with JNF having dubbed its project Blueprint Negev.
But Fisher isn’t just an activist and promoter. He has made his own life an example of what he wants others to do.
Born in Petach Tikva in Israel, Fisher and the three friends who founded the Or Movement decided during their military service that they wanted to continue “to contribute to Israel” even when their service was completed.
All of them became officers, with Fisher himself finishing his service as a “deputy commander” of a submarine. But during that time, he and his friends traveled around Israel and “asked questions” to find out what Israel needed most.
Having determined that what Israel needed most is settlers and development in the Negev and Galilee, Fisher and his friends left the military and in 1999 founded Sansana, a community north of Beer Sheva, where he still lives.
In so doing, Fisher and his friends reestablished a community mentioned in the Bible (Joshua 15:31), and created what he said was the first new community in the Negev and inside the Green Line (Israel’s pre-1967 Six Day War border) in 20 years.
The community began small — the four friends, two of whom were married, plus a generator and a water tank — and now includes about 50 families, of which 150 are children, he said.
The news of this accomplishment spread and “made waves,” Fisher said. “Suddenly groups of people started to come to us,” including government officials and members of regional councils, asking for advice about doing similar things.
Perceiving the need, Fisher and his friends created the Or Movement in 2000. It now has 25 staff members plus some 5,000 volunteers, Fisher said.
The movement helps direct projects, but primarily gathers and disseminates information from many sources, including government ministries and private individuals.
Fisher said the Or Movement has some 15,000 families in its database who are “in some process” of moving to the Negev or Galilee; and he proudly said that “we are the most updated organization” with such information.
The organization is supported by the Israeli government and private contributions as well as JNF. And for Fisher, working for it is “more than a full-time job. It is our life,” he said.
For more information about the Or Movement and JNF projects in the Negev and Galilee, including Blueprint Negev, contact Milwaukee’s JNF office, 414-963-8733.
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