“As always happens when you suggest an idea,” wrote Milwaukeean Elmer Winter in the July 5 newsletter of the Committee for the Economic Growth of Israel, “you are asked to do the work to carry it out. That happened to me.”
Soon after the United Nations passed the resolution equating Zionism with racism (Nov. 1975), then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited a number of businesspeople from the United States, including Winter, to come to Israel to discuss the resolution’s impact.
Israel was already suffering from the Arab economic boycott and could ill afford additional measures aimed at ostracizing the country from the rest of the world. So at the conference Rabin posed a simple question: “What can we do to help build the economy of Israel?”
Winter — a co-founder and president of the international temporary help firm Manpower, Inc., and, in 1976, national president of the American Jewish Committee — suggested creating a nonprofit organization comprising American and Israeli businesspeople dedicated to building Israel’s economy.
He called his idea the Committee for the Economic Growth of Israel. Winter told The Chronicle in a recent interview, “It was not the most sophisticated name,” but since the organization was his brainchild, he had to call it something.
That was 25 years ago, when Winter was 65 and preparing to retire. But the opportunity to mix two passions — doing business and supporting Israel — proved too much for the energetic and driven Winter to pass up. He has been chairman of the organization ever since.
Many directions at once
Winter began his mission by building contacts with American and Israeli businesspeople who would work to attract U.S.-based manufacturers to establish plants in Israel and to encourage them in joint ventures with Israeli companies. Then, Winter and other volunteers began a multi-faceted initiative to kick-start CEGI that they dubbed a “supermarket of services.”
“From the outset, we made a calculated decision that we needed to go into a number of different directions at one time,” Winter wrote in CEGI’s July 5 newsletter. “We did not have the luxury of testing one service with the possibility that, after a year or two, it would not work and we would then have to start over again.”
Among the many services CEGI offers are:
• Assisting American companies in making investments in Israel by providing them with information and helping them with Israeli government regulations and bureaucracy.
• Assisting American companies in using Israel as an outsourcing center by suggesting various Israeli companies for subcontracting, research and development, and software development.
• Helping Israeli companies develop strategies for entering the U.S. market.
• Working to pass the U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement, which Winter testified in favor of during a congressional hearing.
Moreover, CEGI publishes three newsletters: “Israel Business Update,” “U.S.-Israel Business News” and “U.S. Marketing News.” Winter writes them all, and they reach more than 4,000 people in the U.S. and Israel.
CEGI also works with many Jewish nonprofit organizations, but Winter said “surprisingly, most of the U.S. companies in Israel are not Jewish-owned.” Most, he said, are publicly owned.
CEGI boasts “about 250 associate members all over the country,” according to Winter. It also works closely with the American-Israeli Chambers of Commerce, and has an Israeli board of directors as well.
The recent unrest in Israel and the Palestinian Authority territories has made Winter’s job more difficult. “I cannot allow people to get the impression that it is dangerous for an American company to open [in Israel],” he told The Chronicle. “Not a single U.S. company has had a problem with terrorism in Israel. That is my message that I keep repeating.”
Though CEGI’s 25th anniversary is a time of reflection for Winter, he is still pushing its mission into the new millennium. Winter has outlined 13 long-term goals to help Israel become economically self-sufficient.
He aims to present Israel as a country that has joined the industrialized nations of the world. “We will present Israel as the ‘Land of Creation … the place for innovation,’” he said.
CEGI does not host fundraising dinners or other events. “We operate on a budget of $35,000 per year, which is contributed by associate and U.S. directors [of CEGI],” said Winter.
For the 25th anniversary, Winter does plan to have “a big celebration,” but his description for it sounded like an all-business meeting.
“We will have a meeting of our group here after I return from Israel in November, tentatively,” he said. “I will be giving some speeches and a presentation of what I think has to be done.
“There is still so much that we can be doing, in my opinion, and I hope to stimulate that with the meeting in Israel and bring that [enthusiasm] back to Milwaukee….”
In all of his years with CEGI, Winter said his biggest problem “is falling to sleep on the midnight El-Al flight [from Tel Aviv] to New York…. I can’t sleep because I become so excited about the breakthroughs and state-of-the-art ideas I have just seen.”
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