By Arieh Eldad
During my childhood in Jerusalem in the 1950s and 1960s, our nursery and grade school teachers used to send us into the streets every few weeks to wave the little flags of various friendly African countries when their respective leaders would honor Israel with a visit. Kol Israel radio used […]
Our Nation Lives!
Who Needs Enemies?
Ami Chai – Our nation lives! - A youth movement creating the future leaders of Israel.
Why Ami Chai?
“The youth of Israel needs a renewed spirit and motivation to change things from within. No one provides a Zionist ideology for all of us together (secular and religious). We need to learn how much strength we have together to build a better Israel.
We want the feeling that existed in Israel 30 and 40 years ago, when our country was more important than how much money we had or who was religious or not.
Nothing teaches us to become leaders. We need to learn to work with the government from inside, not fight it from the outside.
I want to fix what is wrong in Israel today, without Ami Chai I do not have a way to learn how. This is the only way I will be able to change things.” — Einat Yefet, a 20 year Israeli
The time has come to invest in Israeli youth, before it becomes more disaffected, materialistic, apathetic and eventually joins the growing brain drain by moving out of the country it no longer feels attached to.
The most common statement heard among Israelis is – “but there is no alternative. No one is offering us, the voters, the citizens, the youth – anything else.”
Until now.
Ami Chai - Recapturing the spirit of Zionism.
Ami Chai is recapturing the spirit that built Israel, the spirit of the chalutzim and those who turned sand dunes into the city of Tel Aviv.
Israeli youth are hungry for redemption. They want to be redeemed from the petty politics that has replaced Zionism.
Ami Chai is dedicated to overcoming the artificial divisions in Israeli society, divisions fostering hatred for other Israelis, religious or secular or settlers or rightwing or financially successful. Ami Chai is dedicated to bringing Israeli youth together from all sectors of the country – religious and secular, urban and rural and settlers, underprivileged and successful, immigrants and locally born. Ami Chai is giving these youth a heavy dose of what they want – Zionism: commitment, goals, nationalist spirit.
Ami Chai is teaching Israeli youth to be the next generation of Israeli leaders – people who know how to organize, locally and nationally; who know their homeland, its hills and wadis and cities and towns and archaeological tels and its rivers; who know the problems facing Israel and know better than to run from them, people who love their brethren and who love their homeland and who know and love their history and who know and love their destiny.
Ami Chai is giving Israelis an alternative. Ami Chai is giving Israel a new chance to live. To find a new heart and a new spirit that is an old heart and an old spirit. To recapture the heart and spirit of Zionism.
The staff and members of Ami Chai will become leaders – first in their communities and then, nationally under the leadership of Member of Knesset, Brigadier General (res.) Arieh Eldad