JERUSALEM (June 17, 2010) — The World Zionist Organization took major steps today to green Israel by approving four resolutions put forth by the Green Zionist Alliance at the World Zionist Congress. The resolutions address a wide swath of environmental concerns, including water, energy and food justice. All of the votes were near unanimous, uniting all religious and political streams of Zionism for the cause of Israel’s environment.

“The resolutions will play a major role in helping shift an environmentally imperiled Israel onto a sustainable path, and provide a greener Israel for future generations,” said Dr. Richard Schwartz, a GZA delegate to the Congress.

The resolutions call for the WZO and its subsidiaries — Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael (KKL / Jewish National Fund in Israel) and the Jewish Agency For Israel (JAFI) — to install energy-generating solar panels and rainwater-savings systems on their buildings’ rooftops and to transition to energy-efficient lighting and fuel-efficient vehicles.

Additionally, JAFI is instructed to incorporate environmental education into the immigrant experience at absorption centers, and to develop community gardens at absorption centers for immigrants’ use.

“Growing food from the land is an incredibly potent way of connecting to the land,” said GZA President David Krantz, head of the GZA delegation to the Congress. “For the first time in the history of the Congress, we have brought the issue of food justice to the Zionist table.”

The resolutions will green the Congress itself by requiring the WZO to offset the carbon released into the atmosphere by the event and by the transportation of its delegates to Jerusalem. They also call for at least half of the food at the Congress to be procured from local and organic producers.

“Ensuring that we serve food that comes from locally grown and organic sources helps ensure sustainability for Israel,” said GZA delegate Aviva Melissa Frank.

The GZA resolutions were written by a team of environmentalists from Israel and North America.

“Because of the resolutions approved today, we will be helping to protect Israel’s land, water and air. This may be the best Congress for Israel’s environment since the KKL was founded in 1901,” Krantz said. “One of the resolutions declares that Jewish environmental education and support for local agriculture are globally important values within the Jewish community. It’s an amazing statement — and we’re backing it up with action.”

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NEW YORK (April 9, 2012) — The Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Morningstar Foundation have awarded $65,000 in seed funding to the Green Hevra, a new network of U.S.-based Jewish environmental organizations that includes the Green Zionist Alliance. With these funds the group will lay the groundwork for strategic collaboration across the Jewish environmental movement in 2012.

“The Jewish environmental movement has the potential for real impact,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. “But to do that, they need to work together much more strategically.”

The Green Hevra, Hebrew for “green community,” is fostering growth by sharing strategic knowledge with partner organizations and identifying opportunities for collaboration. The day after Earth Day, the Green Hevra will gather in person through professionally facilitated meetings to identify strategic opportunities for cooperation and impact. It also will map the field of the Jewish environmental movement and develop a plan for broader engagement.

“As the field grows, we must take the time to foster trust and forge a collective strategic vision with accompanying partnerships in order to take our movement to the next level,” said Evonne Marzouk, director of Canfei Nesharim and a co-founder of Jewcology.com, the Jewish environmental web portal and a focus of the Green Hevra’s outreach efforts.

Inspired by the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, a similar movement-building initiative founded in 2009, the Green Hevra is a network of national and regional Jewish environmental organizations. While membership is expected to expand in the coming years, the group’s initial 15 members are: Baltimore Jewish Environmental Network; Canfei Nesharim; Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) / Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA); Eden Village Camp; Green Zionist Alliance; Hazon; Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center; Jewish Farm School; Jewish Reconstructionist Federation; Kayam Farm at Pearlstone; Neohasid.org; Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Shalom Center; Teva Learning Alliance; and Wilderness Torah.

“We believe that the global sustainability challenge is analogous to the civil-rights campaigns of an earlier time,” said Sybil Sanchez, director of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, the organization charged with administering the group. “Just as the Jewish community joined with others to provide leadership in that time, today we’re mobilizing the Jewish community to rise to the environmental challenge.”

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Published in the Forward on March 8, 2002

A Green Cure for Zionism's Blues

By Dr. Gil Troy

In 1897, Theodore Herzl convened the first World Zionist Congress to advance the idea of a Jewish state.

When the 34th quadrennial Congress convenes this June in Jerusalem — balloting began February 27 to choose delegates — the governing body of the world Zionist movement will be confronting an ideological crisis.

Sadly, the malaise in Zionism runs far deeper than the Palestinians' violent upending of the Oslo peace process or the Zionism-is-racism libel that the Durban orgy of anti-Semitism revived and tried to legitimize.

Rather, talk of Zionism today bores or alienates most American Jews.

Indeed, most American Jews see Zionism as an endless source of Jewish problems — and not a solution to our problems, as it should be. Rather than appreciating the centrality of Israel to the Jewish people and American Jewish life, most American Jews see Israel as the central headache of the Jewish people.

Judging by the last few rounds of the World Zionist Congress electioneering, much of the campaign and the Congress will ignore these challenges.

Zionist politics often appear to be as open, as thought-provoking, as creative, as Soviet Politburo politics once were. In fact, the vicious turf battles, inside politicking and the arcane debates about bureaucracies and budgets only intensify the malaise.

We cannot afford to proceed with business as usual. The challenges are too great and the crisis runs too deep.

Like the "Dead White Males" whom campus radicals decry as dominating the literary canon, Zionist thought remains dominated by "Dead Zionist Europeans." The classic Zionist thinkers — Theodore Herzl, Ahad Ha'am, A.D. Gordon — lived in Europe and died decades before the state was born. We need modern American Zionists. We need to start a broad and creative debate about what Zionism can mean to us, given the realities of Israel and the challenges of remaining Jewish in North America today.

We need bold new Zionist thinkers and visionary Zionist leaders. We need a new Zionist idiom that addresses 21st-century American problems, not 19th-century European anti-Semitism.

Fortunately, there are some rays of sunshine poking through the ideological fog. One of the least known, but most refreshing, new movements in Zionism is a small but potentially revolutionary organization, the Green Zionist Alliance, or GZA.

The GZA places environmentalism at the center of the Zionist agenda. "We care about humanity's responsibility to preserve creation," reads a statement on the GZA Web site, "and we accept the special responsibility of the Jewish people to preserve the many ecological treasures of Israel."

"The Land of Israel according to our tradition and text (Genesis 12:7) was assigned to us as a sacred trust," Rabbi Michael Cohen, GZA's executive director, said in an email. "That trust, if we are to take it seriously, includes the care of its holy soil, water, air and animal life. Zionism stands not just for returning the people to the land, but also the care of that very land so that the Jewish people may thrive on it."

It is easy to dismiss environmental concerns amid fear of terrorism and despair over the peace process. But focusing on this quality-of-life question, which itself is a life and death issue, is in fact an inspiring act of optimism. Moreover, in weaving together humanitarianism, traditional Judaism, environmentalism and Zionism, Rabbi Cohen and his allies are showing Zionists of all political stripes how to create a new Zionist language, how to synthesize old school Zionist ideas with modern challenges.

Candidates running on the World Zionist Congress' Green slate — "Your Environmental Voice," as they are billed on the Congress ballot — are not compartmentalized Jews who distinguish between their American and Jewish selves. Through their Zionism these expert activists — including Joseph Kruger and Barry Elman, two senior managers from the Environmental Protection Agency; James Schauer, an engineering professor, and Adam Werbach, a former Sierra Club national president — have been able to reinforce their different identities rather than fragment them. Such an approach seeks balance and integration rather than the neurotic schizophrenia typical of so many American Jews who build Chinese walls between the real world and their Jewish lives.

Love it or hate it, environmental Zionism has an important role to play in revitalizing Zionism. It can remind us that Zionism needs to be modernized and updated, relevant and diverse, electrifying and subversive. We need a Zionism that is Protestant not Catholic, a Zionism of many different churches singing various hymns within a broad Israel-oriented framework.

With creative initiatives like GZA, with new breezes emerging from older organizations like Hadassah, these upcoming elections may indeed be an important step forward in a long postponed journey toward Zionist renaissance, rather than one more lost opportunity, one more example of Zionist torpor.


Dr. Troy's latest book is "Why I am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today" (Bronfman Jewish Education Center, 2002).

Published in The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle on Aug. 12, 2005

The Greening of Zion

By Hampton Stevens

Cherishing the land of Israel has always been an essential part of Zionism. But, according to the Green Zionist Alliance, the call to nurture the land has been ignored for too long.

Founded in 2001, the GZA (www.greenzionism.org) seeks to change that. This week, the alliance launched an effort to build a robust, broad-based delegation to the next World Zionist Congress in 2006.

The GZA has hired Kansas City native Hal Klopper to be its new executive director. Klopper was formerly a fundraiser with the "American Friends" groups of both Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University.

The GZA's main goal is "to secure an activist environmental presence within the Zionist movement." It won its first seat to the 2002 World Zionist Congress, where it was represented by Rabbi Michael M. Cohen. Rabbi Cohen is executive director of the North American office of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which is located on Kibbutz Ketura in Israel's Negev desert. Rabbi Cohen was co-founder of the GZA.

Speaking from his New York City office, Klopper said the Arava Institute has been doing good work on the Middle Eastern environment for nearly a decade.

"For nine years, it has been bringing together students; Israeli Jews and Arabs, Palestinians, Jordanians, Tunisians, Egyptians, as well as students from the United States. They live together and study the environment. It is very valuable work," Klopper said.

Rabbi Michael Cohen agrees. He said caring for the earth is a core Jewish value. 

"Our connection to the land has been one of the primary ingredients in maintaining Jewish identity," said Rabbi Cohen. "Therefore, since we've returned to that land, we have even more of a responsibility to take care of it."

Israelis from across the political spectrum have embraced the environmentalist cause. Unlike the United States, where the very notion of protecting the environment is seen as coming from a left-wing perspective, the GZA's agenda boasts Knesset supporters from right-wing Yuri Stern to left-wing standard bearer Shimon Peres.

But is it hard getting people concerned about ephemeral, if not abstract, problems like clean air and water when Islamic terrorism poses such a direct threat?

Rabbi Cohen said the question poses a false dichotomy. Rather than being at odds, protecting the environment and protecting Israel can go hand in hand. Securing water for the next century and cutting fossil-fuel dependence, for example, would make Israel both a cleaner and a safer state. 

"In terms of the political reality, the issue of caring for the natural world has been pushed aside for a long time," Rabbi Cohen said. "For many social issues in Israel, it is always after the conflict; after the conflict. Well, we can't wait any more. The environment is too important for Israel, internally and externally."

Thus the GZA's current push for increased representation at the upcoming World Zionist Congress. From now through mid-February 2006, Jewish Americans may register to vote for the U.S. delegation to the 2006 World Zionist Congress. (For more information or to register online, visit the Web site of the American Zionist Movement, www.azm.org.) The election will be held, via mail, from mid-November through Feb. 28, 2006. The GZA aims to be the third-largest delegation from the United States.

For those wishing to venture deeper into environmental thought, Rabbi Cohen teaches classes at the Arava Institute in on environmentalism in the Torah. 

"At the beginning of Genesis, in chapters 1 and 2, you have these two very different creation stories sitting right next to each other. Each retelling of the story embodies an existential aspect of the human self — especially in relation to the environment. One is to have dominion and control over nature. The other is to take care of it; to guard it. There is that existential balance. That's what we need to find when dealing with the environment today."

How would Rabbi Cohen sum up GZA's vision?

"Think of a desert," he said. "It looks barren, but a little bit of water completely changes everything. That's a nice metaphor for what we are trying to do — be that little bit of change; the one drop of water that makes all the difference."