I live in Sunrise. I raised my family here. Before this, I spent years as CEO of the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County. Before that, I was at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), starting in 1987, when it was a $10 million organization — before the Iron Dome and before Israel had learned from the Gulf War that it needed Patriot missiles.
Antisemitism was already organizing on American college campuses back then. AIPAC was where a young Jew who wanted to do something about it could go.
Almost 40 years later, I’m doing something similar again. This time, for a Jewish organization the South Florida community may not have heard of yet. I’ve become the National Director of an organization called Israel Friends. I want to explain why.
Oct. 7, 2023, was a watershed for every Jew I’ve ever met. Some had a cousin at the Nova music festival. Some just felt something ancient break open in them that Saturday morning. Nobody was untouched.
Jewish history moves in this pattern: catastrophe, then something necessary gets built. The Holocaust helped give final momentum to a Zionist movement already decades in motion. After Israel’s War of Independence, American Jewish leaders decided their community needed its own permanent voice in Washington — an American organization, built and run by Americans. That conviction became AIPAC.
The same thing happened after Oct. 7. In the hours after the massacre, none of the existing organizations were built to move at the speed the moment demanded. Israel Friends was founded almost overnight by a group of people who cared deeply about Israel and who also happened to know the logistics world inside out — how to charter a 747, how to tap the same supply chains that stock Walmart and Target shelves. Within hours, they were moving armor, helmets and first aid kits into Israel.
By December 2023, it became clear that the response had to become permanent. Israel Friends spent the time since building out that infrastructure. Earlier this year, when the organization posted its national director job, it felt like the natural next step for me. Here, the mission moves first and the bureaucracy comes second, if at all: when a unit needs equipment or a family needs care, the answer is to get it done, not schedule a meeting about it.
That looks like making sure an Israeli struggling since Oct. 7 can see a psychiatrist, not just a family doctor handing out refills. It looks like anti-drone equipment reaching a unit before a mission instead of after. And sometimes it’s simpler than that: standing behind the civilian guards who protect Israel’s border communities — the same volunteers who faced gunmen on Oct. 7 with nothing but a rifle and a radio.
I took this job for a personal reason. I needed to spend this chapter of my life doing work that saves and rebuilds lives. My kids grew up here in South Florida and I want them, and my grandchildren, to inherit an Israel that is safe, secure and still the startup nation we’ve known for decades.
In many ways, this feels like the AIPAC I joined in 1987, before the partisan divide grew wide, when the mission alone was enough to unite the whole community. I think there’s room for that spirit again, for a new generation of donors and lay leaders looking for their place — including a lot of them right here in South Florida.
This community has never stopped showing up for Israel. That’s the invitation I’d make to my neighbors reading this: if you love Israel, and you’ve felt that same pull I have, do something. Don’t wait for the next tragedy to act on it. The moment is now and I’m not far away — I’m just down the road in Sunrise.
Matthew Levin currently lives in Sunrise and is the National Director of Israel Friends (israelfriends.us). He previously served as CEO of the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County and spent nearly four decades in Jewish communal leadership, including at AIPAC.