What Memory Demands

Dear Chaverot and WIZO supporters,

As the Israeli school year began, I stood at WIZO Beit HaKerem in Jerusalem, surrounded by young people on the cusp of adulthood. They belong to a generation for whom Hebrew, Jerusalem, and Jewish sovereignty are part of everyday life.

Yet they have also come of age through war, loss, and uncertainty, learning earlier than we would have wished that sovereignty does not eliminate vulnerability. Rather, it creates a profound responsibility for how a people responds to it.

Every national movement eventually confronts the same paradox: success transforms what was once revolutionary into something that appears inevitable. Recent years, however, have harshly reminded us that national resilience, democratic institutions, social cohesion, and security do not sustain themselves automatically.

The students before me did not have to imagine a Jewish state into existence. They will, nevertheless, help determine what kind of Jewish state it becomes.

As Rosh Hashanah approaches, this is the question I carry with me:

What does it mean to inherit a national achievement while living through the unfinished work of securing its future?

Rosh Hashanah invites us to begin again, but never from amnesia. Jewish renewal begins with memory: the measure against which we test our choices, judgment, and responsibility.

Memory matters when it changes what we are prepared to do.

From Memory to Agency

Only days before the school year began, we marked 129 years since Herzl opened the First Zionist Congress in Basel.

Herzl did not invent the Jewish longing for Jerusalem. He built the political architecture capable of turning longing into action. The Basel Program understood that a dispersed people needed more than memory. It needed institutions, leadership, and a shared capacity to shape its future.

Zionism transformed Jewish memory into Jewish agency.

WIZO was founded on the same understanding: women could not remain observers of Jewish national renewal. They became educators, organizers, institution builders, and leaders, taking direct responsibility for the society emerging in Eretz Israel.

Their contribution did not sit at the margins of Zionism. It expanded Zionism’s capacity to act.

When Responsibility Travels

This August, our Chaverot in Brazil celebrated 100 years of WIZO Brazil.

By 1921, Brazil was already represented at the Zionist Congress. In 1922, Zionist groups there established a national federation. Four years later, Ida Bension arrived in Rio de Janeiro from WIZO headquarters in London and joined Jewish women already active in the developing communal life of the city.

Less than thirty years after Basel, an idea articulated in Europe had crossed an ocean, entered another language, and become the responsibility of women living in a vastly different society.

Herzl was no longer alive. But the movement was.

That is the true meaning of continuity: a movement survives when people who were absent from its beginning can still recognize themselves inside its purpose.

The women who built WIZO Brazil did not reproduce the world of Basel or London. They translated Zionist responsibility into the circumstances of Brazilian Jewish life. Successive generations continued that work as Israel, Brazil, Jewish communities, and the position of women all evolved.

A centenary is therefore more than evidence of endurance. It represents 100 years of women repeatedly deciding that the Jewish future was also their responsibility.

But it also carries a warning.

Institutions can remain in place long after the urgency that created them begins to fade. A school may continue to teach while the history behind its establishment becomes remote. A federation may continue to raise money while producing fewer leaders capable of explaining why the movement matters.

By 1929, there were already 25 Jewish schools in Brazil. The community understood that physical infrastructure alone could not secure continuity. The next generation also had to understand what it belonged to.

That challenge remains with us today. Young Israelis can grow up surrounded by Jewish sovereignty without necessarily understanding the historical necessity that produced it.

Young Jews elsewhere can grow up inside strong Jewish institutions while experiencing Israel as a distant story, rather than part of their own national responsibility.

Our task is not to pass on the fears of previous generations.

It is to pass on their agency.

The Purpose of a Global Movement

Our federations are Zionist assets embedded within civil society. Our women lead in professions, universities, business, philanthropy, culture, and public life, bringing relationships and credibility that cannot simply be created from Jerusalem.

A strong federation supports Israel, but it also develops women capable of exercising Jewish leadership in their own societies.

Fundraising creates resources. Leadership creates agency. Both are essential, but they are not interchangeable.

And global leadership requires presence, engagement, and the willingness to take responsibility for the movement as a whole.

Distance should never become detachment.

The Test of Universal Principles

This September, we will confront a question that reaches far beyond Israel.

On September 28, the United Nations General Assembly will mark 25 years since the Durban Declaration.

The original conference was built around the essential fight against racism, yet its parallel NGO Forum became notorious for manifestations of antisemitism.

Durban remains a warning of what happens when universal principles are applied selectively.

Two days later, World WIZO will take part in the United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in Abu Dhabi, convening an ancillary meeting on “Responding to Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in the Digital Age.”

Our purpose is broader than any single conflict.

From Israel to Ukraine, Sudan, and other war zones, sexual violence continues to be used while international mechanisms remain too fragmented, too slow, and too inconsistent. The women attacked on October 7 are part of that global failure, not an exception to it.

Our message is simple: universal principles must protect every victim, regardless of nationality, politics, or geography.

That is why we are bringing together legal experts, international partners, and representatives from countries that have confronted these crimes themselves.

We are asking the world to build a standard strong enough to protect all women, and consistent enough to include Israelis too.

Holding this conversation in Abu Dhabi matters. It shows what international movements can do when they turn relationships into action. The Abraham Accords created political possibility. Civil society, professional networks, and women’s leadership can give that possibility depth.

This is precisely where WIZO’s global structure becomes agency: women from different countries bringing their credibility, experience, and relationships into a common effort to make universal principles truly universal.

The Responsibility of the New Year

And so, I return to the young people at Beit HaKerem.

They have inherited what earlier generations could scarcely imagine: Jewish sovereignty as the fabric of daily life. Yet war has reminded them that sovereignty is never a finished achievement. It is a responsibility renewed by every generation.

Their task is not to repeat Herzl’s. A living movement remains faithful to its purpose not by preserving the past unchanged, but by applying it to the demands of the present.

That is also the work of Rosh Hashanah: to examine what we have inherited, what we have neglected, and what this moment now requires of us.

From Basel to Brazil, from Durban to Abu Dhabi, memory has shown both its power and its danger. It can become agency, cross oceans, and outlive its founders. Or it can survive in name while losing the moral purpose it was meant to serve.

The shofar is not merely an echo of history. It is a summons to use the agency history has placed in our hands.

May we enter 5787 with the judgment to recognize what this moment requires, and the courage to act upon it.

The question of the new year is not only what we remember, but what our memory makes us do.

Shana Tova U’Metuka to you and your families.

With pride and commitment,

Anat Vidor
President, World WIZO