Transcript: How Do You Create Real Social Change? | Alex Rif

Teaser — clips from the episode

Teaser: [00:00] How do you build a voice for a million people? I think you learn to do a lot with very little money. I can’t bring myself to say, say, to poor Holocaust survivors, I don’t deal with this issue. Because I see that no one else deals with it. Volunteering is basically, it’s a mechanism of friendship. That’s how you get to know people, and connect, and manage to move forward. The aliyah of the ’90s gives a huge boost to Israeli society. Yes, we see it in high-tech, 20% of high-tech employees are Russian speakers. A third of doctors up to age 65 were Russian speakers. Engineering, teaching, but today I look at it, 35 years later. What a huge economic loss for the economy. We got workers almost for free. Unfortunately, only 18% of these new immigrants work in their profession. We learned nothing from the ’90s about the complexities AI creates for us, for example in the issue of scams targeting the elderly. We need to fight it with the AI capabilities of 40 high-tech companies in the economy, each willing to take in five engineers — that’s already 200 immigrant engineers, and it starts to create momentum. And when it works, we expand it. And the Israelis who are still here, investing in the State of Israel, and staying, and not going anywhere — they are tremendous Zionists, we need to thank them, and they’re waiting for things to get better here.

Introduction

Eyal David: [01:14] Hey, Alex, how’s it going? Hey, come on, great. I’m a little excited, we are too, I’ll even introduce you. Come on. Come on. So today I’m hosting Alex Rif, who is a writer, poet, social entrepreneur, and one of the leading voices of immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Israel. I said that right, I hope. Alex came to Israel as a child from Ukraine and turned her personal story into social and cultural entrepreneurship. One of the founders of the Cultural Brigade, maybe afterward you’ll explain a bit more about what that actually means. I know you from One and a Half Generation, the series that was on Kan, right? Where is it? Right, right, right, exactly. Exactly. So it told the story of the children’s generation that came here like you in the 1990s. Founded and served as CEO of the Million Lobby. Today you put that aside and basically already retired. And there you gave, in effect, full power and representation to nearly one million Russian-speaking Israelis. Beyond that, you write poetry and literature; I recently read one of your books during the holiday. You create content, and I also came across your podcast 99 Is Not 100, you lead social struggles around absorption, identity, Judaism, and belonging, and recently you’ve also made the move into politics. Right. First time I’m introducing someone here who got out. That’s it, I’m going home, everything has been said.

Alex Rif: [02:27] Anything you want to add to that? No, mother of three sweet kids. Gur, Oz, and Eliana, Daniel’s partner.

Eyal David: [02:34] Sorry, sorry, he’ll kill me, Daniel. And somehow amid all this, she made the move into politics. Right, right. With a two-year-old girl, you told me, I’m still kind of in shock.

Childhood, immigrating from Ukraine and shame about identity

Alex Rif: [02:44] So, social entrepreneur, how did you get into that? So as you said, right, I was born in Ukraine, and for many, many years I was very ashamed of the identity of my home. That is, I had one goal: to be Israeli. It started, and I remember to this day, on the first day of kindergarten, they laughed at me, I was dressed very differently, I was in a lace dress, a huge red bow, and terribly, I remember, I grabbed my mother’s leg, cried, begged her not to leave me here, and that she would make it to work. And I just wanted to run away from this kindergarten, where they laughed at me and I didn’t understand a word of what was happening, nothing at all. And I remember that there I understood the realization that would change my life and keep this going: that the only way out of this kindergarten is inward. That is, to be like those children. And that was something that would stay with me for many more years, because for 20 years I’ve basically been trying to go inward, Israeli, to speak without an accent, the compliment I have to get is “You’re Russian, you don’t look it,” volunteering in every possible thing, student council, Magen David Adom, graduating school with honors, because after all I do have a Soviet issue, but immediately afterward continuing to a year of service, in Jerusalem, in the Kiryat Menachem neighborhood, after that the IDF, officer training, enlisting in a squad commanders course, officers course, finishing almost three years as deputy platoon commander, deputy platoon commander, and then a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the most Hebrew university there is, I’m a graduate of the Civil Service Cadets Program, like really going through all the stations of what it means to be Israeli. And precisely when I get to the Ministry of Economy, adviser to the deputy director general, an amazing, meaningful, interesting, relevant job, controlling budgets and authority, suddenly something doesn’t work. It’s not just one thing; it’s a set of things. Often when you reach the summit, that is, you’re kind of striving toward some goal, you reach the goal, and suddenly you stop and look around and think maybe this isn’t what I wanted at all. Around that time my grandmother died too, the one who raised me while my parents worked a million jobs, and she was always the very Soviet one, always trying to tell me, always trying to talk to me, because I really didn’t want any of it and pushed everything away, and some process of identity clarification begins in me. I really go in a completely different direction, I go toward writing, I start writing poems about my immigration experience, I go to study screenwriting at Sam Spiegel, there I start writing One and a Half Generation, which later becomes the series in which I also get interviewed with my mother and open everything there live. But suddenly, when I’m asked what story only I can tell and no one else can, I understand that my immigration story is also a story of heroism,

Writing, soul-searching and returning to social action

Eyal David: [05:30] and not just a story of shame. Wow, that is so, I think you’ll be around the age of 40, right? That’s exactly the kind of questions that come up. So today I’m 40; it started at 30, it started a decade earlier. No, no, I really understand, but I’m saying it’s so connected, you know, to age 40, to where I am right now, AI is entering and you start thinking, okay, what do I do now with my life, who am I, what am I, what’s my unique story,

Alex Rif: [05:54] it clicked a bit for me. So with us Soviets, everything always starts early, you have to be first. Just kidding, but... And tell me, within that, like, was there someone who accompanied you through all of this? How do you do this kind of thing alone? No, no one accompanies me through this. I don’t know, I think that’s part of the nature of a lot of, you know, on my podcast, 99 Is Not 100, one of the things I really like to shine a light on is that I interview a lot of senior immigrants about their success stories. And I see that there are many who succeed even though the home, I won’t say it isn’t supportive, it’s not that we don’t have a supportive home, but it’s not the supportive home I see, say, with my Sabra friends, okay? It’s not the home that’s constantly pushing, saying, we believe in you, we love you, we trust you, we’re with you. No, often it’s actually in conflict with the home. The home tells me not to leave civil service, because what do you mean, you’re leaving a job with a secure pension and seniority in a second. The home doesn’t understand what I’m doing. I don’t understand what I’m doing at that stage either, but I have some inner fire pushing me, even though I actually have to calm them too. That is, not only do I still not know what percentage I am, I also have to reassure them, Mom, Dad, it’ll be okay?

Eyal David: [07:05] Yes, I’ll tell you something about that, I didn’t know. I knew a little from my wife’s family, my wife is independent, so her move into independence really came with, they had a hard time with entrepreneurship. Right. And a little when I was preparing for the episode and talking with friends, I said, Alex is coming and this is, so You drew my attention to the fact that there aren’t many entrepreneurs, at least in Israeli high-tech. Can you explain why? Like, it’s probably very intimidating. There’s something very un-entrepreneurial in the DNA of the Soviet Union.

Why entrepreneurship feels so unnatural for people from the former USSR

Alex Rif: [07:32] We were taught, our parents were taught, to be good Soviet worker-soldiers, not to ask questions, not to stick our heads up. Whoever stuck their head up too high had their head cut off. Anyone who was too smart, anyone who was too entrepreneurial, from World War II until the end of the Soviet period, being too smart was not a good thing, okay? I mean, that was always the complexity. So my parents worked the same job for 20 years there, and then 30 years here, basically. That’s their nature. The entrepreneurial nature is a nature that we had to, for a moment... I mean, once I asked my mother what she dreamed of becoming when she grew up, and she didn’t know how to answer me, because that question was never even asked. They didn’t ask themselves that question: what do they want to be. It was clear what their parents wanted them to be, and where it was easier or more convenient to find a job. So we’re actually here in some new world of entrepreneurship. They worry a lot about us. A lot of the roles in immigration are reversed. We become a bit like the parents of our parents, so we take care of them too, we help them too, we also calm them down. So we don’t have support; we’re paving our own way, and that’s where I pave mine. I start with writing, I very quickly feel that creation alone isn’t enough for me, I want the social part again too, so I found the Cultural Brigade, I get to know what I call my first Russian friends, because suddenly there are people like me, one-and-a-half generation, people like me in some identity crisis: who am I? Am I here? Am I there? And we actually want to tell Israeli society who we are. So Israeli New Year is the first project. Every Russian speaker in Israel always tried to explain to their friends what New Year’s is: it’s not Sylvester, it’s not a Christian holiday, it’s secular, we’re not gentiles, and it always failed; they always kept calling it Sylvester. And we, not being Jewish, ran an Israeli campaign, in Hebrew, colorful, cool: what New Year’s is. And it was, it blew up on us. There was crazy exposure on social media, in the media they invited us everywhere. This was ten years ago. I mean, today I look at it a decade back. We managed to take a holiday that was an unknown, stigmatized holiday and turn it into a holiday that all of Israel knows. Yes, yes, I’m really, really counting. Everyone would know what New Year’s is. And intentionally, by the way, we called it New Year’s, we didn’t call it the New Year holiday, even though it’s the same thing, after all—it’s simply celebrating the new year. But we wanted to keep something from our home and give it to Israeli society. It was a huge success; afterward we also did something about the stories of the grandfathers and grandmothers in the Red Army. For five years we’ve been dealing with our identity, each time digging a little deeper. I mean, using it as a kind of reflexive mechanism for where we came from, who we are, to learn about ourselves, because we knew nothing.

The Cultural Brigade and Israeli Novy God

Eyal David: [10:12] Wow, I’m still stuck there, okay, that’s great, you also gave me the great biography that the agent wrote and we’ll improve it accordingly, but... And then the lobby comes. So, one second before the lobby, I’m still basically stuck on the fact that you got this job, which is supposedly every Russian mother’s pinnacle, I guess that’s what you aimed for, and precisely there you actually found yourself in such a process and took a step aside, like what, how was that? Look, I don’t know if it’s the pinnacle of every Russian mother,

Civil service, mission and coming back to social action

Alex Rif: [10:41] in that sense, they didn’t know what civil service was. By the way, I didn’t know what civil service was either. I got there half by accident. I came to an open day at the Hebrew University, there was a booth for Atidim, the program for cadets for civil service, which told me about a full scholarship and a leadership program into it. By then I already knew what leadership programs were. By the way, leadership programs, especially for immigrants and peripheral groups, that’s the scaling mechanism, the best friendships in Israeli society. lots of groups, and getting in, squeezing your way inside. Once I gave a speech to a Naale group, immigrants who arrive here at age 16, with nothing, with no one, and they asked me to explain to them why I volunteer, because if this group of immigrant kids is asked to study math, they study from morning till night; if they’re asked to volunteer, they don’t come. I explained to them that in Israeli society, volunteering is basically a friendship mechanism. That’s how you meet people, connect, and manage to move forward. It’s hard to explain why, but I really, I call myself a leadership-programs expert. I don’t think there’s a program I haven’t done, or something like that, but it gave me a lot of tools and a lot of points of influence to move forward. Yes, yes, that’s what you’re doing all along, I understand. Right, right, right. So hold on a second before that, so really, but... So you decided you were going to step aside. So I arrive at the civil service not knowing what it is and not knowing who it is, but very quickly I see, Okay, what was the dream in the end? The dream there was to become CEO. I look at it and I see, this isn’t what I want to do. No. Because, you understand, after, after 20 years of some kind of escape from something, yes? With house X and outside Y, they don’t talk to each other, they are in estrangement, in escape. It doesn’t fit. I mean, I had to go through some process of reconciliation, of clarification, of who I am, of what I am, of looking inward, and only within that process do I actually return to the same place, because I’m really returning to social action and civil service, and to someone we’ll talk about soon, and now to politics, but only after I went through that inner process, of understanding who I am, what I am, and making peace with myself, and making peace with who I am, could I actually return to that same place. There it was empty, it was a shell. It still wasn’t the person I wanted to be.

Eyal David: [12:58] Wow, interesting. And then basically you went and did what you’re basically saying—you got people around you, you went and volunteered, that’s basically it, right? You created all that content from within yourself.

Alex Rif: [13:07] Correct. Again, the first five years it started with culture, then COVID came and shut down the cultural world, and we understand that this is an opportunity. By the way, the criticism directed at us during that period, during the Brigade period, was: what, you’re dealing with nonsense, there are people who don’t have food, there are lonely elderly people, There are Holocaust survivors who cannot age with dignity, there are people who cannot get married in Israel. Who told you that? Russian speakers, from within the community. That is to say, there was intra-community criticism of, what are you dealing with nonsense for. We said, friends, we have to start with culture. We still, sorry, are Russians, prostitutes, and Russian alcoholics; you can’t talk about poor elderly people, nobody cares about us. But after five years we felt there had been progress, and we opened the door to culture and to our home, I, by the way, wasn’t sure I would take this step. That is, again, I’m reminding you, I went to write poems and write a documentary series, I wanted to be a creator. But little by little, when you add one more step and one more step, then at some point you actually realize that the next step is also the right one for me. That is, there was... wow, that’s also very interesting. You’re telling me, like, you know an example of...

The Million Lobby: from culture to policy

Eyal David: [14:14] You asked me what, and she didn’t know how to tell me what she actually wanted to be, but at this stage, I also don’t know, up to here, you don’t know what you want to be. Right, right, I don’t.

Alex Rif: [14:21] No, I, I have a song like that in my second book about how I’m going to be a member of Knesset, but that was born in recent years. It’s not some childhood dream that I always wanted to be a member of Knesset. Not at all, I... I wanted to be a doctor, like a good Russian girl. Obviously. But that was my parents’ dream, yes? Gradually I understood that it wasn’t my dream, and then suddenly I had a dream, so it was public service and then I understood that that wasn’t the dream either, and then my dream was to write or tell my story and every time I fulfill it I move on to the next step I wrote my story I put it out there and it wasn’t enough and then I started working for the community that is at this stage we all sort of carry the children of aliyah carry our parents on our shoulders there is some sense of I feel some kind of mission to repay them the debt they gave us, yes, my parents came here at age 40 without a language, without familiarity, leaving everything behind, two engineers who work here for 30 years, my father in electricity in his field but as a contract worker gets peanuts and my mother in cleaning 30 years and that accompanies me all my life that is in all the feelings in the shame for many years later in pride or in gratitude with appreciation for what they did completely for me and for the others that is it was clear they were leaving for the children And this part is actually a part where I’m no longer just doing things inwardly to make peace with myself, I’m starting to give back And I establish the Lobby of the Million, which is an organization that actually helps Russian-speaking Israelis, but at the policy level, my perception, by the way, I remember that it really sharpened for me during a service year That I don’t want to put out fires, I’m not interested in helping the individual person, not because it’s not important, but because I haven’t succeeded in changing anything in the system I want to change the system, but from the outside, because at that time I, again, was running away from public service, from civil service, I still don’t want to be inside at all, I want from public service, from the third sector to work as a strong civic force influencing decision-makers in the areas I believe in. And how do you do that, I mean

Eyal David: [16:22] Until now I’m actually really curious, you went and actually started creating content, let’s call it that, right? What actually led you to found this movement? Yes, you got this feedback from the community saying, go do it, so you went for it, I understand that that’s wonderful that you were attentive to the feedback

Funding social activity on very little money

Alex Rif: [16:39] But how did you actually finance all of its activities in the Million? So again, everything like the Brigade started from the programs for alumni. Shusterman Foundation, Bromfman Foundation, these are simply leadership programs I completed, and then there are grants of about a thousand dollars, 1,500 dollars for a project. That’s how we started, Novy God was those thousand dollars. Operation Vatrant was those 1,500 dollars. Step by step, and then those organizations start to know you. Then they already, they understand who you are, they understand what you want to do, they start backing you, and afterward it’s just community support. When we founded the Lobby of the Million, it was during COVID, in that sense it was amazing because every evening we held a Zoom meeting of 30-40 of the top Russian-speaking people in Israel that I knew at the time, from all kinds of places in the country, I would never have been able to get them into one room physically, but they joined Zoom. And there we built the Lobby of the Million, there I brought all the ideas and we started working them through, and it was born from some kind of idea into a real work plan, yes? A strategic plan, what we’re doing. And we are actually turning to foundations and federations to support us, and also to crowdfunding. The lobby’s first 100,000 shekels came from 100-150 supporters, second-generation, who believe in the idea and give it strength. And it was amazing, it was, you know, the beginning is very much with spirit and vision and excitement and a sense of mission, so many join and many come and get involved and give and give support, and then you set out. By the way, that may be the difference between a social initiative and a startup, that it’s very hard to keep volunteers volunteering for a long time. That is, unless you’re really working on it, on constantly motivating them, and that takes a lot of resources you need to invest in it, or at the beginning there is a very, very strong spirit, and then you have to stay with employees, because otherwise you just... so that’s one example of something that didn’t work, we can touch on others,

Eyal David: [18:33] but like, that’s it, I feel like you did a lot of hustling along the way, right? What does that mean? Because you’re saying, basically, the program was built as it went, and basically I went and, I’ll say it bluntly, but like I scraped together a thousand dollars from here, a thousand dollars from there, right, absolutely, I brought people into the same Zoom room, I’m not ashamed of that at all, no, amazing. So we actually talked before this conversation about the differences between social entrepreneurship and a startup. Right. So that’s another thing that is very, very, we also talked about something else, we talked about the episode I recorded with Erik, right? With you. Erik Stillman. Yes, and that basically an entrepreneur has to know how to enter through the window, or in this case, through the chimney, so that’s basically what you did here too, very much hustling like that. Right. And at what moment do you feel, though, that it really grew? Like, that you leveled up? That, say, I managed the Lobby of the Million for a little over five years. And until that moment, I already picture that basically you did the Zooms and all that, was that you?

Slow growth, expanding the agenda and building a lobby

Alex Rif: [19:27] I was also in this brigade, it’s a founding force of about ten people. They back me up, advise me, support me. But each in their own field, that is, they were never really part of the core. They’re in their own worlds, in the business world, in the social world, in public service, they do it on top of everything else. But they’re from different fields, and that’s important and interesting, because it gives me very, very different perspectives. It really grew little by little. That is, every year we manage to bring in more, another big donor. When I say big, I hope for 100,000 dollars, yes? Or 100,000 shekels. That’s not a big donor in the real sense, but for us, for the lobby, it was a big donor. Suddenly we’re starting to expand into the area of religion and state. Suddenly Russia invades Ukraine, and this topic is front-page news for a year and a half. So we manage to be a very leading voice in this field. Every time, by the way, one of the criticisms they always level at us is: why are you all over the place? Why are you dealing with immigration absorption, elderly poverty, religion and state, and education and culture? Focus on one area, and you’ll succeed more. It may be, by the way, that they’re right, but I can’t focus. I can’t say, for example, to impoverished Holocaust survivors, “I’m not dealing with this issue,” because I see that no one else is dealing with it. But I also understand, especially at this stage with this current government coming in, that there are very few things we’ll really be able to advance. Meaning, this is a government that doesn’t want these areas; there aren’t any Russian speakers in key positions there, they don’t really want to help us, and therefore the minimum I can do is keep bringing these issues into the public discourse, keep crying out and shouting about them, so that when a government comes here, by the way, I’m not even thinking about myself yet, one that will want to work on these areas, then at least they will be, meaning, I don’t know, poor Holocaust survivors, what are you talking about? Meaning it will at least be something that’s being talked about.

Eyal David: [21:18] It’s pretty similar to what you did before, actually you’re preparing the ground, right? So that the conversation can even happen, a bit like in your book, for that matter, which I read. What? That there too you’re preparing the ground, for a broader conversation, I think. Can we talk for a second about your book? Do you want to say a few words about it soon? I wrote the book a year ago, it’s called More Jewish Than You,

The book "More Jewish Than You" and the fight over the narrative

Alex Rif: [21:36] and it was published by Sella Meir. One of the things you wrote, that you told me when you spoke with me, is that basically I’m not the audience, right? You didn’t write the book for me. That’s partly true. I wrote this book for Hebrew speakers; that’s first of all, meaning, not necessarily for immigrants. It’s not a book for immigrants, but it’s a book intended to tell a right-wing, religious, Israeli audience who we are, what Soviet Jewry is, and that, in fact, all the solutions to all the complexities we have today in religion-and-state issues, marriage, divorce, conversion, burial, are within Jewish law. Of course I’m not a halakhic authority; I just give glimpses, but I’m just showing that once you want to reach solutions, and let’s open that door for ourselves. I think it’s a different point of view, because this is the first time we’re saying, this is our story, we own it, stop pushing us out. By the way, like Stalin did, no, I’m not willing anymore, I’m Jewish, and I’m not willing for anyone to tell me, you’re not, you’re questionable, you’re not enough, no.

Eyal David: [22:32] What I’m taking from what you’re saying is that in all these places, including the book, you’re basically preparing the ground for the conversation,

Alex Rif: [22:38] and then now, now that there are boundaries in place, you can start moving and acting. You have to prepare the ground. Look, there were also areas where we really did manage to move forward. One example, for instance, is the whole issue of immigration absorption. The previous government, right when Russia invaded Ukraine, I asked for a meeting with the prime minister, and he agreed; he met with us right away, ten second-generation immigrants, and we said, listen, this is going to be an event, and the State of Israel is not prepared at all. Let’s build a strategic plan together and start building better immigration-absorption processes so they stay here. He agreed, we started building a plan, and they started implementing it, only this government fell apart very quickly. And then at first we thought they simply didn’t understand this event. At first we thought it was kind of, you know, growing pains, and very quickly we understood that it wasn’t growing pains; they simply don’t want immigration. Meaning, it’s not their electorate, they don’t vote for them, they’re not sufficiently Jewish in her view, so they’re really taking active steps to harm it. But there were successes too; we managed to improve, I don’t know what, a salary agreement for ulpan teachers, so that better teachers would come. We managed to set up a physicians’ administration, so that today an immigrant doctor who arrives is accompanied, and they’re not just thrown in: good luck, handle it on your own. Find something, don’t find something, bye. Like, we’re massively short of doctors, you know, that’s one of the things that amazed me; we did a survey of new immigrants, and when we asked them what issues were burning most for them, it wasn’t immigration absorption; the second or third issue was long waits for doctors. Meaning, again, more than a thousand doctors—Israelis—have left in recent years. The first people who feel this are the marginalized groups, it’s exactly that same group that doesn’t have, you know, a minister in the government, the health minister, to call and ask to shorten their wait, and they wait months for appointments, by the way, in shock, because the healthcare system here is much better, but in Russia if you pay enough money you get whatever you want within a minute and a half. So this understanding of improving things and making things happen—every right, I remember that when I was only 13, my mother brought me her first payslip and said to me, I work 40 hours, they pay me for 20, can you do something about this for a second? Now what did a 13-year-old know, like, Mom, what do you want from me? Really, it’s also, always some kind of struggle as a kid—you know, let me grow up, let me be a normal teenager. And I said, Mom, look it up yourself, and she said to me, there isn’t, there’s no information in Russian. I really went in and saw that there was no information in Russian. And one of the things we managed to do, together with Vladimir Beliak from Yesh Atid, was to translate the Kol Zchut website into Russian. Meaning, we managed to get funding, and today over 50% of the site is translated; with AI, pretty soon everything will be translated, we’ll talk about that in a moment. There are successes. We managed to get things done even in a difficult government; we also managed a lot of the fights to stop bad things. Yes, they wanted to strike the grandchild clause in the Law of Return. At a time when antisemitism is on the rise all over the world, everyone is starting to suffer because of their Judaism, and precisely at this time they want grandchildren of Jews not to be able to come to Israel, which sounds to me like a shame—like, really, we managed to stop that. So I need to understand for a second: you said a lot of things and kept going,

Immigrant absorption, Russia-Ukraine and what did work

How you get to a prime minister and what it takes

Eyal David: [25:38] and I’m still stuck on one thing: how do they get a meeting with the prime minister?

Alex Rif: [25:43] I knew Naftali Bennett back when I was an adviser to the deputy director general, because he was a minister. I wrote to him, very simply: a huge wave of immigration is arriving here, we have to meet, you’re not part of the event, and he said yes, like... wow, that’s insane, like, how actually... not something that can happen with the current prime minister. Like, you need to care. In the end there are people—I end up deciding to join politics, okay? I choose Gadi. By the way, I know everyone, I meet with everyone, I know everyone, I work with everyone. Why do I choose Gadi? I see in him a person who really, really cares. I mean, even before I joined him, he put in the effort. Two million immigrants over the last 20 years, because absorption—he understood what immigrant absorption is, he was the son of immigrant parents, it matters to him, I see it, we’re succeeding... I think there’s really no choice, we really should talk about it, but I think there simply is no choice.

Eyal David: [26:37] I just want to take you for a second... let’s talk about it. Yes. That’s the thing. I need to understand something for a second, but go on, we’re still trying... yes, yes, yes. My sister told me not to use the word “to formalize,” but we’re trying to understand your formula for a second, and I’m trying to understand how you actually build a voice for a million people, let me call it that for a second, okay? I do hear that there were a lot of opinionated people who basically gave you opinions along the way, and how did you actually get into this whole million thing, and start moving the voice of a million people, especially when a new wave of immigration started coming here now around the war in Ukraine—how was that?

How to build a voice for a million people

Alex Rif: [27:10] Look, first of all, how do you do it? In my view, you start with research. You start with learning. Let’s learn the voice of a million people. One of the things is that when you don’t know, it’s because there isn’t enough research, the field isn’t researched enough. So in every area we touch, we start with in-depth research to understand it. What are people’s perceptions? I mean, for example, I’m learning in the research we’re doing on conversion that 45% of Russian-speaking Israelis who are zera Yisrael, ages 18 to 45, still want an Orthodox state conversion process. Maybe just say in one word what zera Yisrael is for those who don’t know. Zera Yisrael basically means someone whose father is Jewish, or whose grandfather is Jewish, but whose mother is not Jewish. They are eligible under the Law of Return, they are Israeli citizens. We learn—each time we take another step, we learn something else about it. We learn that there are 30,000 poor Holocaust survivors, 86% of them are Russian speakers. Each time we start, in the end no one—I mean, often one of the criticisms aimed at us was, no one chose you. You don’t represent the public. I really am not a public representative; I’m a social activist who chose a topic that is very, very, very important to her and decided to advance it, but I did it very carefully, at every single step, so as not to represent people according to anything other than what they truly want.

Eyal David: [28:22] So I didn’t publish a single statement without knowing that this really is what the majority of the immigrant wave wants. So you were basically talking about research that did or didn’t exist, and you started actually driving it, so you started interviewing people to bring more qualitative information from the field—what did that look like?

Alex Rif: [28:33] They really reached out to research organizations; we did interviews with research organizations. How do you do that on a hundred thousand shekels a year, I’m trying to... today polls are a thing, but also, you learn to negotiate, you learn to cut prices, and I think you learn to do a lot with very little money. It really develops creativity. In the end, you know, people often say to me, sometimes when you throw ten million shekels at a body, it sues. I’ve never had such amounts in my life; in my best years I had a million and a half, two, for everything, everything, everything, for all the fields I worked in. So you learn to do something for 20,000 shekels, and also to pool resources—here’s something this foundation wants, and that foundation wants, so let’s pool resources together. Two completely different polls, but I do them in one poll already, because I pay less. It pushes things forward.

Eyal David: [29:18] And what was the goal here? Like, what did you define as success, actually, when you went into this research? That’s it, people often asked me, define success goals. What are success goals?

Alex Rif: [29:27] I could, like, say it this way: pass a law, I don’t know what— we submitted a bill so that victims of hostile acts could also be buried in dedicated plots. Today, in the IDF they found a halakhic solution, they bury all the soldiers who fall in the same plot. We wanted that too for victims of hostile acts. On October 7 there were terrible stories, I’m right now—we’re getting close again to the anniversary, of October 7, so we’re publishing stories of Nova massacre victims, terrible stories, and then, after all this killing and horrible loss, they are also buried outside the fence.

Eyal David: [29:55] That’s it, let’s maybe say in one sentence what the solution was—only IDF soldiers. The solution is that everyone is buried together at a different burial depth. You simply can’t see it from the outside.

Alex Rif: [30:02] You simply can’t see it from the outside, and in the same plot, not in separate plots, not behind the fence. So we submitted such a bill. It was a coalition-opposition bill, Elkin and Saada. Of course it was submitted, but it didn’t advance because of the Haredi parties in the coalition, but actually this is an example of what can be done, of how you can move forward within an existing reality. And it really was... so a very focused goal, I understand. Very focused. Now again, did we succeed? Let’s say, this law did not pass in this Knesset, but we submitted it, we raised the issue, we talked about it, we were interviewed about it. A lot of people know this issue now. So basically the thing was to change the narrative? It was to start by changing the narrative. Now, within that, at the time, and maybe that really is the next step too, there was also a moment of understanding whether I want the next step, whether I want politics. I thought I now had at least a decade to learn from the outside, because I also really believe in that, when you enter something you’re already—especially as a Knesset member—there’s no time. You need to do, you don’t need to waste public time learning on the job, you need to come in knowing what you want to do and how you want to do it. And for me, at the time, I was in that kind of examination. Do I want to make the next leap and become a Knesset member? But then October 7 came, And for me, he really sped up processes. I mean, since October 7, I’ve been feeling very guilty. I think we all had some kind of guilt, but I directed the guilt toward this place of, I was sitting in the comfortable space of the third sector, complaining from the outside, saying, this is bad and this is bad and this doesn’t work and you’re not okay, but I never really put myself out there and said, I'm going all in, and I’m going to solve this. And I understand there’s no choice. If I, there’s, there’s no other way, you can’t stay on the outside anymore, you can’t keep leaving it to other people, it’s really not the ideal time, I have three very young kids, I understand the costs, I don’t yet understand the costs, I’m starting to understand the costs of this thing, and you’re going at me, yes. Exactly, you asked me how life is, like I, every day I understand more and more of the cost of this thing, but on the other hand it’s also clear to me that in another ten years my eldest, Gur, will enlist, and that I won’t be able to sleep peacefully, knowing that I didn’t do everything possible to make things better here. I mean, it’s like, it’s a decision that takes time, but it’s built that way based on this moment, yes I understand, let me bring us back for a second because I’m really curious what she learned from this whole process up to here, if for a second we’re already thinking about the next step, so

October 7 and how it sped up the decision

Lessons from building community and influence

Eyal David: [32:37] what did you learn about building community and impact?

Alex Rif: [32:42] that it can be done cheaply I’m hearing, but what else? One: it can be done cheaply; two: you need the strongest people with you, meaning in the end the people who drove Lobby 1000000, the Cultural Brigade, and the 90 investment, that’s not a little, they’re the ones who broke the glass ceiling. By the way, that’s why I built the podcast 99 — because I felt it wasn’t being heard enough. Like, a lot of times people told me, you’re just complaining, you’re just “achololi,” they took from me, so I said, okay, then come see what we’re good at, and let’s inspire others, let’s be role models for other people who want to know how they succeeded. By the way, every episode I finish interviewing, I learned something, because it’s really inspiring: people who succeeded despite everything, against all odds, got here with \$100 per person and managed to become VPs, CEOs of the most successful companies in the economy. So I learned first of all that you need the strongest people with you, but that you also absolutely need the field. I mean, at first when I founded the lobby I really had this perception that I don’t need the field. I just need the... I came to do policy, okay? I came to work for the public. But at some point I saw that the public doesn’t know me, it doesn’t know who I am, I have this very strong sense of mission, I know what I’m coming to do, I believe in it, and I know that I—but in the end, if the public doesn’t know who you are and doesn’t give you some kind of backing, not only as an elected official but also as the third sector, then you’re actually very weak, like you don’t have the support of the public. Especially today, in today’s period, I very much agree with you. So we started working on the field, so we started doing meetings with the field, so we started doing projects. Again, I kept trying to focus, yes? In a situation where you don’t have money and you have to choose where the first shekel goes, I preferred to put it into policy and not into a project that met the field. And at some point I understood that wasn’t enough. Like, policy is important, but I also have to put the next shekel into the field, into networking projects. For example, I did a very big project for new immigrants and sabras, bringing them together in networking. Just get to know each other, so that if you need some help with something, you’ll have someone from the field to call. We started doing projects for an initiative commemorating all the immigrant soldiers who fell in the war. That really touches people; it’s not a policy project.

Eyal David: [34:44] Where do you do all this thinking, all this drilling down? Here, here, and here, just kidding. I understand, but really. Look, I very much believe that in the end everything is here,

Alex Rif: [34:52] but then you bring an idea to a group of such senior people, and you roll it around with them, and they refine you, and they sharpen the...

Eyal David: [34:59] So that’s another thing you did, that you created your own lobby, basically, within Lobby 1000000. Right, right, that group that advises me, that group that I...

Alex Rif: [35:06] which was also my executive committee; in the end I brought these people onto the committee, to the general assembly, those who worked with me. But also those advisors, whom I could consult on anything, and ask, and here, I have this idea, what do you say, here, I have this, what do you think. So you come with a very raw idea, you come with an idea you thought about, and basically started refining, and wrote it down—what does it look like? People always laugh at me, that someone should love me the way Alex loves presentations. I really love presentations, because they organize my head. So I start with an idea, and once it sits on a presentation, it’s already clearer, and then I show that presentation to 20 people, and then it becomes even clearer, and then it starts moving. It starts being implemented, it starts getting sharpened, it starts getting more precise. Out of twenty ideas, four get carried out, but those are the four that—when you throw a lot of fishing lines, four get caught. Great, amazing.

What strategic thinking and presentations look like

Eyal David: [35:53] It’s always like that, you get twenty no’s not for three yeses. So in that we’re very similar; I also love presentations a lot, because it’s a great way to convey a message and sharpen it, I very much agree.

Alex Rif: [36:03] And it also stays. I mean, afterward you have it, and you can come back to it suddenly, like, everything... and that also stays, that’s very true. It’s very important organizational memory.

Eyal David: [36:11] You engage with me a lot. And setting up a lobby for yourselves is also a really good point. People want to help; people like helping.

Alex Rif: [36:19] How did you assemble your first lobby? Who are the people you started adding? Is it the same lobby that’s running? What does it look like? Is it the same... it’s the same... we’re not talking about Lobby 1000000 now, we’re talking about Alex’s lobby. It started with Russian speakers in senior positions, in all kinds of places like that. It’s those people who aren’t at all, they’re CEOs of federations who supported me, because I suddenly saw people who came to advise me, all kinds of company CEOs and consultants I met along the way, and there are such figures.

Eyal David: [36:44] How many people are there, for example? How many did you gather for yourself to... There are four or five very strong people there, and hundreds of people... And you consult them individually? Do you bring them all to Zoom? I consult with them individually. Because everyone’s time... also because everyone’s time, and also because it’s a format that doesn’t work, you can’t bring everyone to... And how do you manage to distill the feedback you get from each of them into something that is... because it’s really hard to hear a lot of opinions, and... It’s not a lot, first of all really, it’s four or five,

Alex Rif: [37:11] whom I trust very much. In the end, look, I feel that all the answers are inside me. In the end, sometimes you need to echo it to someone for a second to get some kind of tightening or sharpening, but there are few times when I came to someone with a blank page, there’s no such world. I know inside me what I want and where I’m headed; sometimes I just need a little adjustment, or even, by the way, a shot of courage. You know, someone who basically doesn’t have it, even in a family sense, like, I need to calm my parents down, not the other way around. So it gives you some backing, maybe even though I knew the answer before. But the very fact that someone said to me, well done, you’re there.

Eyal David: [37:52] That’s why I asked that, because I understood where you’re coming from, and that’s why I also asked it; it’s very easy to doubt, in fact, so it’s very defensive. So there’s no room for doubt, there’s no room for doubt. By the way, I had such a conversation on one of the podcasts,

Alex Rif: [38:03] We have no room to fall,

Eyal David: [38:07] to not be certain, that’s out of the question. Wow, I loved that, there’s a title for the episode, apparently there’s no room for doubt. It’s interesting how he’ll handle that in the transcript, doubt. Let’s switch for a second to the wave from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. I know, because actually, you know, I also worked in high-tech in the early 2010s, right? 2010 and so on, that’s called the 10s, and basically a lot, a lot of people worked with me and alongside me. So I actually saw the significant boost it gave to high-tech, for example, you talked about medicine, you mentioned, basically, other industries. It’s clear to me that our boost, I don’t know how to say it in Hebrew, but basically what happened over the last 20 years is very much connected to these people, and I’m trying to think now about what’s happening with this wave that you’re describing, basically, that’s happening now, that’s been happening in recent years, you said they’re not being used properly, what do you see there? What’s missing? What was in your plan that you presented? So look, really, when the 1990s wave comes here,

What changed since the 1990s aliyah and what is repeating now

Alex Rif: [39:10] it gives an enormous boost to Israeli society. In everything, yes, we see it in high-tech, 20% of the workers in high-tech are Russian speakers, far above our share of the population. Doctors, until a few years ago, a third of the doctors under 65 were Russian speakers. Enlistment rates in the IDF, engineering, teaching, a lot of math, physics, by the way, these are the teachers who are retiring now and there are no replacements for them. I mean, it was huge, a very strong boost. What we failed to do in the 1990s was really, there were a lot of people who couldn’t reach their maximum, couldn’t realize their professional potential. Whether in small ways, in quotation marks, say doctors, I don’t know, surgeons who got stuck as family doctors, or in big ways, like my mother, an engineer who worked in cleaning, unfortunately, there were many like that. That, again, is an aliyah that doesn’t complain, yes, it’s not hard for me, and so on, she worked hard, she did what was needed, and she moved forward. But today I look at it, 35 years later, yes, I’m exactly 35 years into my aliyah. What a huge economic loss for the economy. We got workers almost for free, in the sense that they were already trained, we didn’t pay for their degrees, we didn’t pay for their training, just to put them in their field. And the same thing is happening today. In the last four years, more than 150,000 new immigrants have arrived here, only from the former Soviet Union countries, because of the war. 75% of them are academics, in the professions most needed by the economy. And the State of Israel has done very little to truly absorb them into the field, across the board. First of all, the ulpans aren’t good enough; they still teach active, passive, hitpa’el, not practical Hebrew, not spoken Hebrew, they’re not suited to working people. I know a friend who says that when he immigrated, he had to choose: his wife went to study at ulpan, he went to work, because they had to make a living. Four years later, she knows Hebrew, he doesn’t know Hebrew. There’s no flexible, varied adaptation to the solutions needed today. And if you don’t know Hebrew, you’re blocked in many places. We’ll talk about it in a moment, but in Israel, unfortunately, even in high-tech companies there’s a culture, what’s called the corridor culture. By the way, I spoke with a good friend, a Russian-speaking CEO of a high-tech company, about this wave, I told him, take them. I mean, you need to say it in English, he told me, but the culture of the... I can’t bring in someone who doesn’t speak Hebrew at all. Interesting. And then employment, wait, let me just finish, because this is the most important part. And the same goes for employment. Unfortunately, only 18% of these new immigrants work in their profession. We learned nothing from the 1990s, no programs were built to place engineers, academics, teachers, within their field, and unfortunately, unlike the 1990s wave, this is a wave that leaves. Yes, what do you know? What do you see? There aren’t exact numbers, because nobody knows if they... on the other hand, it’s also an aliyah that’s on the fence, meaning it’s much more hybrid, it runs businesses there, it has family there, but we see that many didn’t stay, because they couldn’t make it here. How many is many? Tens of thousands. Again, we don’t know exact numbers, but tens of thousands tried, wanted to, all the studies we did about the new immigrants, we really sampled them the moment they arrived. You came to... those were the stigmas, that this was an aliyah that came to get a passport and leave, that was a gross lie. A tiny fraction came to get a passport and leave, the vast majority of the aliyah, over 90 percent, the big bulk, came to stay. Yes, I don’t think you, I don’t think you... and that’s it, but it didn’t work out. So again, there are those who are very, you know, driven, or these are the other options that were left, and they work hard and do and advance little by little, but we missed many. Because maybe it’s also a generation that...

Eyal David: [42:48] Maybe it’s also a generation where, if we talked about how the previous generation weren’t entrepreneurs, then this generation is much more?

Alex Rif: [42:57] Willing to compromise. Because it knows it has options. It knows that if they don’t open the door here for it, they’ll open the door for it somewhere else.

Eyal David: [43:05] What do you think Israel did right in the 1990s that was worth keeping and maybe isn’t happening now? I think in the 1990s they wanted the aliyah,

Alex Rif: [43:13] and that’s the difference between what’s happening now. The government and everyone created a feeling that we’re here at some kind of national event, we’re receiving planes now, I hear stories about ministers who actually came to receive the immigrants’ planes, who arrived with some great Zionist spirit. That is dead; this is the first government in the history of the State of Israel that made distinctions between immigrants, that said, I don’t want these immigrants. So the feeling was that this wave of immigration wasn’t wanted. There was no national mobilization to help them, absorb them, open the door for them, and that seeped downward. And that’s terrible, it’s a terrible thing. We’re missing the most important Zionist value of immigrant absorption. How do you think it could have been shaped differently? Everything, starting with the prime minister saying: this is an important wave of immigration, we need to open the door to it, it’s important to host it, it’s important to help it. Including directing budgets. We saw the opposite, we saw budgets being taken away from immigrant absorption, to... I don’t know what, there was some specific support test that was supposed to help organizations already on the ground doing immigrant absorption, 8 million shekels were redirected from such organizations to organizations that teach Torah. To kolels and to avreichim and to... what does that have to do with it. I mean, even in that way things were done, and budgets were also simply cut. Less and less money went to immigrant absorption; it wasn’t a national value, it wasn’t something we saw as nationally important.

Eyal David: [44:33] Do you think the business sector could have done things differently? I think the business sector could have been mobilized much better.

Alex Rif: [44:40] I think that if programs had been built with the business sector for absorbing groups of immigrants, for wage subsidies, for a certain initial period. We also want to help this employer; we know he’s taking on a worker who doesn’t know Hebrew, but we want him to learn Hebrew in the workplace, at a high professional level, and then stay there afterward. We could have built programs that would make that happen. By the way, not just in industry, industry is important, but I’m really talking about the higher end, about high-tech, about professional workers; we could have worked with them,

Eyal David: [45:09] to do something here. You were definitely talking about industry; I actually went more toward high-tech, because I also think that’s what you said—I don’t know, of those 75%, how many had engineering degrees, probably most of them, that’s my assumption, so that’s where I’m going. What do you think could have been done differently there? That’s what I’m saying, absolutely in high-tech. I understand that from that angle, but I’m thinking for a second, if you put on your social hat and now had to recruit those strong people, you said we need to harness them to our side, then I probably would have gone and found the CEOs, who forbade me from banging on the table here, they told me that, but I would have banged on the table for them, and tried to bring these guys in. What would you say to them? How would you recruit them specifically?

Alex Rif: [45:47] First of all, I bring them to me—99 is not 100. Because many times when you succeed, when you break the glass ceiling, you don’t see other people’s problems. Because from your perspective, if you’re good, you succeed. I remember many such conversations, specifically with the most senior people. And in my view, precisely when you succeed, you need to stop for a moment, look at those who didn’t succeed, and open doors for them. And I think when you open your mind a little and see that picture,

Eyal David: [46:12] it’s easier for you to build programs, do specific things, but you have to work at it. You really have to... lay the groundwork, as you said, so I really understand that, but what would you do, okay, on Monday, after you had those conversations, and started creating dialogue, you dragged along a few people like that from the... she’s really building a program of 40 high-tech companies in the economy,

Alex Rif: [46:31] that are willing to absorb five engineers each; that’s already 200 immigrant engineers. And you start creating movement, basically. And you start creating movement. And when it works, we expand it. And bring in more companies, start creating the things. It’s hard, it’s not easy, I’m not saying it’s easy. You need to earn trust, you need to see that they’re really good people, you need to make the right adjustments. But think about it—we managed to take 20-200 engineers, and bring them into the Israeli economy. But wait, I’m looking from above. In the end, we’re in a complicated situation on so many fronts. As long as we don’t replace the government here with a government of hope and of a future, as long as we don’t bring investment back to Israel, as long as we don’t lower the cost of living, everything depends on everything else, yes? We do just this one thing, but everything else stays bad, I’m not sure we’ll succeed. That’s the complexity—that everything is big projects, we’ll make everyone mobilize, so there won’t be a serving, paying sector on which many people who don’t serve and don’t enlist are hanging.

Eyal David: [47:27] If we don’t do all of this together, we won’t succeed. So let’s talk maybe about two areas that we can identify as worth focusing on, okay? You and I talked about Israel’s human capital; we can talk for a moment about what can be done with it, and we can talk about AI—that’s also something you mentioned, and it can be used. So you mentioned AI specifically for translations, but maybe let’s start by listing the problems, and from there move forward. Look, really, today I’m dealing with some of the problems,

AI, scams targeting the elderly and accessibility for immigrants

Alex Rif: [47:56] I don’t know if problems, but the complexities that AI creates for us—for example, in the issue of scams targeting the elderly. There are about 400 complaints opened with the police each month about elder scams, what we call the Russian scam, meaning most of them are Russian speakers, eight out of ten elderly people, who use AI a lot. Meaning, they imitate the voices of family members, penetrate a computer app, block other calls, there are real mechanisms that use AI to steal a huge amount of money from that elderly person, and that has to be fought. It has to be fought with AI capabilities too. But first of all, the government needs to see this as a national mission, allocate resources to it in the police, build an inter-ministerial team with Interpol; many times these criminals aren’t even in the country, they’re in some other country, to catch these people and start fighting back. By the way, we held a hackathon on elder scams. We really gathered, and there were more than ten different app-based solutions for fighting it, but each one was small. You need some national body to take this on, build the two or three best apps, and distribute them to all the elderly, to all the welfare authorities, through all Holocaust survivors. You need to work at it, yes? Ten small companies trying on their own to make an impact, especially with all the trust issues of the elderly, won’t work. It has to be a national project. This, for example, is one of the first things I’m going to do. It’s very, very important to me. In my view it’s truly a failure that this is still happening, and here with AI you can do good things. And beyond that, we see that AI significantly lowers the costs of, as you said, translating things. Websites too, which is kind of the easiest thing today, but also apps. Today we still have a health fund app, just in Hebrew. A bank app, just in Hebrew. Why? There’s now Bank Leumi, Bank Rishon, that translated apps into languages; it’s easy, it costs little money today. Why not do it, make it accessible, allow new immigrants to use a language they understand, and make their lives easier in the first few months?

Eyal David: [50:01] These are also things that have made things much easier. There are several layers to knowing how you can get into government offices, I call it that, but basically government services. On the one hand we’re talking about health, which makes sense, but on the other hand there are many areas. For example, as a self-employed person I felt the state very strongly in all kinds of areas,

Alex Rif: [50:17] when I need to communicate with it. That’s where, maybe that’s less your field. It had to enter there, it had to. So, one of the things we’re planning to do in absorption of aliyah is a unified absorption center. That is, there will be one place that will centralize on the immigrant’s phone all the authorities they need to be in touch with. So they won’t have to, even if these are different government offices, they’ll see it in one address through one app. It’s not that complicated, but sometimes government offices know how to work very slowly and in a very complicated way and create obstacles along the way. This can be solved more easily, and AI adds enormous possibilities here.

Eyal David: [50:55] Yes, that’s interesting, it’s interesting how AI will enter there and how much willingness there will actually be to receive it. There are probably budgets. What about human capital in Israel? What do you think? We talked a bit about the aliyah that’s happening now, there are more aliyahs happening, what areas do you identify as the ones most worth focusing on?

Medicine, teaching and human capital in Israel

Alex Rif: [51:16] I see very great importance in everything related to healthcare workers and medicine, both because of the unfortunate large departure of doctors in recent years, and also because on the other hand immigrants are arriving, like just, I know a doctor who does residencies at night, basically he had fewer than 10 years of internship so he has to re-prove his specialization, so at night he works in residencies like he’s 21, and he’s not, he’s in his 30s, and by day he works in construction. We are not using the human capital that has already arrived here, and we need to, these are in-demand professions, I’m not talking now about somersaults, in-demand professions, we are not utilizing it properly. Teaching, we need teachers very, very, very much. I know there are also teaching professionals here, thousands, and also academics who couldn’t find, I don’t know, work in research or teaching in academia here, but they could be excellent teachers. You need a good program that accompanies them into Israeli schools, which is not easy; the Israeli education system is not an easy system. If you don’t do it with guidance, they’ll drop out, and teach them Hebrew, quickly, but Hebrew that suits them, school Hebrew, the Hebrew of their profession. How do you do that, in your opinion? Easily—just decide in the Ministry of Education that it’s important enough, allocate resources to it, do collaborations with the third sector, organizations like Chotam, which is really about excellence in teaching or retraining academics, and build programs. Yes, and that wouldn’t come out like ulpanim, for example? Not at all. I think that once there are third-sector organizations that work well, but you don’t dump the responsibility on them, like we saw on October 7, when Israeli society took on all the responsibility because the government dumped everything, rather, they do it in cooperation. It’s the third sector together with government ministries, so amazing things come out of it, and it’s possible, and you learn from the capabilities and strengths of the third sector, and also from the fast execution capabilities, which we often said government ministries have less of, but on the other hand, the money, the budget, the direction are governmental.

Eyal David: [53:09] And you actually mentioned people who leave—would you focus, for example, and this is, there are people who leave, okay, I see it with my friends, maybe I live in a bubble, but would you focus specifically on... after all, immigrants who arrived here also left, and also basically people who were here. Right. So how would you approach that?

Alex Rif: [53:26] Who would you focus on? How would you approach that? Look, there are here two, really two populations of his. You know how hard immigration is, so doing reverse immigration, like... Right, right, right. I’ll tell you what: first of all, it’s very logical that there is a large group of immigrants who are leaving, it’s FIFO, yes? First in, first out; it’s clear that the first ones who arrived and still hadn’t managed to acclimate, and then there’s a war and the socioeconomic situation is much more complicated, they’re also the first to leave. By the way, not all of them; there is a very large population that stayed and is here and serving, and unfortunately I even see them in the bereaved families I visit. So on the one hand, first, improve aliyah absorption programs. That is, so that people, not just sit around the table, people who are already here will be absorbed better and be allowed more to work in their profession and feel part of it and be part of it, and that their children will be absorbed in schools and in the education systems. And on the other hand, there is a population here that left, we want to give them the best tools to come back. So first of all, clearly everyone is waiting for the election results. It’s clear that according to the election results, they will also decide whether to come or not, and therefore our first and most important goal is to replace the government. So I’m calling on everyone who is listening to you, it’s clear that you’re going to vote and it’s clear that you’re convincing everyone around you to go vote and come, and do everything possible to vote in these elections, for whoever you believe in, of course, in the change bloc, but besides that we need to create, for example, we’re talking about hybrid citizenship, often people wait ten years to get returning resident status, which is ridiculous. Let’s make it hybrid: even if you come back after four years, you may not get everything you would have gotten after ten, but you get something to allow you to return, to ease this bureaucracy of returning, also to make finding work easier, yes, like people ultimately want to return to some kind of certainty,

Who leaves, who stays and how to bring people back

Eyal David: [55:08] so also help them find where they’re returning to and how. Maybe it’s also very important that the dollar rate goes down, so that this can happen,

Alex Rif: [55:16] Interesting. As you said, the economic situation has to improve; there’s nothing to do, everything is in a very bad state. Economic investments, high-tech companies, we are in a very, very, very complicated situation. The Israelis who are still here and investing in the State of Israel, and staying and not going anywhere, are tremendous Zionists; we should thank them. It’s not at all obvious that in such a complicated economic situation, we know they’re losing money by keeping companies in Israel. They don’t get up and leave because they believe in the State of Israel, and they’re waiting for things to get better here. So you saved me a question.

Eyal David: [55:52] Tell me, just out of curiosity, where were you on October 7? Do you remember how many times it was October 7, where did it find you?

Alex Rif: [55:59] Pregnant. Two years, really, it’s two years. Yes, my little love. It found me in a very complicated way, there were very difficult feelings, very much, a lot of real existential fear. Also, really being pregnant is a very strange feeling that the... there is life inside, but life is in such danger and so many people are losing their lives. Also some kind of fear of exposing myself too much so as not to hurt that little one. So, like, you also expose yourself to horrors to some extent, because you’re, like, responsible for someone’s life, you don’t want to hurt them. And on the other hand, really, because of that, that feeling too, the realization came within a few weeks, that we have to do something. And that’s what also gave me the understanding that I’m not sitting around, from now on I’m building and I built little by little this path into the home. I sat and talked with everyone and thought where was best for me and listened and really looked for a place. I think that’s what’s so beautiful about Gadi’s team, he gathered around him professional people. Not all the fields are fields he understands the way I understand immigration absorption, but he brought me because of what I did and because of my professional record, so that I can keep doing exactly that, and he gives me support, just like those mentors I gathered: I’m with you, I believe in you, I know that what you’re doing is right and we’ll succeed in doing it together.

Eyal David: [57:17] So you kind of touched on this along the way of you entering politics, so maybe let’s talk a little bit more about that. I’m a bit curious, so really you’ve laid From the way I see you operating, you’re basically laying, and you’re laying the groundwork now. You wrote a book, and I’m curious to know where you’re going to take this, basically what beyond the fact that you’re probably going to change the narrative there, what are the actions you’re going to actually take in those areas? What are you planning? You touched on it a bit, what are the first actions you’re planning to take.

Entering politics and the next stage

Alex Rif: [57:46] I’ll tell you what the dream is, really the dream, the dream is to do all the things I told you in the Knesset. It very much depends on the role I get, yes, I’m a Knesset member, I’m chairing a committee, I’m the minister, everything depends on where I manage to do all these things, I’ll do them no matter where, yes, people often ask me, yes, but it depends on the role. First of all, that’s not true. I want the voice of immigrants in every field where they need help. If they need help with the Ministry of the Interior, I’ll connect them with the Ministry of the Interior. If they need help with the Ministry of Transport, I’ll help them find that connection, because often there is no voice for such populations; they don’t know whom to turn to, they don’t know who it is, and in that sense I’m very proud. I’m a first-generation one and a half, the first, touch wood, without an evil eye, with everything I’ll be in the Knesset; that’s a very, very big strength of mine, on the one hand to speak Russian, but my Russian—we haven’t spoken Russian—I often do things in Russian now, my Russian is less good than my English. Like, it’s clear that I’m very Israeli, very deeply rooted, but I understand this public’s problems, and unfortunately we see a situation where there’s a chance that in the current Knesset there will be only three Russian-speaking Knesset members, out of 120. Yes, now wait, I’ll tell you, population, we are 14.5 percent of the working population. Are you kidding me? I already did the math, 20. And 20 percent in the Jewish population. That’s nowhere near proper representation, because unfortunately parties think it’s not important, and that’s terrible, because I, again, from my experience with the Million Lobby, I saw how many Russian speakers, how many Russian-speaking Knesset members cooperate with us, compared to everyone else. So what you’re saying is basically that you’re breaking the glass ceiling, and you also know how to look back. Right, but I also hope more will come, because in the end, if there aren’t more Russian speakers in the Knesset, our power is weak, and we need power to achieve these goals. That’s what I want to do, that’s the dream. But besides that, I want to be the voice of those who have no voice, of those who need help, and those who need a push, and those who need me to be their representative. In the end, I came from there, so... And in your opinion, what are the conditions,

Eyal David: [59:41] the conditions that will help Alex function best and bring out the most in herself? Probably giving you a little money would help a lot.

Alex Rif: [59:50] But no, because we see that you know how to make the most of... we talked about it at the beginning too. I think if I live close to my workplace, exactly we talked about this, I wrote a thesis on strategies that senior women in the labor service, in the civil service, use in order to succeed in combining work and family. I also wrote that, basically, to know how you do it. Again, this was fifteen years ago. Meaning, I still didn’t know what and who, but I wanted to understand for a moment how senior women. And I really wanted a family and really wanted a home, but how do they manage to be in senior positions and do both? So I really interviewed them and built ten strategies. One of the strategies there, and I really started to realize it, yes? So first of all, it’s finding a partner who is a life partner, and he’s with you, and he believes in you, and he supports you. It’s working at what you believe in, in your mission, yes? After I founded the brigade, there was a moment when I said, okay, I’m done with the... like, I gave birth to a child, I handed it over to someone else. I was done with Russian speakers, I contributed, I gave back enough. And for a year and a half I looked for myself, who am I and what am I, and I went to all kinds of projects with that, and nothing burned. Nothing, like... And then there was a moment of realization that I got a door in the world. So, instead of starting to make yourself crazy for a moment, what, why, unless this, this, go through it and do good. And then do good in other places too, but like, not now, not, this, not, this is my door, and I’m proud of it, and I love it, and I go through it with great love, and there afterward I can do good for so many other things and people. So one, it’s doing what you, two, is already doing what you believe in and your mission. And three, it’s support circles, of course. I, my parents moved to live near me, which is the biggest blessing I can give in the world. People often ask me what I would do if my parents didn’t live near me, and I say fewer children. Because really, first of all, in my opinion it’s a great privilege for children to live near grandma and grandpa. They also get another language, they understand Russian, they speak a little, and they also get love. It’s growing up in a unit that holds you very, very strongly. So getting support circles, what you can pay for, outsource for pay, what you can’t bring grandma and grandpa, and live close to the workplace. That’s the next project. So we wish you success, and thank you for coming, so nice. Thank you very much for hosting me and for asking smart questions, and amen, really, we all have one goal, Replace this government and make things here much better. Thank you very much, Eyal. All right, bye-bye.