“What would our ancestors not have done to come live in Eretz Yisrael? Today it is doable. Operation Home Again seems to be the most realistic approach to enabling our brethren to come home (and is worthy of our support in every way).”
- Rabbi Yitzchak Berkovits, Rosh Yeshiva Aish HaTorah, Jerusalem
Our Mission
The mission of Operation Home Again is to be the catalyst and facilitator of synagogue and community-based Aliyah from North America as part of inspiring a Movement of returning home.
Meet The Team
Rabbi Shimon Apisdorf
Founder
Together with his dynamic team, R’ Shimon is building the premier organization devoted exclusively to community-based Aliyah from North America. At this historic juncture of unfolding opportunity for the last major Diaspora community to return home, Operation Home Again is poised to catalyze and facilitate the entire process.
Mrs. Shifra Novograd
Executive Director
With every subsequent visit to Israel, Shifra returns to her Baltimore home with this growing sentiment: Israel is a land begging her children to come HOME.
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Bringing more than three decades of executive experience with innovating and directing projects for both the corporate and non-profit arenas, Shifra has...
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Mr. Richard Greene
Business Advisor
Richard founded and grew his Maryland-based CPA and Business Advisory firm into a force of more than one-hundred employees before moving to Center City in Jerusalem five years ago. Today, he helps Israeli companies and nonprofits achieve maximum impact.
Richard is thrilled to help North American Rabbis and their communities "come Home, like we did."
Rabbi Jonathan Feldman
Young Adult Aliyah
Rabbi Jonathan Feldman is Founder and Director of Tribe Tel Aviv and Community Educator for Am Yisrael Foundation. For the past three years since making Aliyah, he has been working in Tel Aviv with young adult olim building community, helping them settle in and connecting them to Israel and Judaism.
Mrs. Batsheva Goldman
Director of Community Relations
With an eclectic career path whose highlights include more than a decade as a managing partner of Brand Launcher, Inc. and Turning Point, as a marketing copywriter, and as an underground tour guide, Batsheva is well-positioned to direct the entire gamut of administrative affairs for group Olim, including housing, education, and employment.
Our Vision
Like you, we’re dreamers.
We dream of something astounding taking shape in North America.
We dream of an Aliyah unlike any before.
Forty-two years before the destruction of the first Temple, Jews first made their way to Yemen. Two and a half millennia later, Yeminite Jewry was facing an ever more perilous situation, and then something astounding happened, Operation Magic Carpet: Throughout the year 1949, every day, five to six hundred Jews were airlifted from Yemen to Israel. With those 50,000 rescued Jews, a grand era in Jewish history came to a close, and a community had returned home.
Babylonia, where Jewish scholarship flourished and the Talmud Bavli was authored, was the home to a great and prestigious Jewish community for two thousand years, but by 1950 dark clouds were gathering over the synagogues of Baghdad, and then something astounding happened, Operation Ezra and Nechemia: From 1950-1951 an obscure American airline company was hired to airlift 150,000 Jews out of Iraq. Once again, another chapter in the story of exile was closed, and Iraqi (Babylonian) Jews were finally home again.
And so it was with Operations Solomon and Exodus. Jews whose lives hung in a precarious balance in Ethiopia, and Jews whose heritage, religion, and identity had been denied to them by the Soviet Union, were brought home to safety, and to the opportunity to flourish as Jews.
That’s our dream, but not quite.
While there is no denying that Jews in America and elsewhere are looking over their shoulders in a way that never existed before, our dream is never to see the face of a Jew that has to get out, but rather—
To witness a large movement of inspired, self-motivated Jewish communities making aliya from North America who become the leading edge in a massive wave of return to Zion from every corner of the Diaspora.
Because like you, we’re dreamers.