‘Those Who Hate Us Simply Want To Get Us,’ Israel’s President Warns Jews at Budapest Conference
Herzog made the remarks during the final sessions of the Voice of the People conference in Budapest, which marked the culmination of the initiative’s inaugural cohort of 150 Jews from around the world
By Maayan Hoffman / The Media Line
[BUDAPEST] Israeli President Isaac Herzog warned more than 100 Jews gathered from around the world in Budapest that they must remain vigilant against threats to Jewish communities, regardless of where they live or how they practice their faith.
“Those who hate us really don’t care about the way we practice our Judaism,” he said during an on-stage interview with Voice of the People CEO Shirel Dagan-Levy. “They simply want to get us.”
Herzog made the remarks during the final sessions of the Voice of the People conference in Budapest, which marked the culmination of the initiative’s inaugural cohort of 150 Jews from around the world.
The president developed Voice of the People in partnership with the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency, with funding from the Azrieli Foundation, the Wilf Family Foundations, and the Patrick and Lina Drahi Foundation.
Although Herzog announced the initiative in April 2023, before the October 7 Hamas massacre, its launch was delayed until August 2024 because of the war. The first cohort gathered in Haifa in March 2025.
On Tuesday, following two days of meetings and presentations, Herzog addressed the participants, warning of growing threats, including online anti-Semitism and the spread of hatred through artificial intelligence and social media. He cautioned against the illusion that the challenges facing the Jewish people would disappear with time.
“We have to understand it. Be strong enough … Fight together, and for this we have to give strength to Jews all over the world,” Herzog said. “Jews right now around the world are threatened and attacked, and we know it. And it will be a battle, a long-range battle, where we will have to overcome it with our inner strength and our partners and allies.”
Against this backdrop, Herzog urged participants to embrace the diversity of the Jewish people while recognizing their shared responsibility for one another. Despite their differences, he stressed, Jews must stand together, particularly when individual communities come under threat.
He said that in Israel, “we care for Jews everywhere around the world. And when I came in February to Australia, people saw me there, and we literally took the community and picked it up. It was so important to show solidarity from all over the world with this community.”
The president added that “we have an incredible nation, it’s diversified as ever before” and that people in Israel have a “sense of mission and a sense of purpose. And what I’m trying to do is to show each person that he is worth something.”
Herzog raised a fundamental question: How can a nation of fewer than 16 million people, a “drop in the sea,” preserve its identity and continuity from one generation to the next?
He suggested the answer lies in each generation taking responsibility for the future of the Jewish people and finding ways to engage those who might otherwise drift away.
“It’s not easy when you have millions of unaffiliated Jews,” the president said. “You don’t know what will be the future of the Jewish people. The only way to do it is to identify forces who care, who want to be involved, who have a sense of purpose, who bring a great story to the table, who are diversified enough.”
For Herzog, this is Voice of the People’s purpose: to bring together Jews from different backgrounds, communities, and traditions who might otherwise never meet, let alone understand one another’s experiences.
He noted that many Israelis know little about Jewish life in the Diaspora, just as many Diaspora Jews have limited knowledge of the realities of Jewish life in Israel.
“Ask the average Israeli; he has no clue about the diversity of Jewish life,” the president said. “And you ask an average person in world Jewry, in the diaspora; he has no clue about Jewish life in Israel. So you have to bring people into the room … and invigorate more and more Jewish life.”
Yet the very divisions Voice of the People was created to bridge have also become challenges within the initiative itself.
The president’s remarks followed an article in eJewishPhilanthropy reporting that “several members said that the initiative has fallen prey to the very divisions roiling the Jewish world that led to its creation in the first place.”
According to the report, some participants struggled to openly discuss the sensitive and divisive issues they had been brought together to address.
However, Dagan-Levy told The Media Line that organizers never expected bringing together such a diverse group of Jews to be easy. She acknowledged the tensions but said the team was working to ensure that even when disagreements become heated, participants remain in the room and continue having difficult conversations.
“Maybe we need to rephrase our rules of discussion,” Dagan-Levy admitted. “What are the boundaries? How do we have a productive discussion? How do we leave everyone in the room? And we’re working on it very hard.”
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