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WIZO
It’s All In
The Family For
This Most Important Group
By Tim
Boxer
 N
his five months as Israel’s permanent representative at the
United Nations, Dan Gillerman has turned up at
countless functions. But the annual Women’s International
Zionist Organization luncheon/children’s fashion show was “the
most important one.”
His
wife Janice is a member of WIZO. His mother, a founder of the
group, lived the last 20 years of her life in a WIZO home in Tel
Aviv. His two thirtysomething children once modeled in a WIZO
fashion show. And his four-year-old grandson, Braun,
attends a WIZO kindergarten in Tel Aviv.
He
told the 400 women at this year’s luncheon at New York’s
Pierre Hotel about a teacher at a WIZO school who asked her class
of eight-year-olds to draw a picture. They drew a horse, a dog, a
cat.
Then
she spotted something strange. “What are you doing?” the
teacher asked.
“I’m
drawing God,” the youngster said.
“Nobody
knows what God looks like.”
“When
I finish they will.”
Every
time Gillerman goes to pick up his grandson at kindergarten, it
breaks his heart.
“My
heart breaks having to see an armed guard to protect these
children from terrorists,” he said. “This is the reality of
Israel."
“As
long as a cup of coffee on the Rue St. Germain costs you two or
three dollars, and a cup of coffee in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem or Afula
costs two or three children, you will never understand the reality
of Israel.”
Gillerman,
a businessman and president of the Chamber of Commerce before
being named ambassador, did not give up. He came to the UN “a
very bitter, angry man” and met with scores of colleagues “to
bring home to them the reality of Israel.”
Terror
has not hindered daily life in Israel. “I always say, do not
hold business hostage to politics.”He illustrated with the story
of a Jewish boy in upstate New York where his was the only Jewish
family in town. The youngster took a test in school on the most
important man in history. He wrote Jesus – and won a
prize.
His
father was outraged.
“How
could you? You’re Jewish!”
“Daddy,
Moses is Moses but business is business.”
WIZO
president Evelyn Sommer led the applause and said, “My
grandmother used to have a Yiddish saying: Laughter is louder than
tears.”
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