“Some people want to be movie stars or rock stars; I wanted to be in the IDF,” San Diegan Julian Josephson says of his dreams growing up. That explains a lot about where he his today.
Julian and his wife, Jenny, are being honored this month at the annual gala of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces’ San Diego chapter, for their commitment and support to Israel and the soldiers of the IDF.
From their time as children in South Africa, both Josephsons have long championed IDF soldiers. In San Diego, they’re arguably some of their most influential supporters and tireless advocates.
“We grew up with this tremendous love for the state of Israel,” Jenny says, “and we were always taught that this was our responsibility; that wherever we were, we needed to play a part in making sure Israel was safe.”
As children and young adults in South Africa, the couple’s unwavering sense of commitment and responsibility toward the IDF was nourished in their local Jewish communities, which both Josephsons credit as teaching them to “understand the importance of having a Jewish homeland.”
“If you look back at the history of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, when volunteers arrived from around the world, South Africa sent disproportionately more volunteers than any other country to fight alongside the embryonic army of the state of Israel, and they did that again in 1967,” Julian says. “I guess we were just all infused with that spirit.”
In June 1967, a few days after the start of the Six-Day War, when Israel’s security needed a bit of bolstering, Julian’s love for the country manifested itself into a trip to Israel, his first, to enlist in the IDF as a volunteer soldier.
Josephson had already completed his mandatory military service in South Africa and climbed the ranks to become an infantry officer there before joining the army reserves in Israel.
“I felt that I could be of some help because I had a military background,” he says. “In another day and age, I would have loved to become a career soldier in the IDF, because my first love was always the military.”
Supporting Israel Together
The couple married in the mid-70s and honeymooned in Israel, years after Julian’s service in the IDF. That honeymoon vacation bolstered a lifelong connection with their ancestral homeland and was the start of their lives supporting Israel as a couple. At that time, though, their support of the IDF was still mostly informal, as the organization that came to be known as the FIDF was not established until 1981.
With a growing family, the Josephsons immigrated to the United States in 1978, the same year Jenny’s parents made aliyah to Israel with her younger brothers (still minors at the time) in tow. Annual vacations took the Josephsons and their two children to Israel to visit family members serving in the IDF, and that’s when their appreciation for Israel and her soldiers really became personal.
As young marrieds on one of their first trips to visit family in Israel, Julian and Jenny toured an IDF base where one of Jenny’s brothers was staying during his mandatory military service. As Jenny recalls, the base was “awful.”
“The ‘rec room’ was this broken room with no TV, and we said, ‘This is it,’” she recalls. “We got in our rental car and bought a TV for the soldiers.
“There was this vision of [the soldiers] having nothing because all the money goes to making sure they have the best equipment and the best in technology to fight this war, so there’s nothing left for the recreational side,” she continues. “These are young kids straight out of school, 16-18-year-olds, and you want them to have good morale and not be depressed and feel as if nobody cares about them, so it makes a big difference when they can come back and there is a pool table, or there’s a TV and computers for them to work on.”
Those early visits with Jenny’s family in Israel, and especially with her brothers when they were soldiers, were the foundation of their understanding of soldiers’ needs and the gaps between what they needed and what was provided to them during their service.
‘Friends’ in Need
The Josephsons’ involvement with the FIDF, didn’t come about until 2007, when Julian participated in an FIDF mission trip to Israel with another South African expatriate living in San Diego, Norman Smith.
Smith, who is the FIDF-San Diego chapter vice chairman, had served in the South African army as an officer under Julian and invited him on the mission to visit soldiers on bases and to tour recreation facilities built previously by FIDF donors.
“I immediately saw that this organization… was something that I really, really wanted to get involved in,” Julian remembers. “I came back from that mission ready to work for [the FIDF]. I wanted to devote the next few years to seeing how I could add value to this organization, how I could contribute, because this not only blends my love of Israel and how I view Israel, but it also blends the IDF, that military component, as well.”
Within a year of the Josephsons’ involvement with the FIDF, Julian became chairman of the San Diego chapter, which he developed to be a stand-alone chapter of the organization, not just an extension of the Los Angeles and Western chapters, as it had previously been. His growth of the local chapter and subsequent work as vice president at the national level prompted board members to promote him to national president last year. FIDF-San Diego Executive Director Nir BenZvi says Julian’s passion and hard work made all the difference.
“It is a direct result of some of [Julian’s] actions that have made a change on the national level,” BenZvi says. “He is responsible for all the [buildings and] projects that we build in Israel. He made it possible for all the building projects to become standardized, so that we can approve and get to the project completion cycle faster.”
Prior to Julian’s arrival at the FIDF, the organization had had difficulty in Israel differentiating itself from another group, Ha’Aguda Leman Hachayal, the largest nonprofit in Israel providing welfare to Israeli soldiers. Under his leadership, the national offices of the FIDF made the decision to separate themselves from their Israeli counterpart, making their mission definitively clear.
“[Julian and Jenny] have made a big impact on the future of the organization and where it will go,” BenZvi says of the decision to honor the the couple at this year’s gala.
Looking Ahead
Though Julian will be able to fulfill his national FIDF duties from his home base in San Diego, he will eventually step down as the local chapter’s chairman. However, both he and Jenny say they will continue to support the team here, either as members of a local board or in some other way.
“[Julian] can help this organization continue to grow and go in a direction that will be of more benefit to the soldiers and to the people of Israel,” Jenny says of her husband’s new role as national president. “He’s tremendously dedicated, and he feels a strong responsibility to do whatever we can to ensure Israel is safe and the soldiers are safe.”
To do that, Julian has big plans for his first few years as national president. First, there’s fundraising.
“I would like to break the $100 million barrier for fundraising in the United States,” he says. “Although we aren’t there yet, I see that in the next 24-36 months, where we will be in that position to raise $100 million in the U.S.”
Connecting Jews in the Diaspora to Jews in Israel, through the IDF and its soldiers, is another major undertaking of all FIDF offices across the country. BenZvi says all FIDF offices should have a young leadership group for ages 20-35 and a young professionals group for those 35-55, where Israeli soldiers visiting the U.S. can come to meet their counterparts here and discuss what life is like for each of them.
“The young boys and girls in the IDF are pure,” Julian says of this effort, which he will oversee on a larger scale soon. “They want to know that Jews and non-Jews around the world, throughout the Diaspora, support them. They want that connection and to know that what they are doing is not just for them but for the Jewish people.”
It could be said that, like the commitment of the IDF soldiers, the work the Josephsons have done in their years together, not just for the FIDF but for all their endeavors, has not been just for them, or for Israel or for the IDF, but for the Jewish people as a whole. As a couple, the Josephsons have dedicated countless hours to Jewish organizations and causes around the country and in San Diego County, specifically. Together, they’ve been involved in some capacity with most, if not all of, the Jewish organizations in town. Julian was president of the San Diego Jewish Academy in 1985 and 1986, and he also worked with the United Jewish Federation of San Diego County and the Agency for Jewish Education in different regards; Jenny has worked with Magen David Adom and StandWithUs, and she is a past president of Hadassah. They’ve both volunteered their time at their synagogue, Congregation Beth El in La Jolla, over the years.
“It’s an important thing [to support Israel],” Jenny says of her reasons behind her involvement with so many Jewish and pro-Israel organizations. “It’s about that little bit extra to say we care because we love [the soldiers of the IDF] and because [they] are doing more for us in the Diaspora than we are doing for [them].”
• The FIDF-San Diego annual gala, with reception at 6:30 p.m. and kosher dinner at 7 p.m., will be Jan. 21 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in downtown San Diego. Keynote speaker will be Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, vice prime minister of Israel. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.fidf.org /Page.aspx?pid=322 or call (858) 926-3210.
