The message of the Cambridge billboard, which is reprised in several 30-second TV ads you can see at the website klita.gov.il, is that Israelis who linger too long in the diaspora risk losing their Jewish roots. In one of the ads, a family is Skyping their grandparents in Israel at Hanukkah, and the presumably assimilated daughter refers to the season as “Christmas.’’ A look of pain shoots across her grandparents’ faces. The point of the “Daddy’’ ad is that real Israeli children call their fathers “Abba,’’ not “Daddy.’’
Kelly Anne Smith, a spokeswoman for the Israeli Consulate, admits that the new campaign, which also ran for a while on an Israeli TV station available in the United States, “comes from an emotional standpoint. We don’t want to force people to go back to Israel, but it’s something we’d like them to explore. Life is pretty comfortable here, but parents need to ask themselves if this is where they want their children to grow up.’’
It’s too early to judge the campaign’s effectiveness, she says.
There are 10,000 Israeli citizens in the Boston area and perhaps a million in the United States. Israel offers generous incentives, including 10 years of tax relief from overseas income or investment, Hebrew lessons for children - even 200 free cellphone minutes - to returnees.
It’s a tough sell, as former MIT economics professor and now governor of the Bank of Israel Stanley Fischer explained in an interview with Newsweek: “The conditions are enormously better in the United States. A graduating student in economics who gets his first job in the United States will earn three or four times what he earns in Israel. And the universities are better equipped and all that. It demands something of people to come back.’’
