From Astrophysicist to Rising Star in Israel's Social Change Leadership

August 6, 2008

Hagai El-Ad brought Jerusalem's LGBT community "out of the closet," after taking over as Executive Director of veteran NIF grantee Jerusalem Open House (JOH) in 2000. Today the rainbow flag flies proudly outside JOH in Jerusalem's city center, and despite fierce and often violent opposition from the city’s Orthodox religious communities, Jerusalem's annual Gay Pride Parade is part of the city's cultural calendar.

Hagai El-Ad sees more public engagement as his top priority.

Last month, El-Ad, 39, took on a new challenge when he became Executive Director of flagship NIF grantee Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), succeeding Rachel Benziman, who led the organization for more than five years.

Since its establishment in 1972, ACRI has brought about a revolution in human rights in Israel. ACRI has pioneered major breakthroughs in four main areas of civil rights: equality for all Israelis regardless of race, religion and gender; social and economic rights; human rights violations of Palestinians in the territories by the Israeli security forces; and protecting freedom of expression and ensuring freedom of information.

"We are currently embarking on a process of renewal and reassessing our strategies," says El-Ad. "We want to encourage greater involvement by our dozens of volunteers and supporters and identify leadership potential among them and work even more closely with other social change organizations. We also want to make greater use of technology and the Internet to reach our supporters and the Israeli public in general." 

A decade ago Hagai El-Ad was one of Harvard’s rising young stars-as an astrophysicist at the Ivy League university. 

“My research and studies at Harvard were progressing excellently,” El-Ad recounts. “But I found my heart was no longer in it. More and more of my energies were devoted to public activities on behalf of gays and lesbians both in the US and back in Israel. I began to feel homesick for Israel and that I was in the wrong place.”

Hagai El-Ad and fellow activists outside of JOH

Born and raised in Haifa, El-Ad is a former officer in the IDF Intelligence Corps and a graduate of the Hebrew University. The tenacity of his character is demonstrated not only in the way that he won recognition for Jerusalem's LGBT community as a distinct and legitimate group within Israeli society, but also through his own personal voyage of self-discovery as a teenager in Haifa. By age fifteen he had already dismissed as nonsense a negative definition he had found of homosexuality in a library book at Haifa University.

"My strength emanates from the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam [repairing the world]," he states. "I was also inspired by the US civil rights movement during my years at Harvard. Above and beyond the values of civil rights, what impressed me most about the American movement was its professionalism. There is a misconception in Israel that NGOs are amateur organizations based on volunteerism."

"My vision is to stress professional and quality management," he insists, "to maximize the effectiveness of limited resources."

One of El-Ad's goals for ACRI is to engage the Israeli public more on the topic of civil rights. "We will do this with more emphasis on social and economic rights," he explains. "This includes health rights, economic and employment rights and housing rights."

He cites a recent, highly publicized ACRI report on public housing, which showed that only 1,628 apartments were available for 50,000 applicants, while government mortgage assistance to the needy was cut from $1.6 billion in 2006 to $560 million last year. The housing issue impacts many sectors of Israeli society from Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox to new immigrants and veteran Mizrahim.

"But the focus on social and economic matters will not be at the expense of less popular issues," he insists. "Yesterday, for example, we petitioned against the forced return of the Fatah members who were rescued from Gaza."

El-Ad explained that ACRI's petition to the Supreme Court had probably saved the lives of some 150 Fatah refugees who had escaped from clashes with Hamas in Gaza, but whom Israel wanted to repatriate despite the danger to their lives. In the end, the Defense Ministry agreed to transfer them to the West Bank instead.

El-Ad is adamant that despite Israel's demanding security situation, he can raise awareness about the importance of civil rights in a democratic society. "I am optimistic," he says. "We won't persuade 100 percent of Israelis to agree with 100 percent of the issues we tackle, but we can empower and engage large numbers of Israelis and push the subject of civil rights higher up on the public agenda."