Dear friends,
It’s been a long time since my last update on our activity at Africa First.
The events of October 7th back home in Israel took us all by surprise.
The shock and terror, the pain and horror, the fear and despair impacted every single one of us.
I was lucky to be able to leave for London on Oct 9 with my family. We found ourselves at the Langham right infront of the BBC where pro-palestinian protests of an unprecedented scale were taking place at our doorstep. Antisemitism was felt everywhere. A week later we headed to Paris, where I had committed to presenting a booth at the AKAA fair. We did, but it felt so awkward and out of place. As soon as the fair ended my focus turned to providing any help I could to support the hundreds of thousands of displaced co-citizens, particularly the terror struck families and communities of the Gaza envelope. In collaboration with the Israeli embassy and a local Parisian auction house we started working on a fundraising auction. Unfortunately due to rising antisemitism in Paris and the complexity of a public pro Israeli event, the initiative fell through. I didn’t give up though, and upon returning to Israel in December I immediately engaged the entire family around a local auction supporting 3 non-profit organizations. We sold close to 100 works from our collection, by established and emerging Israeli artists, and raised close to 600’000 Israeli Shekels, with all proceeds distributed equally between 3 nonprofits supporting orphans, families and the Nova festival survivors.
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START & Africa First Collections new showroom, Tel-Aviv - Jaffa, Israel