As some are trying to secure a place at the inauguration of Donald J. Trump to his second term in office, others – volunteers who worked hard to help him garner his victory – met in Ramat Gan, raised a toast and enjoyed some good old American-style burgers and fries, and recounted the behind-the-scenes action of the successful campaign.
“It doesn’t get more American than this,” said Marc Zell, chairman of Republicans Overseas Israel (ROI) as he offered a le’chaim to a crowd of relieved volunteers. He added that he hopes the first thing Trump will do is repeal Executive Order 14115, imposed by the Biden administration to sanction a growing list of Israelis it considers “extremist.”
“James Blair, Donald Trump’s campaign coordinator, recognized the importance of the overseas vote, particularly Israel’s participation,” Zell said. “No other country has done as much as Israel to push for Trump’s win.”
According to Zell, it is estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 Israeli-Americans voted in the 2024 presidential election, and of those over 90% voted for Trump.
The team leader of the group, Caroline Gazit, joined by Zoom from Miami, where she is taking a well-deserved vacation after what everyone agrees was a chaotic lead-up to the election.
“I plan to use the time until 2026 to roll up my sleeves and develop ways to help more people vote in a much more efficient way,” she said.
A self-described “stay-at-home mom of four for 13 years,” she laughed as she recalled the day Maayan Yakov, executive director of ROI, “dusted me off and put me to work as a team leader.”
A veteran, when she enlisted she was placed in the logistics division of the US Armed Forces for four years, stationed in South Korea and later in Fort Stewart, Georgia. After her service, she became an elementary school teacher.
“In 2016 I fell in love with Trump, especially his support for veterans and his success in stomping out ISIS, which was keeping me up at night,” Gazit recalled.
She immigrated to Israel in August of 2019 and reached out to the ROI group to help her vote. She was very disappointed with the outcome of that election, so when Yakov approached her with the opportunity to work on voter outreach, she was in 100%.
“This time, the goal was so clear,” she said. “It was hard, it was time-consuming, and so draining talking to people all day and night. But Trump made it easy and, thankfully, Kamala made it even easier.”
This was her first foray into politics. She began making phone calls, encouraging people to vote, and was surprised to find indifference among Israeli-Americans. But as the team got closer to election day, she said there was a quantum rise in voter interest. Even on November 5, she was getting calls and helping voters email and fax their ballots.
She worked with Yakov to mobilize community leaders, ranging from the Golan to Eilat, throughout many communities in Israel and Judea and Samaria.
Yakov, who was born and raised in Ariel, lived in Kansas City for 13 years, and came back to Israel to live in 2022.
A business entrepreneur and creative thinker, Yakov became the marketing pulse of the Trump campaign in Israel, working alongside business director and partner of the Gilad Group, Ariel Sender, a lobbyist and Republican campaign manager whose office is based in Ramat Gan. Together they created and helped fund social media campaigns, public relations, advertisements, T-shirts, and bumper stickers to push and promote Trump’s campaign.
The community leaders recalled that the process of voting was different in each state, which made the campaign extremely challenging, especially for first-time voters.
“Each state determines who and how overseas voters are allowed to vote in federal elections,” explained Zell, who is an international attorney, as well as leader of ROI. “Under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens and Absentee Voting Act, the right of US military and overseas voters to vote in federal elections is preserved in all 50 states, as well as other jurisdictions.
“But the states still determine who exactly and how the overseas voters are allowed to vote in federal elections. While any US citizen originally living in the US can vote, a US citizen born overseas who never resided in the US isn’t always eligible to vote.”
The community leaders found that independent state laws can create confusion among voters (and among those assisting them), particularly when it comes to determining who is a citizen. Citizenship is determined by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and is also covered by the 14th Amendment – birthright citizenship. According to Zell, while most states consider children who have one or both parents who are citizens and once resided in the United States eligible to vote, many states do not allow the second generation to vote, even if they are paying US taxes.
Republican community leaders had to familiarize themselves with different state laws. While all voters were treated with utmost patience, voters from swing states, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, were given special attention.
Or Yehuda resident Sarah Koren, a Bucks County, Pennsylvania, voter, became the Israeli expert on Pennsylvania’s challenging ballot, along with Shmuel Levine from Netanya. They worked together to bring in the Pennsylvania vote.
“There were so many lawsuits in Bucks County in September that they never even constructed a ballot,” Koren said. “Once you put your information into the FPCA [Federal Post Card Application], Pennsylvania’s system was horrible. It’s far more complicated than any other state. When women were listed under their maiden names or married names, sometimes that name lined up and was approved, and other times it was rejected. In Allegheny County, they refused to take any request for ballots from voters that didn’t list affiliations.”
She said that she always advised people not to identify as members of the Republican Party, lest the ballots be rejected by Pennsylvania.
In Pennsylvania, no electronic signatures were allowed; and, unlike New Jersey, people were not allowed to simply email ballots – they had to be sent in by mail as well.
“Almost every single voter required extensive research. Many had to redo their FPCA ballot requests.
“Even the envelope protocols were confusing. There had to be an inner envelope that was blank and sealed, and an outer envelope that was preprinted with the address, but the preprinted envelopes didn’t have USA as part of the absentee envelope,” she recounted. “If the voter used blue pen on the envelope and black pen on the other documents, it would be invalidated, so many people had to redo their ballots after they had already filled them out. Each ward and district had to be specified on a separate document. On the outer envelope of the FPCA, there was an individual bar code that couldn’t be shared.
“Pennsylvania was frustrating, and in some cases heartbreaking; I had people who worked so hard, only to get emails saying that their ballots were rejected. The tracking system was atrocious. Pennsylvania scheduled a Zoom call for the rejected voters from counties in Pennsylvania, and it took place on Friday night – on our Shabbat.”
Koren advised her voters not to participate. She had to teach the Israelis some basics.
“I taught voters to write the date with the month first instead of the day, and I explained the difference between the ‘Print your name’ and ‘Sign your full name’ boxes. Most Israelis don’t know cursive writing. And, of course, many only spoke Hebrew, which complicated things even more. And after the ballots were submitted, Pennsylvania had no way to know whether or not the ballot had been counted, just that it was received.”
Many Pennsylvania voters were missing ballot pages, so the demand for help increased greatly in the final weeks of the election.
Koren said her background as an ICU nurse helped her keep people calm and enabled her to troubleshoot and think on her feet. She had to force herself to turn off her phones to take bathroom breaks and eat, and she worked 12- and 14-hour days, into the early hours of the morning, especially the last two weeks before the election.
In all of the districts that Koren helped with, Republicans won Senate seats, and most of those districts swung for Trump. She watched the election results the morning after the election with bated breath.
“As Pennsylvania came in for Trump, I just started yelling,” Koren said. “I felt like I really contributed to Trump’s win. I put in blood, sweat, and tears, and to see that we flipped it was just amazing.”
Attorney Michael Schoen, a resident of Ra’anana, had served as a senior-level official in the State Attorney’s Office at the Justice Ministry, as well as liaison to Bill Barr in 1991 when he was US attorney-general. He said he received numerous calls, mostly from elderly people in Ra’anana who eagerly wanted to vote but didn’t understand how to find the FPCA website or how to register as overseas voters. As the word got out, the bulk of his callers came from well beyond his region.
“I had callers from Herzliya, Ramat Hasharon, Petah Tikva and Caesarea, Hod Hasharon, Shoham, Rosh Ha’ayin, north Tel Aviv – throughout Dan and Sharon. And one family would bring you 11 or 12 more voters,” he said.
Votes mushroom in haredi communities
“We had several experts from haredi communities to help expedite the votes in Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh, and beyond,” Zell said. “Our outreach was extremely successful.”
Alan Silver, a South African immigrant who never lived in the United States and is not eligible to vote, signed on to be the community leader in Telz-Stone to help others vote for Trump. He felt it was a special mission for Israel to help Trump get elected.
He turned his store – Kol Bo Alan, which sells computer equipment, small appliances, and more – into a branch of the Republican Party to help voters fill out their forms. Thousands of voters took him up on it. Although he generally closes his store on Hol Hamoed Sukkot, he obtained special rabbinical approval to keep his store open to help voters register and get their ballots.
“They knew how important this vote was for the Jewish people,” Silver explained. “Some of the yeshiva heads actually sent students into the store to vote. And then the yeshiva heads came in themselves with their families.”
One vote quickly turned into many more, as large families registered and voted.
Since there was no actual blessing to thank God for Trump’s win, Silver announced a program to give out candy to celebrate the election.
“The blessing ‘shehakol nehiye bidvaro’ means clearly that all is attributable to God, so I announced a candy giveaway to have children bless God for Donald Trump’s victory. When I opened the store the day after the win, hundreds of children were lined up outside to get their candy and say their special blessing,” he said.
Silver took his task of getting out the vote beyond his store. While waiting to undergo an angioplasty at Hadassah-University Medical Center, Silver heard two people speaking with American accents. He immediately convinced them to vote.
Beryl Pepper, father of 11 from Ma’alot Dafna, was another haredi expert, helping people with no access to smartphones, WhatsApp, and in some cases email or computers.
A father of two young children, Ya’acov Baram, who lives near Katzrin, drove from all points north to as far as Tel Aviv to sit with people and explain the registration system and help them obtain their ballots.
Michigan was another swing state heartily represented by a great many from the Jewish communities of Oak Park, Southfield, West Bloomfield, and Detroit. One Michigan voter spawned as many as 30 or 40 votes when second-generation family members were counted.
Koren recalled that a cousin of Barbra Streisand – a known Democratic leftist – came to her from Safed. He apologized for his relative’s public statements and political leanings, but Koren laughed, explaining that while the iconic singer represented only one Hollywood vote, the man from Safed had seven voting-age children, who together more than canceled out her vote.
“After all was said and done, we won,” said the cousin. ■
This article was originally published at www.jpost.com
