About ESRA Magazine

ESRA Magazine

ESRA Magazine is the English-language magazine of ESRA, the English Speaking Residents Association of Israel. Published in print and online, with the association's office in Herzliya in the Tel Aviv District, it carries features, community news and services for English-speaking immigrants and residents across Israel. The magazine is the publishing arm of a volunteer organisation founded in 1979 by English-speaking residents of Herzliya and Kfar Shmaryahu, which describes itself as Israel's largest English-speaking community network. ESRA Magazine is written, edited and distributed substantially by volunteers — more than 900 ESRA volunteers include the editors and distributors of the magazine among their number — and it has reached issue numbers above 220, with a chairperson's message in issue 221 marking the association's 45th anniversary. For English-speaking newcomers to Israel, known as olim, and for veteran immigrants alike, it is one of the most durable community magazines in the country.

The association behind the magazine: ESRA's founding in 1979

ESRA was formed in 1979 when a group of English-speaking residents of Herzliya and Kfar Shmaryahu came together, primarily to fulfil a social need and to assist their integration into Israeli society. The founder and president was Merle Guttmann. The new English Speaking Residents Association soon expanded to include other towns in the Sharon area such as Ramat Hasharon, Kfar Saba, Hod Hasharon and Raanana, and over the years it spread to areas wherever the need arose, providing a framework for English-speaking activities in the community. An ESRA history published in the magazine itself counts twenty branches across the country, including a branch in Modiin, and describes an organisation established more than four decades ago whose reason for existence was to create a framework for English speakers, immigrants and old-timers, in which they would feel at home and part of a community with others sharing the same language and a similar cultural background.

ESRA is an independent non-profit organisation run by volunteers. Its stated aims are threefold: helping the integration of English-speaking families and new immigrants by providing social, cultural, educational and civic activities; encouraging English speakers to volunteer in the community, thereby helping others and at the same time becoming a useful part of Israeli society; and initiating and running projects in the community through the ESRA Community Fund to aid immigrants from distressed countries and other disadvantaged sectors of Israeli society. The magazine serves all three aims at once: it informs newcomers, it is itself produced by volunteers, and it reports on and recruits for the association's community projects.

Recognition and growth

ESRA's contribution to immigrant absorption has been formally recognised. In 1992 ESRA and its president and founder, Merle Guttmann, received the President's Award for Volunteering for its contribution to the absorption of immigrants. In 1999 Guttmann was presented with the Volunteer Award of the Year for outstanding leadership by the National Council for Voluntarism in Israel, and the association records five additional awards for its president and numerous individual awards for its volunteers from their local municipalities. The organisation maintains contact with other immigrant organisations, with local municipalities and with the government bodies responsible for immigrant absorption and social welfare. In recent years ESRA has worked with partners such as Gvahim, the organisation supporting the professional integration of immigrants, on combined services for newcomers — presented in ESRA Magazine under the banner of getting it right in Israel personally, professionally and socially — and its chief executive, Sunny Marshansky, has described the association's mission from her own experience of feeling like a stranger on arrival and wanting new immigrants to have a better experience.

That growth gives the magazine its audience. ESRA describes itself as Israel's largest English-speaking community network, providing social and cultural activities, personal, financial and emotional support, and opportunities to volunteer, while running education and welfare projects for weaker sectors of Israeli society. A magazine published for that network is not a commercial title chasing newsstand sales. It is a membership publication with a national community attached, delivered to readers who share a language, a migration experience and, through the branches, a local social life.

The magazine: print, online and volunteer-made

ESRA Magazine appears in print and online at its own site, magazine.esra.org.il, where articles are published as a continuing online magazine alongside the print issues. Issue numbering passing 221 by the association's 45th anniversary year indicates a long and regular publishing history. The chairperson's message in issue 221, written for the 45th anniversary of the association, reflects the magazine's role in difficult times: it records pride and gratitude alongside awareness of a challenging year of conflict and hostages affecting the community, and describes ESRA as a steadfast pillar of support whose commitment to helping newcomers and fostering a spirit of giving back had become more crucial than ever. It sets out the magazine's recurring themes in the chairperson's own words — a welcoming and supportive community for people making aliyah, practical assistance with housing and employment, social and cultural activities, and support programs designed to help newcomers navigate their new reality and build a life in Israel.

The magazine is made by its community. ESRA's volunteer pages state that more than 900 volunteers act as mentors and movers of cultural, educational and social activities and clubs, as helpers to children and families in need, as editors and distributors of the ESRA Magazine, and as volunteers in the ESRA offices. That production model shapes the content: branch news written by branch members, features about local people and projects, practical service information, and first-person accounts of immigration and volunteering that a commercial newsroom would rarely assign. The magazine's Hebrew pun is part of its identity — ESRA, in Hebrew letters, echoes ezra, help and assistance — and its pages treat helping as both subject and method.

Content: features, community news and services

The content of ESRA Magazine falls into the three streams its directory description names: features, community news and services. Features range across Israeli life as English speakers meet it — profiles of members and volunteers, accounts of the association's second-hand shops and bookshops in Modiin, Raanana and Zichron Yaakov, reports on education projects, and essays on Israeli society, history and everyday culture. A magazine feature on the ESRA store in Modiin, for example, combines an interview about the shops' philosophy with a reader's own account of finding nostalgic English children's books there — the kind of small, concrete community journalism that binds a dispersed readership together.

Community news covers the branches, clubs, lectures, hikes, cultural activities and celebrations of a national association, and marks collective moments: anniversaries, awards, memorial and crisis periods, and the arrival of new groups of immigrants. Services content is practical: guidance for newcomers on employment, housing, rights and integration, information about ESRA's support programs, and signposting to partner organisations. The joint ESRA and Gvahim initiative reported in the magazine is typical — a one-stop approach offering olim relevant opportunities and options to get on track and stay on track in their new home, personally, professionally and socially.

Projects the magazine chronicles

Because ESRA runs substantial welfare and education projects, the magazine doubles as the record of a working non-profit. Its chief executive has described in its pages how, over five years, more than 1,000 students became part of the ESRA family — four times the previous number — through partnerships with other non-governmental organisations and universities including Reichman University in Herzliya and the Rothberg International School at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with students assisting in shops, organising activities, supporting office operations and joining community projects. Foremost among those projects is Students Build a Community, operating in Netanya, Akko and South Tel Aviv, which offers financially stressed students free housing in disadvantaged neighbourhoods in exchange for mentoring local schoolchildren and becoming social activists. ESRA Magazine reports such projects not as press releases but as community stories, following the students, children and neighbourhoods involved, and in doing so it recruits the next cohort of volunteers and donors from its own readership.

Audience: English-speaking Israel

The magazine's audience is defined by language and experience rather than by age or profession: English-speaking immigrants from the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, Australia and elsewhere, together with veteran residents and English-speaking Israelis who share their cultural world. For a new immigrant, the practical and emotional problems are similar whatever the country of origin — Hebrew, bureaucracy, employment, schooling, loneliness — and ESRA Magazine addresses them in the reader's own language, with the authority of an organisation whose volunteers have solved the same problems themselves. Its Herzliya base reflects the geography of its founding community in the Sharon plain, but its branch network and online edition make it a national publication, read wherever English-speaking communities exist in Israel, from the north to the south and in Jerusalem.

Place in Israeli magazine publishing

Israel's magazine market is overwhelmingly Hebrew, and its best-known titles — from TheMarker Magazine to Lady Globes — serve Hebrew readers. English-language publishing in Israel is led by newspapers and news sites. ESRA Magazine occupies a different and rarer niche: a long-running English-language community magazine, produced by a volunteer association, sustained for more than four decades, and numbering its issues in the hundreds. It belongs to the tradition of immigrant association publishing, in which a community writes its own record, but its scale — a national branch network, a community fund, nationally recognised volunteer leadership, and a print-plus-digital magazine operation run from Herzliya — sets it apart from a synagogue bulletin or a local newsletter. It is, in effect, the magazine of record of English-speaking Israel.

Significance and legacy

ESRA Magazine's significance is cumulative. Issue by issue, it has documented how English-speaking immigrants built a permanent community inside Israeli society: founding branches, staffing shops and projects, mentoring children in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, supporting each new wave of newcomers, and marking, in its chairperson's messages, the national moments — celebration and crisis alike — as one community among Israel's many. Its threefold parent mission, integration, volunteering and community aid, is enacted in the magazine's own production by volunteer editors and distributors. Published in English, in print and online, from Herzliya in the Tel Aviv District, ESRA Magazine is recorded in this directory as the magazine of ESRA, the English Speaking Residents Association founded in 1979 — a publication whose subject is a community, whose makers are that community, and whose long run is itself evidence of the integration it exists to support.