Today, at our Second Annual CFOIC Conference of Communities, we handed out over a million dollars to more than 30 communities and several regional councils for security and community needs. These are funds that you, our trusted friends and supporters, have contributed during these past few months. Some of you donated small sums, whatever you could manage to give. And some of you donated larger sums. But all of you took part in this. YOU deserve our thanks.

For most of the last two years, Israel has been embroiled in an ongoing election campaign, with four elections taking place in less than two years. Most of the time, we were governed by transition governments and for a short time by a permanent government that only lasted a few months. It has been chaotic, to say the least.

Israel experienced a totally new reality during these past few weeks. A reality that could have been expected, a reality that some might even say was an obvious development. But at the end of the day, we woke up one morning and realized that the Arab-Israeli Conflict that we have been talking about for decades, was far worse than what we may have hoped. That whatever progress we thought we made in the past 20 years may well have been cosmetic at best, or at worst a deliberate manipulation of the Israeli psyche.

A terrible tragedy happened late Thursday night. As tens of thousands of people were exiting a major prayer gathering at Mt. Meron to celebrate the Lag Ba’Omer festival, a bottleneck was created, a few people slipped and fell, and in a domino cascade hundreds were crushed and trapped. Forty-five people lost their lives that night, including children and teen-agers, and hundreds more were injured.