Last Thursday I went to The Michael Levin Base annual gala at the Jerusalem Theatre, which I wrote about beforehand. Now that I’ve sat through it, I have a few things to add and one urgent ask.
The evening was what was advertised. Michael Dickson of StandWithUs emceed. Jonathan Conricus, the former IDF spokesman, and Ezra Cohen, Panama’s ambassador to Israel, spoke. The panel, “Three Years Since October 7th: Where Are We Today?”, had Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, Diane Neal, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Tila Falic-Levi, Yaakov Katz, Adir Schwarz and Joseph Cohen.
Meeting Joseph Cohen was a real thrill. He founded the Israel Advocacy Movement and has spent more than a decade fighting Antisemitism and anti-Israel propaganda in public. He’s one of the few people doing that online who is informative and fun to watch at the same time.
The crowd skewed toward Jerusalem retirees, and I say that with affection. At some point in the evening I wondered how much some of the people in that room would pay to be 18 to 21 again. Probably a lot. Now think about who is living those years for Israel right now. Lone soldiers and bnai sheruth are giving the best years of their lives to the Jewish people, far from home and mostly without family nearby. If you remember being that age, you know what that costs. We owe them, and the least we can do is help.
They also showed a short film about the new Base at 206 Jaffa Road in Jerusalem. It looks amazing. Modern, slick, almost zen. A Tel Aviv branch is coming too.
Now, Walter
I met Walter Bingham at the gala, and I’ve also met him at a neighbor’s Shabbat lunch. Afterward we went over to his apartment, which is right next door, and I was floored. There are awards everywhere, and photos of him with notable people he’s met over the years. He’s quite a character, and he’s about to do something that makes everything else in this post look lazy.
Walter was born Wolfgang Billig in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1924. He got out in 1939 on the Kindertransport, the rescue effort that brought thousands of mostly Jewish children from Nazi territory to Britain. He joined the British Army, drove an ambulance, and landed at Normandy in 1944. When German fire knocked out his ambulance, he kept pulling wounded soldiers to safety under heavy fire, and King George VI gave him the Military Medal for it. France later gave him the Legion of Honor. Because he spoke German, the army moved him to analyzing captured Nazi documents and counter-intelligence work. He ended up interrogating Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, who claimed he knew nothing about the destruction of the Jews. Ribbentrop was hanged after Nuremberg.
Then Walter got even more interesting, if that’s even possible. He built a career in British journalism and broadcasting, modeled, acted, played a wizard in the first two Harry Potter movies, and worked as Santa Claus at Harrods and Selfridges, two of London’s fanciest department stores. He moved to Israel in 2004 at age 80 and applied for a job at Kol Israel, the national radio. They turned him down for being too old. So he went to Israel National News, where he’s hosted a weekly show called Walter’s World ever since. At 97 he got a Guinness World Record as the world’s oldest journalist. His Wikipedia page is worth your time.
The Walter Bingham Skydive
Walter also jumps out of airplanes. He became Israel’s oldest skydiver in 2018 at age 94 and jumped again at 100 (watch it). On Friday, October 23, at 11:00 a.m., he’s going again, from 13,000 feet over the Bar Yehuda Airfield near Masada. He is 102 years old.
The jump is a fundraiser for The Michael Levin Base. The goal is $13,000, one dollar for every foot. When the Base announced the jump on October 11, a bit over $2,300 had come in, so he has a long way to go and not much time.
Please donate at causematch.com/walter. Ten bucks, a hundred bucks, whatever you can. A 102-year-old Holocaust survivor and D-Day veteran is willing to jump out of an airplane for these kids. You can click a link.
And if you missed the gala, you can still give through the gala page or directly at thebase.org.il.
― Tom Robbins
