Yossi Baumol

Yossi Baumol (born 1953) is an Israeli right-wing activist who is director of the Hebron Fund and formerly served as director of Yeshivat Ateret Cohanim.

Education

Born to Holocaust survivors and raised in Brooklyn, New York, USA, Baumol graduated from Torah Vodaath High School, studied under Rabbi Tuvia Goldstein for five years at Yeshiva Emek Halacha in New York, studied briefly at Lakewood Yeshiva in New Jersey and received a degree in Philosophy and English Literature from Brooklyn College.

Career

After a short business career in the USA, Baumol moved to Israel in 1977, with his wife Sarah and their oldest daughter. In Israel, Yossi studied Management Systems Analysis at the Finance Ministry’s School of Management Disciplines.

Baumol served as a management consultant at the Jewish Agency. In the four months he worked there he caused a stir with his report showing that loans being made to new immigrants could be doubled in size if the Jewish Agency would save the cosst of collecting the loans and instead turn them into grants. While working at the Jewish Agency, Yossi met the future founder of the Efrat settlement, Moshe Moskowitz and became an Efrat activist, serving on the founding settler’s committee and becoming one of Efrat’s first families in 1983 where he has lived ever since.

In 1978 Baumol joined the staff of Shaare Zedek Hospital where he worked in the department that planned the administrative aspects of the move into the new Medical Center. He later headed up the Medical Center’s Forms Department. From 1982 to 1985 he served as the Chief Assistant for Organization and Planning at the Israeli Social Security Institute’s Division of Old Age and Survivors' Benefits.

In 1985 Baumol was brought in as executive Director of the Hebron Torah Academy founded by Rabbi Dan Beeri. This was the first elementary school to implement the Barkai method, and in August 1990 Baumol succeeded in convincing the Education Ministry to adopt the Barkai Method as a recognized, alternate track of Religious Zionist public school education.

At the same time Baumol was elected as the head of the opposition party on Efrat’s City Council. When the First Intifada broke out in 1987 and Efrat students were hesitant to continue commuting to the Hebron Torah Academy, Baumol took advantage of his position on the Efrat City Council to lead the struggle to establish the Orot Etzion Institutions in Efrat – today the largest of more than 30 Barkai schools throughout the world and the single largest educational institution between Jerusalem and Beersheba. Kfar Etzion's Yochanan Ben Yaakov, a longtime senior Education Ministry official, claimed it was Baumol's cogent and moving appeal to Education Minister Zevulun Hammer that secured the recognition of Orot Etzion’s status by the Ministry. Yossi was also instrumental in helping the establishment of additional Barkai Schools in the Benjamin and Samaria regions as well as the establishment of the Barkai Yeshiva in Brooklyn.

In 1988, Baumol was asked by his friend New York City Councilman Noach Dear to join him and others on the first visit of an Israeli rabbi to the Soviet Union – Rabbi Simcha HaCohen Kook. Working covertly for the underground Religious Zionist organization "Machanayim" headed by Pinchas Polonsky, Baumol smuggled dozens of Jewish books into the Soviet Union, met with refusenik cells in the greater Moscow area and photographed and smuggled out lists of Hebrew teachers and other important information.

In 1990, after having achieved official status for the Hebron Torah Academy and its "Barkai" curriculum, Yossi left Hebron to become the Executive Director of Ateret Cohanim in the Jerusalem Old City|Old City]] of Jerusalem. During his 15 years there, Baumol succeeded in developing the Yeshiva, founding the Ateret Pre-Military Academy and putting Ateret Cohanim on the map of American Jewish organizations as the Jerusalem Reclamation Project (JRP). Baumol had a leading role in running the JRP annual dinner which became the first and foremost New York area celebration of "Yom Yerushalayim". Baumol became a popular speaker and writer on Religious Zionism and as an outspoken proponent of Zionism was often quoted and interviewed by Israeli and foreign media. He led tours of the Western Wall Tunnels, the Old City, Kever Rachel, Gush Etzion and Hebron and lectured in synagogues and communities across the United States.

In 2005 Baumol left Ateret Cohanim to return to Hebron as the head of the Hebron Fund. While he was still working in Jerusalem, Yossi convinced the heads of Hebron Jewish Community to begin purchasing properties from Arabs as was being done by Ateret Cohanim in East Jerusalem and made the initial connection with the Arab middleman that led to the eventual purchase of "Beit HaShalom" in Hebron. Baumol continues to lecture and guide tours together with his administrative and fundraising duties as the executive director of the Hebron Fund.

Family

Baumol's wife Sarah is an equal and active partner in all his Zionist activities and continues to devote all her spare time to the development of Orot Etzion. The couple have nine children.