Michael Freund is an American Israeli political activist who advocates on behalf of individuals and groups who self-identify as Jews or would-be Jews, including self-described descendants of the Lost tribes of Israel, crypto-Jews, hidden Jews, and Jews forcibly assimilated under Communist rule, and converts to Judaism, attempting to regularize their legal status as Jews under Israeli law and secure permission for them to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. He founded the organization Shavei Israel.
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Freund attracted controversy both because the immigrants he advocates for are religiously Orthodox in a tightly contested political system, and because they often settle in the occupied West Bank.
Childhood and education
Freund grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and attended the Ramaz School and Princeton. He spent a post-college year in Israel, studying in a yeshiva and working part-time for the concert pianist and journalist David Bar-Illan. He returned to New York as a speechwriter and aide with the Israeli Mission to the United Nations, then went on to earn a graduate degree in business administration from Columbia University.
Freund married Sarah Green and they made aliyah in 1995 with their infant son.
Freund is the son of Harry Freund, co-founder of the merchant-banking firm Balfour Investors and grandson of Miriam Freund-Rosenthal, a former President of Hadassah Women's Zionist Organization of America.
Early career
Freund worked for a year with a short-lived NGO called Peace Watch, a right-of-center group monitoring the Oslo Accords. When Peace Watch closed, he took a job with the Sapanut Bank in Tel Aviv, work he did not enjoy. In 1996, he became the deputy director of communications under Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. After Netanyahu lost an election 1999 election to Ehud Barak in 1999, Freund took a job with Ruder Finn, a Jerusalem public relations firm. At some point, backed by family money, he left his job in public relations to devote himself to the work of "returning lost" Jewish groups to Israel.
Shavei Israel
Freund was introduced to his current political beliefs while working for the Prime Minister, when he read a letter from the Bnei Menashe community of eastern India, a group that claims descent from the lost Israelite tribe of Menashe. In the letter, they pleaded with the Prime Minister to enable them to make aliyah. He invited Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail to meet with him in the Prime Minister's Office to discuss the work he was doing, and the two began to work together to find "lost" Jews and reunite them with the Jewish people and state.
Freund began to work with Rabbi Eliyahu Avichail whose organization Amishav was founded in 1975 to help "lost" Jews "return" to Israel, splitting with him to found Shavei Israel in 2002. He became the largest funder of Shavei Israel.
Freund believed that the Bnei Menashe and similar groups "constitute a large, untapped demographic and spiritual reservoir for Israel and the Jewish people." He was criticized both by secularist parties objecting to the arrival of new, religiously orthodox voters, and by members of the political left who assert that Freund's true motive is to bolster Jewish settlement of the West Bank.