$25 million gift to bring families home: philanthropist Izhar Armony bets on schools to revive communities

On October 10, 2023, Izhar Armony boarded one of the first flights from Boston to Tel Aviv. He did not have a plan.

He had a cousin, Sharon Avigdori, and her 12-year-old daughter, Noam, who had been kidnapped from Kibbutz Be’eri three days earlier and taken into Gaza.

“I felt very, very frustrated, sad and I just went,” he says. For weeks, he and a five-person team helped evacuated families find temporary housing.

Early on, that meant buying them basics like underwear and toothpaste. He could have written a check from Massachusetts.

He chose to show up. “I felt it was my responsibility because I can,” he says.

Three years later, Armony’s family has committed $25 million to Habaita, known in English as Homeward.

He founded the Israeli education nonprofit in 2024 on one idea: families come back to a place when they believe their children can thrive there.

The commitment covers part of Habaita’s $120 million five-year budget. Philanthropy is expected to fund half and the Israeli government the other half.

Jewish federations and foundations, most of them American, have pledged another $21 million, which leaves $14 million still to raise.

The gift has a deadline built in.

Habaita is designed to close in 2029, whether or not the problem it was created to solve is fully solved.

For a man who spent his career backing startups, the reasoning is practical.

“If we say we’ll be here forever, the government has no incentive to step in,” he says.

Five years, he believes, is enough time to test programs, grow the ones that work, and reach full scale.

After that, the state should carry on.

“Even if the 2029 survey doesn’t show the full impact we want to see, I feel that Habaita’s job and time to make a difference is done.”

Armony knows Israel’s border communities from the inside. He grew up on Kibbutz Malkiya, on the Lebanese border, and served as a captain in the Israel Defense Forces.

He later recalled being “stationed in the field under fire” when “we were all just kids” and said a young officer’s only authority comes from leading by example.

I still apply those principles I learned at 20 or 21,” he said. He then spent seven years in Tel Aviv as vice president of marketing at Onyx Interactive before taking that lesson to America.

The American part of his story runs about 30 years. Armony earned an MBA in finance from the Wharton School and a master’s in international studies from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1997 he joined Charles River Ventures, the Boston-born venture firm now known as CRV, at a time when Route 128 still rivaled Silicon Valley.

He stayed for more than two decades. CRV was the original investor in Twitter, and Twitter remains the deal most often linked to his name.

He also backed six companies that reached billion-dollar valuations, including the Cambridge marketing-software company HubSpot, the Boston firms Drift and Cybereason, and iBasis, Virtusa and RPX. Forbes put him on its Midas List of top venture investors four times.

He has served on the board of TerraPower, the nuclear-energy company, and has been a director of Virtusa since 2004. He retired from making new CRV investments in 2022, though he still manages his holdings from earlier funds.

He lives with his wife, Noamit “Noni” Armony-Erel, in Arlington, Massachusetts, where they raised three children.

He is a U.S. citizen.

In his spare time, he races off-road rally cars across the Sahara and the Atacama.

Before October 7, his giving was steady and quiet, and much of it went to Boston institutions.

His family foundation, the Boustan Charitable Foundation, received its U.S. tax exemption in 2022 and is registered in Arlington.

It focused mainly on shared-society work in Israel, including scholarships for Arab students at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. The couple’s names also appear on American donor rolls: the Boston Foundation’s civic-leadership circle, the JCDS Jewish day school in Boston, and the keystone donors of Cornell Hillel’s capital campaign. Israel had been a family vacation once or twice a year.

After the attacks, Armony spent 165 days there in one year and 155 the next. “My attention and time shifted to Israel,” he says.

eJewishPhilanthropy calls Armony an “Oct. 8 Israeli.” Much has been written about American Jews whose lives changed after the attacks.

Less has been written about Israelis who built their careers in America and found themselves pulled back.

His family’s story also has an American thread.

Sharon and Noam Avigdori came home on November 25, 2023, after 50 days in captivity, part of a temporary ceasefire brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the United States.

Habaita grew out of the five Gaza-border kibbutzim Armony helped first: Kfar Aza, Nahal Oz, Kissufim, Re’im, and Holit.

Their leaders told him families would stay away unless the region gave them a reason to return. In early 2024, Habaita surveyed 350 displaced families with school-age children from the Western Negev and the Galilee. Between 30% and 40% said they might never go home.

“That is devastating, a disaster,” Armony said at the time.

“If you lose Galilee, if you lose Negev, the country just shrinks.”

Then came a second finding: when families were asked about an improved school system, 83% said they would be willing to return.

The first test came quickly.

Within four months, Habaita launched the Summer of Tkuma, a six-week camp for students in grades four through 12. Tkuma means “rebirth,” and it is also the name of the government administration rebuilding the Gaza border region.

Nearly 11,000 children came. Teenagers took English and math, learned to cook and cut hair, and spent evenings on beanbag chairs talking with social workers.

Hen Cohen, a Habaita project coordinator, remembers lawns that had been empty for nine months suddenly full of children “jumping, shouting, and having fun.” Armony described the work more simply: “It’s rebuilding love and faith. That’s what we’re doing there.”

Boston was there first.

Combined Jewish Philanthropies, Boston’s Jewish Federation, gave $500,000 to that first summer from its Israel Emergency Fund. “CJP was the first federation to believe in what we were trying to accomplish,” Armony said. CJP later gave another $1 million to bring teachers and counselors to northern Israel.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington gave $500,000. UJA-Federation of New York gave through its Day After Fund.

Federations in Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, and San Diego followed, along with the Jewish Federations of North America and family foundations, including the Frieze Family, J. Blair and Tina Frank, and de Toledo foundations.

Habaita’s main government partner in the south is the Tekuma Administration.

Sigal Moran, Habaita’s CEO, has said plainly that without CJP’s support, “it would be difficult to do what we’re doing.”

Habaita funds programs and leaves buildings to others. It operates in government facilities and existing schools, where students in the Western Negev and the Galilee can try technology, the performing arts, and competitive sports.

One program fills a converted hangar with robotics, drones, and machining equipment, and classes from across the region come for weekly three-hour sessions. Habaita now works in 14 municipalities.

It served 9,900 students in its first summer and says it reached 40,000 by the 2025-26 school year. In its first year, it recruited 374 new teachers and supported 52 new projects started by local educators. Its annual philanthropic budget has grown from about $3.25 million to $13 million.

With government matching, the full effort runs about $26 million a year through 2029.

The north has been harder.

Many Galilee evacuations lasted 15 to 18 months, much longer than most in the Negev, and some towns have seen fewer than half their residents return.

Armony says the region’s school problems did not begin with the war. “They were just exposed, and [the war] made it worse.”

So Habaita organized towns into regional clusters that share resources, so no small municipality has to build excellence on its own. A new secondary school opened in the Galilee, the first there in 47 years.

Families in remote towns no longer have to send gifted children to the center of the country, a point Yesud HaMa’ala Mayor Tamir Shalom made when he said, “We’ll bring education to us.” Habaita says much of its success comes from humility.

That means working with longtime civil servants rather than politicians and letting officials take the credit.

Armony jokes that one district head, 34 years in the job, knows how many pencils every classroom needs.

The government is now adopting the approach, which is the outcome Armony planned for. Israel’s Education Ministry has allocated NIS 26 million for regional excellence centers along the northern border.

Moran writes that a NIS 88 million, four-year budget has been approved for the Galilee. The Jewish Federations of North America calls the decision proof of a model it helped build with Homeward.

“Rebuilding and securing Israel’s northern border requires more than just temporary relief,” said Rebecca Caspi, who leads the federations’ Israel office. “It demands a long-term, strategic commitment to the people who call this region home.”

Armony is candid about what money can and cannot do.

“Our ultimate goal is to drive demographic growth in the Western Negev and the Galilee regions,” he says.

He knows schools are only one factor alongside security and jobs and that the final 2029 study will not be able to isolate their effect. Habaita measures progress by tracking, year after year, how parents and students feel about their schools, and he says early readings show satisfaction rising.

If local governments decide not to fund a program after 2029, he accepts that. “It is their right,” he says. “[It’s] not for us to force them.”

Next month, Armony is listed as a speaker at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly in Washington, D.C., from November 8 to 10.

Many of the American institutions that helped build Habaita will be there.

The story he brings is one of partnership: Boston dollars matched by Israeli government funds, and private money used to test ideas that the state can then expand. It is also a story about place.

A boy from a border kibbutz built a career in Boston, then flew back when his family needed him.

Today, in a converted hangar in the Negev, a 14-year-old is building her first drone, and in the Galilee, a teacher has moved north to a classroom that went without one for too long.

Armony will never know most of their names.

But he has bet $25 million that if those children are given a reason to stay, their families will come home too.