Veterans: On target

A profile of Lynn Lipschitz, 56, who made aliya from South Africa to Tel Aviv in 1978.

By GLORIA DEUTSCH
Lynn Lipschitz (photo credit: GLORIA DEUTSCH)
Lynn Lipschitz
(photo credit: GLORIA DEUTSCH)
Israel is a popular venue for international conferences and no one is happier about that than Lynn Lipschitz, joint CEO of Target Conferences, which she established in 1993.
The company is known for its ability to organize any conference, whether it’s a huge gathering of several hundred scientists and doctors or an intimate get-together of a handful of like-minded enthusiasts.
Lynn made aliya from South Africa in 1978, a single girl of 19 who went against her parents’ wishes and took the plunge to move here alone. It has been a long and hard road, with setbacks, health issues and all the usual problems, but today she is happy, settled in her relationship with Rafi, a businessman, and she is “grandmother” to his three grandchildren.
She has also been a foster mother to troubled Israeli teenagers for many years. “I could never have children of my own,” she says. “I work a 15-hour day and if I’d wanted motherhood, I would have had to close the company down. It was a way I felt I could give back for all the good things in my life.”
She grew up in Johannesburg, and was a keen Zionist although her family was not. “Maybe it was my Hebrew teacher in the private Jewish school I went to who first aroused my interest in Israel,” she muses. “From a very young age, I was always top of the class in Hebrew and had a leaning towards Judaism.”
She joined Betar and became a youth leader, holding meetings every Sunday at which the ideology of the movement was discussed and guest lecturers came to strengthen the Zionist feelings of the children. “We had a very large group – probably one of the strongest Betar associations in South Africa at the time – and many of us subsequently made aliya,” she recounts. “We continued being good friends after we moved to Israel.”
When she announced to her family that she was leaving for Israel, her father tried to dissuade her, offering to fund her university education and even pay her a salary if she agreed to stay. By now, it was a matter of principle that she was going to make it in Israel – alone. The first week she was able to stay in a hotel, for which her mother paid; then she was completely on her own.
“Luckily for me, I was able to get a room at the Tel-Fed [South African Zionist Federation] hostel in Givatayim,” she recalls. ”It was rather spartan accommodation with a shared refrigerator at the end of a corridor, but I was able to stay for three months until I moved into my own apartment in Ramat Gan. I could have gone to a kibbutz to learn Hebrew but I was very right-wing at the time, and the idea of a kibbutz was anathema to me because of my Betar principles.”
She never did learn Hebrew officially, just picking it up as she went along. With no money or qualifications, Lynn decided she must start working as soon as possible; through the Manpower agency, she got her first job in Motorola’s management office. This gave her some security, but she was bored.
“In 1980, I had a complete change of direction; I moved to Eilat and opened a restaurant with a partner,” she says. It was a golden time for Eilat, with charter flights from Europe arriving directly to the Red Sea resort full of tourists eager to sample local fare.
“It was called L’Escargot (The Snail) and was very non-kosher,” recounts Lynn. “I never tasted the food, just helped to run the place.”
After a year she had to leave Eilat because of health problems. “I had a bad thyroid problem and it was not diagnosed,” she says. Returning to Tel Aviv, she was hospitalized and realized she would have to return to South Africa for a time. “I had debts and had to go back and work to repay them.”
She couldn’t wait to get back to Israel and returned in 1983, finding work as a secretary in a travel company. “I decided it was time I became qualified in something and studied for a travel agent license and then a foreign currency consultant,” she says.
Shortly afterward, she set up Target – and has never looked back.
Two of the children she fostered over the years are now adults, and they are still very much in touch. One boy whose family had moved to Canada came back alone and was living on the streets when Lynn took him in. “He was with me from the age of 15 until he went in the army,” she says.
Another was a girl who had run away from home, who stayed for several years. She proudly shows photos of her “grandchildren.”
Meeting Rafi in 1996 has given her the family life that was lacking until then. “His children became like my own,” she says. “They don’t see me as the wicked stepmother.” She loves the role of grandmother and plays it to the hilt – although Target is still very much her baby.