‘I don’t do ‘problems,’” Anat Vidor, the president of World WIZO (Women’s International Zionist Organization), said. “In Israel, a problem is just another item on the morning to-do list.”
Vidor, who was elected the eighth president of the venerable organization in January 2024, is a fifth-generation Israeli with a distinguished family pedigree in Zionist leadership. Growing up in the 1970s, she did not have to research her roots. Her family history was already etched onto Israel’s streets and institutions. Vidor represents the ultimate Zionist pedigree.
Vidor’s ancestors were First Aliyah pioneers – physicians from Baron Edmond James de Rothschild’s circle who helped lay the foundations of the Jewish homeland.
Her great-great-grandfather, for instance, Dr. Menachem Stein, founded Jaffa’s first Jewish hospital, established the first Hebrew library, and laid the foundations of Tel Aviv’s Neveh Tzedek.
Moreover, Vidor’s grandmother’s uncle, Dr. Aharon Meir Masie, who famously hosted Albert Einstein in his Jerusalem home, served as president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language and created the first Hebrew medical lexicon.
This legacy continued with Vidor’s great-grandfather Nachman Gelman, who planted citrus orchards in Petah Tikva, employing a young David Ben-Gurion, and with her grandparents, who rest in the Irgun heroes’ plots.
Vidor currently lives in Neveh Tzedek, just two streets away from the street named in honor of her great-great-grandfather Dr. Stein.
Her own path reflects that same builder’s spirit: fast-moving, practical, and deeply Zionist. After her IDF service, Vidor served as a Betar emissary in Australia, later completing degrees in history and communications. She went on to become president of WIZO Sydney before returning to Israel in 2018.
For Vidor, Zionism is not a trauma response or a refugee narrative; it is an intergenerational mandate. Zionism runs in her blood.
Founded in 1920 by leaders including Rebecca Sieff and Dr. Vera Weizmann, WIZO was created to help build a state shaped equally by women and men. More than a century later, the organization remains entirely female-led and has grown into the largest nonprofit organization in Israel, providing critical services across Israeli society.
Today, WIZO is a global Zionist movement with tens of thousands of members and 38 federations worldwide. Part of both the World Zionist Organization and the World Jewish Congress, Israel’s largest nonprofit has 300 institutions and 6,000 employees.
“Our federations are not just fundraising arms,” Vidor said. “They are the voting body, approving the leadership, budgets, and work plans.”
VIDOR’S LEADERSHIP in terms of these global federations, many of which are currently celebrating their centennials, focuses on transforming them into active “Zionist outposts” within their local communities. And, representing tens of thousands of members, WIZO is far more than a traditional organization.
“It’s an identity. It’s generations of WIZO women. A WIZO federation is a Zionist outpost in a community,” according to Vidor.
To fortify this global network, she has visited more than 12 countries since her election, driving an unapologetic message of Jewish unity. “My focus is on connecting Jewish women worldwide to Israel and building true community resilience,” she explained.
“In my view, Zionism is a shift of narrative. Unity isn’t about agreeing on everything; it’s the profound realization of a shared destiny – what impacts one Jewish community inevitably impacts us all,” Vidor continued.
“It is the sobering truth that no one will protect us but ourselves. The ultimate goal of Zionism is to ensure the Jewish people can live out loud and entirely uncompromised. And the realization that we are the only authors of our future.”
This grassroots impact serves as Israel’s most effective form of “soft diplomacy,” she said. WIZO allows the world to understand Israel through the prism of social welfare, child education, and gender equality.
This universal appeal famously led Pablo Picasso to donate a masterpiece to the organization, recognizing its pursuit of social justice.
In Europe, WIZO’s decades of hard work have secured elite access; major galas are frequently 50% non-Jewish, attended by top officials, including prime ministers and mayors. In Latin America, supporting the local non-Jewish community is part of the organization’s DNA. In Chile alone, 6,000 gentile children graduate annually from municipal schools named after Israeli icons, such as Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.
WHEN IT comes to hard diplomacy, since 1959 WIZO has held UN consultative status – the first Zionist organization to be granted that status.
In 2026, this legacy is becoming a real diplomatic breakthrough. WIZO is not merely attending the UN’s 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70); it is entering the commission’s formal proceedings.
Vidor was invited to deliver an oral statement at the CSW70 general discussion session, which she will deliver via Zoom due to the current war.
This is an unprecedented milestone for a Zionist organization in this exact oral format within the formal CSW framework.
At the same time, WIZO is holding a side event with the Czech Mission, together with the Dinah Project and the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, regarding accountability for conflict-related sexual violence, including the crimes of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
That, too, is a significant breakthrough, as a government that is not Israel is joining WIZO in advancing this issue within the UN framework itself.
SINCE OCTOBER 2023, WIZO has served as a backbone of Israel’s civil society. From youth villages and Naale Elite Academy programs to emergency centers for at-risk children and shelters for battered women, it is the country’s largest provider of social services.
“Routine is resilience,” Vidor said. “In wartime, the ability to preserve daily life is itself a victory. While military success matters, our mission is to keep the civilian home front functioning. We provide daily services to 70,000 people; the logistics of maintaining such a massive operation during wartime are staggering.”
A clear example of WIZO’s operational agility is its ability, within 24 hours of war, to establish daycare centers inside hospitals, enabling essential medical staff to remain on duty.
“Our strength,” said Vidor, “also lies in our ability to identify and fill the gaps that war exposes.”
After a mass mobilization of reservists, WIZO launched the Homefront Heroes initiative, offering ongoing professional support to the wives and families of IDF reservists.
It did so alongside A Father Is Born, a program set to assist men who become fathers during wartime.
Further, through its Soft Landing workshops, WIZO has also supported hundreds of families in the Gaza border communities and is now expanding this model to the North, working with local authorities and frontline communities to help rebuild resilience where it is needed most.
A central part of that effort is the Fanny Cohen Open House for Families in Sderot, which WIZO is now expanding and renovating as one of the largest resilience centers for Gaza’s border communities.
For Vidor, the most important task now is clear. It is to restore routine, strengthen the resilience of the younger generation, and help ensure that the communities of the South and the North return to a full, functioning life.
“Only 50% of the residents of the North have returned,” she noted. “And even if the security situation improves, people will not come back unless there is real civilian infrastructure that allows them to live there.”
That is why Vidor travels the world raising resources with a simple Zionist message: Israel was not built in one explosion but by “dunam by dunam.”
“If each of us does the maximum we can, that is our victory,” she said.
This is the call of the hour: to stand strong in Jewish communities abroad while strengthening the communities here in Israel. “With action comes miracles,” she said. “And the mission now is to make sure the North and the South have the civilian and social infrastructure needed for people to truly return.”
“That is Zionism. That is borders. And that is the security of the Jewish people.”
This article was written in cooperation with WIZO.