Gidi Mark

Origins and early life

Gidi Mark was born on 19 February 1956 at Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael and grew up in Rekhasim, then a town of new immigrants near Haifa, where as a boy he volunteered to help newcomers settle in.

Work and career

At his father's funeral, a friend recalled how his father used to carry beds on his back for immigrants while the boy followed with the sheets, and Mark has said the cause stayed with him from then on. After the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa and service in the Intelligence Corps, he spent about two years as a security guard at the Israeli embassy in London, then studied economics and Middle Eastern studies and took an MBA.

He has said that he first saw himself as a Jew before an Israeli on the eve of Yom Kippur in Munich, after his army service, when for the first time in his life he went to synagogue out of an inner need and not at his father's request. After the Foreign Ministry's cadet course he served three years in Turkey and a year in Bonn, and in 1993 he moved to New York as spokesman of the Israeli consulate. Leaving that post in August 1997, he ran into Yossi Beilin, who wanted every young Jew in the world to be able to visit Israel, and the philanthropists Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt soon asked him to join the project.

On 1 January 1998 he became the first employee of Taglit-Birthright Israel, as head of operations and marketing, and in 2008 he was appointed its chief executive. Under his leadership the number of young Jews coming each year grew from about 2,000 before the programme to nearly 50,000 in 2019, and by 2023 more than 800,000 young people from some 70 countries had taken part. The Jerusalem Post listed him among its fifty most influential Jews in 2018, 2022 and 2023, and the Algemeiner named him in 2023 among the hundred people positively influencing Jewish life.