For years, organizers of the Salute to Israel Parade have puzzled over a little mystery. While the annual parade attracts tens or hundreds of thousands of marchers and spectators — most of them American Jews — one group that might be expected to show up and salute has almost never shown up: Israelis.
As grand marshal of Sunday’s parade, one of David Borowich’s duties is to get Israelis to attend.
There are an estimated 400,000 Israelis living in the New York metropolitan area, many of them dual citizens or longtime residents with children born here. But in proportion to their numbers, their participation in the parade has been “marginal,” according to Michael S. Miller, executive vice president and chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, a parade sponsor.
Parade organizers this year, which is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, have for the first time tried to reach out to Israelis and other Jewish communities long underrepresented, including Russian immigrants. But Mr. Miller said no one would know until the parade kicked off on Sunday morning at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue whether those efforts were successful.
If the Jewish population of the New York area is an estimated 1.5 million, as recent surveys indicate, then by the equation of an old joke, there are potentially 3 million opinions about the reason for the Israel Day parade’s Israeli gap.
Mr. Miller has a couple of his own. “For a long time, we were an English-speaking group of people organizing a parade in support of a Hebrew-speaking country,” he said. “They may have felt unwelcome.”
“Or there may be cultural gaps between American Jews and Jews from other parts of the world,” he added.
Israelis interviewed last week — some of whom have attended the parade and others who have not — saw a multitude of factors in play: cultural, political, religious, existential and some too complicated to explain to anyone not Israeli.
“These are very big questions, and I don’t know if it is possible to answer without going into a very long, long conversation,” said David Borowich, 38, a Manhattan financial executive who holds dual citizenship and has served in the Israeli Army. But in one sense, he added, the answer is simple: Israelis do not hold parades.
“Israelis have rallies,” he said. “They have demonstrations. The idea of a parade is kind of an American thing.”
As any politician will tell you, the ethnic parades of New York are not just parades. They are demonstrations in the literal sense: musterings of potential voters, beauty pageants of potential contributors, inventories of the ethnic loyalties that count most in a metropolitan area of a thousand intermingled peoples.
Jonathan Leader, co-executive director of the parade with his wife, Dina Leader, said one of the motives for broadening participation this year was simply to reflect more accurately the inventory of loyalty to the existence and vibrancy of Israel.
Orthodox Jews have long been a mainstay of support, he said, as have yeshiva students, and they are expected to be so again this year. “But we are now also reaching out to the Conservative and Reform communities, the Russian immigrant community and, of course, the Israelis to come and show their identification and love for Israel,” Mr. Leader said.
Shai Feinsod, 41, of Cresskill, N.J., an Israeli who has lived in this country for 10 years as a manager of an Israeli technology firm, said he had never been to the parade and did not plan to go this year. Instead, he said, many Israeli residents he knows have celebrated the 60th anniversary in social gatherings like one he attended last month.
“About 30 or 40 of us went to Rockland State Park for the day with our kids, and we spent the day talking about politics and singing Israeli folk songs,” he said.
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