‘Ask what you can do for your country’

TAMAR WISEMON, 52 FROM MANCHESTER TO JERUSALEM, 1990; TO NOF AYALON, 2016

Tamar (Woolf) Wisemon’s parents – one from South Africa, one from Manchester – met in an Israeli absorption center. Intending to make their aliyah permanent, they traveled to England only to pack up… but their plans got derailed, and it took them 22 years to move back to Israel.

“I did not want to make the same mistake,” says Wisemon .

So she made aliyah right after high school. Although she subsequently returned to England to start University College London, she changed course after just one year and moved back to finish her studies at Michlalah Jerusalem College.

One of her Michlalah teachers introduced her to Carmi Wisemon, the man who would become her husband. “He’s from New York, and he also came after high school and never looked back.”

Six months after the couple wed, the Woolfs joined them in Israel with Tamar’s younger sister. Her younger brother followed not long afterward. “My husband’s family came too, so we are very fortunate,” she says.

The couple lived in various places, such as Jerusalem, Mevaseret Zion, Safed, and Beit Shemesh, moving to Nof Ayalon eight years ago.

Wisemon interned as a writer at The Jerusalem Report during college, and in Safed she became a freelance travel writer.

“I always wanted to write, and to make a positive change in the world, so I started in journalism,” she explains.

In 2002, she moved to Beit Shemesh and continued writing while also working in public relations at a nonprofit for the next five and a half years, learning the art of branding and website creation.

During and after the Israeli disengagement from Gush Katif, she covered the difficult stories of many of the families who were forcibly removed from their homes in a weekly Jerusalem Post column titled “Living on a Prayer.”

“My interest in social media and technology led me to technical writing, and I started working in a cybersecurity company helping to prevent fraud in banks and credit card companies.”

Working at RSA Security, acquired by EMC Corporation and later Dell Technologies, for more than nine years, she represented her team to win the 2014 EMC innovation contest and later served on the committee that runs Dell’s annual global innovation competition. She also holds a patent on an emulator detection device.

For the last three years, Wisemon has been documentation manager at Carbyne, a technology company founded in Israel and headquartered in New York. Carbyne provides cloud-native solutions for emergency call centers in North and South America and for United Hatzalah in Israel.

“Our company saves lives by giving call centers accurate location, live video and translation abilities to send help much faster and more effectively,” she explains.

Since Oct. 7, she has devoted her talents to Israel advocacy on social media, “sharing what people don’t see on the news.”

She traces her interest and expertise in this endeavor to an environmental education organization that she and her husband co-founded in 2007 to connect schools in Israel and schools abroad. Due to her work with this organization, the US Embassy in Israel sent her to the US State Department’s International Visitors Leadership Program during the Obama era.

All the participants received a personalized gift at the end of the program. “Mine was a magnet with the John F. Kennedy quote ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’

“That really resonated with me. We are not in the world to get what we need but to make the world better than it was before. You don’t have to succeed in everything, but you have to do your part.”

Following the Hamas attacks, she thought about how she could do her part. “My key strength is writing, and I know the mindset of how people think about Israel. I know what information they are not getting in their schools and from the media.”

She found that posting her views on Facebook “was kind of an echo chamber,” so she turned to LinkedIn “for a much more diverse potential audience around the world” and saw her audience grow vastly in terms of numbers and geography.

“I post things people wouldn’t necessarily see elsewhere. When my son, a professional photographer, served in the army reserves as a combat photographer and took a picture of Israeli soldiers evacuating premature babies from Shifa Hospital in Gaza using incubators donated from Israeli hospitals, people thanked me for sharing that,” she recounts.

Another post that got a big reaction was inspired by Kfir Bibas, the red-haired baby who turned one year old in captivity. “I wrote about my own grandson, who was born on Rosh Hashanah, right before this all happened. My daughter was getting sirens all the time at her home in Kerem B’Yavneh, so they moved in with us for a while, and I spent a lot of time holding the baby. I thought about the Bibas family that couldn’t hold their baby.”

She also posts items from the Hebrew press that didn’t make it into the English or overseas press, and she analyzes blatantly biased coverage of the BBC.

“It’s always from a personal perspective and always fact-based. I believe everything should be polite and understanding of where the other side is coming from.”

Wisemon also founded a matchmaking group for English-speaking National Religious singles, which is credited with at least eight marriages in the past two and a half years.

“I’m not as talented at making the match but am more successful at facilitating the conditions for them to be made, like setting up WhatsApp groups and Shabbatonim. It takes a village to make a successful match.”

Her own successful match in life produced six children ranging in age from 28 to 17, many helping society in addition to their daily work and studies, including a volunteer ambulance driver, paramedic, and border patrol volunteers.

Wisemon, who also makes wine from grapes growing in her garden, says one of her favorite Talmudic sayings is “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it” (Pirkei Avot 2:21).

“I’m not an influencer, but I do what I can do to help. You don’t know how something might impact somebody else,” she says.

(Binyamin Wisemon) TAMAR WISEMON at the Carbyne office.