Investing for the long run

IT’S AN improbable journey, from someone who barely scraped through his matriculation exams to chief executive of the world’s largest Jewish educational organisation, but Avi Ganon, the new director-general of World Ort, has done it — and along the way has been a professional footballer, a mainstay of the Israeli navy, and a diplomat.

Mr Ganon, who has been in his latest role at Ort’s London headquarters for just over a month, has worked for the organisation in a variety of jobs, principally in Russia, for more than 15 years, and willingly admits that the charity is in his blood.

Ort helps around 300,000 students in 37 countries, running schools and training centres, providing teachers with career development opportunities, and devising global aid programmes in Africa and beyond.

Nothing in Mr Ganon’s background suggests that this was how he was going to turn out. He was born in a working-class neighbourhood in Beersheva, Israel’s southern-most big city, to Moroccan parents who arrived in the country in 1962. His father was a safety inspector and his mother worked in the dining room of the city’s Makhteshim Agan factory.

“I had nothing to do with education when I was growing up,” he says. “I just played football.”

He played in the Beersheva streets but also ended up playing for Hapoel Beersheva, until it was time for him to go in the army.

In fact the IDF decided to put Mr Ganon in the navy, and he spent his military service both on board ships and training new navy recruits in engineering and technology.

Only after the navy, and, as he cheerfully admits, sustained nagging from his mother and father —“Jewish parents!” — did Mr Ganon begin to engage with education.

“I realised that I didn’t have any alternative. I needed to sit and learn.”

After graduating from Ben-Gurion University with a social behaviour and economics degree, he applied to work as an Israeli diplomat in the embassy in Moscow.

In fact his introduction to Russia came a year earlier, in 1997, when he went to Moscow as a Hebrew teacher in the capital’s Ort school.

“A year after that, I joined the diplomatic service and worked in the embassy from 1998 to 2002, responsible for all Jewish education in the former Soviet Union.”

And he learned Russian. He spent two years with a private teacher and now regards himself as a fluent speaker. With a grin he recounts how he is able to have bantering conversations with the mainly Russian cashiers in Israeli supermarkets, and how they are astonished that an Israeli of plainly Moroccan heritage can speak their language.

I didn’t just learn Russian, I learnt the culture’