Eli Bin
When Iranian missiles began landing on Israeli cities this year – Beit Shemesh, Bnei Brak, Tel Aviv – the man moving between the impact sites was the same one who joined Magen David Adom as a 15-year-old youth volunteer.
Eli Bin, MDA’s director-general and the first chief to rise from within its ranks, spent the 2026 war standing shoulder to shoulder with his teams rather than directing from headquarters. “Every call is an entire world,” he says of the ethos he demands from roughly 3,000 employees and some 35,000 volunteers.
Under Bin, MDA has become something larger than an ambulance service – an emergency command center, the manager of Israel’s National Blood Services, and a pillar of national resilience. His signature legacy is the world’s most advanced protected national blood bank, built to keep supplying the IDF and hospitals through missile fire, earthquakes, and chemical attack.
The war validated a bet he made years ago: that emergency medicine belongs inside national infrastructure, not at its margins. AI-assisted dispatch and his Project Magen initiative are retooling MDA for sustained mass-casualty warfare, while defibrillators and CPR training push life-saving capability out to ordinary citizens.
What keeps Bin on this list is the mosaic he leads – Jews and Arabs, Druze and Bedouin, secular and religious – working the same scenes toward the same end. In a year that tested Israel’s home front as never before, he remained the face of that promise.
Dubi Weissenstern
Born in 1975, Dubi Weissenstern has been the CEO of ZAKA since 2013, leading Israel’s foremost rescue and recovery organization. Founded in 1989, ZAKA is a volunteer-based emergency response nonprofit with more than 4,000 volunteers in Israel and abroad. Under Weissenstern, it has expanded its international disaster-relief work, earned United Nations recognition, and restructured its governance with a new board.
Weissenstern has been central to crisis management through Israel’s hardest periods, especially after October 7, 2023. To address the trauma endured by first responders, he launched a nationwide plan for Resilience Centers offering therapy and long-term mental health support to volunteers, with a pilot slated for Jerusalem and further centers to follow.
His mission also extends internationally. In February 2025, he signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the US National Sheriffs’ Association, and in July 2025, ZAKA aided flood recovery in Texas. In November 2025, the organization marked its 35th anniversary with a benefit concert at Newark Symphony Hall. Its teams continued responding abroad into 2026, including a fatal Maryland plane crash in June.
In its January 2026 annual report, ZAKA said it had responded to more than 7,000 cases in 2025, including over a dozen terror attacks and more than 2,300 traffic accidents. In August 2026, it reported one of its busiest 24-hour stretches on record.
Eran Zimrin
Eran Zimrin brought two decades of executive experience in business and finance to ELI – Israel Association for Child Protection, Israel’s only organization focused specifically on preventing and treating child abuse, when he became president in 2021.
With a heavy heart, Zimrin took on the leadership role to expand the extraordinary legacy of his late mother, Dr. Hanita Zimrin, the visionary pioneer who founded ELI in 1979 and spent her life defining child protection in Israel.
Zimrin fights for resources and removes systemic barriers so ELI’s mental health professionals can deliver lifesaving care. Under Zimrin’s leadership, ELI continued expanding its reach to all segments of Israeli society, from North to South. The organization was awarded the 2025 Platinum Seal of Transparency by Candid, earned by fewer than 1% of charities.
As Israeli families faced unprecedented stress from the complex trauma resulting from COVID-19 and the ongoing war, Zimrin spearheaded major expansions across ELI’s core initiatives. ELI celebrated a landmark operational achievement by reaching 100 active therapists providing specialized trauma care.
In 2025, ELI doubled therapy capacity in terms of the number of treatment rooms, and in 2026 this meant the number of therapy hours provided doubled, delivering immediate, high-impact therapeutic support to children and their families.
Over 100,000 students participated in ELI’s school programs, using creative arts to uncover hidden cases of online abuse and domestic trauma. To support the most vulnerable, ELI embedded therapists directly inside special education classrooms to support children unable to report abuse.
ELI championed culturally sensitive, parent-guided therapies to treat traumatized children in communities where social stigma normally blocks access to care. By embedding protection directly into schools and communities, Zimrin continues to honor his mother’s vision, ensuring hope remains an actionable strategy for protecting Israel’s youth.
Chantal & Marc Belzberg
Twenty-five years ago, a 12-year-old girl’s decision reshaped how Israel cares for its wounded. When their daughter Michal chose to cancel her bat mitzvah party after the 2001 Sbarro bombing and donate the money to the victims, Chantal and Marc Belzberg turned that gesture into a movement.
OneFamily has since become the country’s leading support network for bereaved families, orphans, widows, and the wounded – the only organization in Israel that treats every circle of a grieving family as a single unit needing emotional, social, and financial care for life.
Canadian-born Marc, a hi-tech investor, and Belgian-born Chantal made their home in Jerusalem in 1991. Their philosophy – that trauma does not end when the shiva mourning period is over – has guided the organization through the darkest chapters of the past two years, as the toll of war placed unprecedented demands on Israel’s fractured communities.
In 2026, Chantal received the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the state’s highest civilian honor, recognizing a national model of resilience built one family at a time. The couple was also honored at The Jerusalem Post Annual New York Conference for a quarter-century of service.
In a year when so many Israelis needed somewhere to turn, the Belzbergs had spent decades making sure someone would be there.