Award Winners Announced - New Israel Fund names the three Human and Civil Rights Activists to be honoured at inaugural Awards Dinner.
9th July

A very special Awards dinner, sponsored by the Pears Foundation, is being held on Monday 9th July 2007 at the Russell Hotel, London, to honour some of Israel’s most outstanding activists and organisations working in the field of human and civil rights.   Professor Yuli Tamir, MK, Minister of Education of the State of Israel, will give a keynote address and The Rt Hon the Lord Woolf, former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, will chair this prestigious inaugural event.  Short films of each winner’s work in Israel will be shown during the evening.

New Israel Fund Human Rights Awards Winners

Dan Yakir has worked for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) as an attorney since 1989, serving as its Legal Counsel since 1995.  A well-known trial attorney, Mr.Yakir specialises in human rights in the occupied territories, freedom of speech, and gay and lesbian rights.  He has won many precedent-setting judgments at the Supreme Court and lower courts, and helped people from every sector of Israeli society to realise their rights as equals before the law.

In 1988, Mr. Yakir was awarded a New Israel Fund Law Fellowship to study International Human Rights Law in the United States.  As part of his fellowship he worked as a legal intern at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Washington, DC and at the national headquarters in New York City, focusing on gay and lesbian rights. 

Among the most important cases which Mr. Yakir has brought to the Supreme Court in recent years are the following:

• Kaadan v. Katzir, Israel Lands Authority, Jewish Agency for Israel (2000), successfully challenged the rejection of an Arab family’s right to build a house in the town of Katzir.
• ACRI v. the Prime Minister and the General Security Service (1999), banning of torture and the use of force as interrogation methods used by the security services.
• Orenstein-Zehavi v. the Judge Advocate General (1999), striking a section of the Military Jurisdiction Law, which establishes that a soldier can be held for four days before a hearing, because it violated the Basic Law of Human Dignity and Liberty.
• Avi Golan v. Israel Prisons Service (1996), overturning a prison authority decision to bar a prisoner from publishing a column in a local newspaper, stating that the human rights of prisoners (including freedom of expression) must only be restricted insofar as necessary for the security or functioning of the prison.
• ACRI v. The Minister of Education (1997), overturning the ban by the Minister of Education for broadcasting a program about lesbian and gay youth on Educational Television.

Uri Ben Yaacov Pinkerfeld was born in Jerusalem in 1928.  He enlisted in the Palmach – the underground army for founding the Jewish State and became a “messenger” for its headquarters.  He was one of the founders of Kibbutz Revadim, and has lived there for 60 years, working as a shepherd, raising turkeys, and farmer.  Over the years, his public activities have included:  various activities in the National Kibbutz movement, serving as its Secretary from 1976 through 1979, former Director on the Boards of the Jewish National Fund and Israel Lands Administration, working on issues of land use and developing new kibbutz communities.

He was one of the founders of the Jewish-Arab Center for Economic Development which is a non-profit organization, established in 1988 by a group of Jewish and Palestinian-Arab businesspeople who believed that Jewish-Arab economic cooperation and equality of opportunity in Israel is essential for peace, prosperity and economic stability in Israel and the region at large.
In recent years, Uri has been doing humanitarian work with Palestinian farmers, and has led a grassroots movement of individuals and organisations in Israel - including the Israel Religious Action Center, BINA: Center for Jewish Identity and Hebrew Culture, Rabbis for Human Rights, the Kibbutz Movement and the New Israel Fund - to replant olive groves uprooted or burned by Israeli settlers. He believes that the Palestinians’ decision to join him by rehabilitating their land rather than demonstrating or retaliating is evidence of a sincere desire for peaceful relations.

Hanna Zohar was born in late August 1948, as the State of Israel was being formed.  She is truly committed to the cause of eradicating human rights abuse for all citizens and residents in Israel and over the years she has volunteered for the feminist movement, community organizing and the minimum wage law.

Together with a group of seven friends she founded Worker’s Hotline in 1989, a pioneering effort to provide legal aid and practical assistance to workers – mostly foreign workers whose rights have been violated in Israel.  Over the years the organization’s activities have greatly broadened – for all types of workers, into all regions of Israel, its presence in the media, and in political advocacy – and it has succeeded in raising not only public and press awareness for the rights of migrant, salaried and subcontracted workers, but also the awareness of the workers themselves regarding their rights.

Now Worker’s Hotline is the address in Israel for worker’s rights. The organization is invited to the Knesset and to the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare to provide professional consultations, asked to assist in drafting laws, cited in the Comptroller’s report and quoted regularly in the press.

Since Worker’s Hotline was established in 1989, it has grown into a vibrant organisation with representatives in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Eilat. The materials they produce explaining worker’s rights are available in Hebrew, Spanish, Russian, Thai, Turkish, Arabic and Chinese.  It has filed thousands of complaints and law suits and has ensured millions of shekels withheld by employers were returned to workers.

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