Founded in 1901 to promote the return of Jews to Israel, the Jewish National Fund is famous for its fundraising efforts centered around planting trees in Israel.

Its annual conference typically plays to feel-good stories about innovative start-up enterprises and charitable projects that are part of the Israeli narrative.

Organizers of the global conference, who picked Denver as the venue this year, envisioned another such event – successful, vibrant, but certainly not the target of protests.

All of that changed on Oct. 7, when a surprise attack by Hamas into southern Israel killed 1,200 Israelis. The group, which the U.S. government lists as a terrorist organization, also kidnapped more than 200 people, including Americans and citizens of other countries. 

And when the 2,600 conferees from around the U.S. and from Israel entered the Colorado Convention Center on Thursday night, they passed security barricades surrounding the complex and saw a streetscape dotted with concrete barriers.

They encountered protesters, who hurled insults and chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

The conference, which began on Thursday, has been caught in the escalating tension rising in America as the war between Israel and Hamas is set to enter its third month.

A recent cease-fire, which ended on Friday, saw Israel pause most military activity in Gaza and release 300 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for militants freeing over 100 hostages held in Gaza. Up until the truce began, the Health Ministry in Hamas-ruled Gaza said more than 13,300 Palestinians have been killed.

Amid the war in Israel and protests in America, the Jewish National Fund-USA’s conference still offered those feel-good moments on the agenda to celebrate what Israel had achieved as it marked its 75th birthday this year.

But the events of the past two months markedly altered the mood of the conference.

Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael B. Oren told The Denver Gazette that, as a veteran of numerous crises, including the Yom Kippur War and the intifadas of the 1990s and early 2000s, this moment feels different.

“It’s an existential crisis,” Oren said. “We’ve never had crises that were close to existential.”

“This feels very different, it’s been disheartening,” said Michael Mintz of New York, who has been active with JNF’s fire-rescue task force and has been working to get advanced emergency equipment into Israeli firehouses, including jaws-of-life and infrared cameras that can be used in rescuing victims from burning structures.

“This is so different,” added Nora Schrutt of Denver, who, along with her husband Bruce, toured the conference exhibits when their daughter Jennifer rushed up, fresh off a flight returning from Tel Aviv.

“The amount of antisemitism in the world has somehow brought us together to understand that we have a job to do,” Schrutt said.

The subject of antisemitism permeated the conference. On Thursday night, Gov. Jared Polis unequivocally called on Coloradans – and, by extension, Americans – to stand behind Israel.

“Our greatest strength is our ability to stand together to support the people of Israel in their time of need to be an example of hope and light that others can follow and to stand against hate,” the governor told the attendees.

Fran Karpel and her childhood friend Lisa Chrystal Herzberg, both from New Jersey, talked about the effects of the extraordinary moment on their kids, now in their thirties.

Both are proud of the historical knowledge their children learned from attending Jewish day schools.

Both also lamented that, without a special education, average kids would have little way to put the horrifying events during and after the attack in context.

“We’re still in a state of shock,” Herzberg said.

“This conference pivoted after Oct. 7 from celebrating the amazing work that JNF does to showing how we’re going to have to fight a global resurgence of antisemitism,” she added. “There was already a lot of dissention and disagreement before this over the state of the (Israeli) government, and the divisions had carried over to this country.”

Herzberg said being Jewish gave her a DNA link to the threat to eradicate Jews, something that has played out for a long time and, more recently, in the Hamas attack on the music festival in southern Israel that killed 364 people.

“Maybe you can’t understand it unless your family members were refugees from holocaust,” Herzberg said. 

Penny Rosen underscored the work of the Jewish National Fund-USA and of its donors. 

“If we don’t change the hearts of people in the diaspora, if we don’t get the truth out, this will continue forever,” said Rosen, who, after losing a son, worked with her husband Stephen to fund the building of a fire station to serve a community in southern Israel, not far from the communities attacked in October.

The station is named for her son and the couple has helped to fund and open a second station.

“We’ll die broke and die happy,” she said.

Out on the street beyond the barricade, a crowd of around 150 protesters followed the lead of organizers with bullhorns, saying Israelis are the ones bent on genocide and accusing the Israel government of “apartheid.”

A smaller group pounded on the glass of the Hyatt Regency Hotel across from the Convention Center, shouting epithets at conferencegoers indoors as they passed through hallways from the meeting.

“JNF seeks to displace Palestinians by any means necessary,” said a spokesperson for the Colorado Palestinian Coalition, who identified himself only as Abdullah.

When a Denver Gazette reporter sought a few interviews from among the protesters, organizers became confrontational, blocked the reporter from photographing the signs that they carried and brought forth a spokesperson from the organization.

Asked about the “from the river to the sea” slogan, the spokesperson said that it contains no threat to Jews or the Israeli people, but, rather, it is intended to convey that the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River “should be free for all people who live there.”

The Anti-Defamation League regards the now familiar refrain as a “clear call for the Jewish state of Israel to be entirely dismantled.”

“Calling for the destruction of Israel and its people is unbridled hate and antisemitism in the extreme,” the Anti-Defamation League said. 

College students who attended the conference are buying none of the protesters’ explanations.

“You can hear them from the top floor of the hotel,” said Samantha Levy from University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne. Levy said she heard the protests upon arriving at the conference and as she was meeting up with her friend, Benjamin Himmel from Penn State.

Levy said that although her Illinois campus is politicized, the message of pro-Palestinian protesters had become subdued over the past few years after an attack on a Jewish student facility on campus. But the level of turmoil has been inflamed since the Oct. 7 attack and the following retaliatory strikes by Israeli forces.

“There is something unspeakable about this that words couldn’t describe,” added her friend, Himmel. “We all have friends and family there.”

Himmel added that he had numbers of acquaintances serving or having recently served in the Israeli Defense Forces.

“This is a horrible event, but it has created strong bond for us,” Himmel said.

Levy said she has been passing shouting protesters on her way to the campus.

She attributes their arguments to a lack of education.

“They don’t want us to be here, but we’re still going to show up. We don’t let terrorists win,” Levy said.