Draft:Gvahim

Gvahim (Hebrew: גבהים, lit. "Heights") is an Israeli non-profit organization that assists new immigrants (olim) and returning residents with professional and entrepreneurial integration into the Israeli labor market. Founded in 2006, it operates under the auspices of the Rashi Foundation.

History

Gvahim was established in 2006 as a job-placement center for highly educated new immigrants. The organization initially worked with immigrants from France, many of them graduates of the grandes écoles, before expanding its activity to immigrants from additional countries of origin. By 2010, roughly 70 percent of participants held a master's degree or higher, with an age range of 22 to 55.

The organization was co-founded by Mickael Bensadoun, an immigrant from Morocco who had previously worked as an advisor at the Rashi Foundation, together with Yair Shamir, an Israeli businessman and former Israeli Air Force colonel who later served as chairman of Israel Aerospace Industries and as a Knesset member and Minister of Agriculture. Shamir served as chairman of Gvahim from 2006 to 2013.

In January 2026, Gvahim marked twenty years since its founding, alongside ten years of a partnership with the Jerusalem Municipality.

Programs

Gvahim's core offering is a career development program combining group workshops, one-on-one career consultations, mentorship, and networking, run in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other Israeli cities in partnership with local municipalities. The organization also operates TheHive, a startup accelerator for immigrant entrepreneurs based in Tel Aviv and Ashdod, and a pre-aliyah program offering multilingual workshops and consultations for prospective immigrants before their arrival in Israel. An internship program places students and early-career professionals with Israeli companies and organizations.

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent increase in immigration from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, the organization introduced subsidized Russian-language programming for new arrivals from those countries.

Studies and data

Gvahim has periodically released data on immigrant employment drawn from its own program participants. A 2017 organizational study on the employment of highly educated immigrants, reported by Ynet, found that only 19 percent of employed participants held senior management roles, 22 percent held junior management roles, and the remainder worked in non-managerial positions; respondents most frequently cited language and accent difficulties (86 percent) and unfamiliarity with the local labor market (80 percent) as barriers. In 2018, data released by the organization and reported by TheMarker ranked Israeli companies by the number of new immigrants hired between 2015 and 2017, with Amdocs, Cornerstone OnDemand, and ICE identified as the leading employers.

Affiliations

Gvahim is a subsidiary of the Rashi Foundation. It has partnered with the Jerusalem Municipality since around 2016, and has collaborated with Nefesh B'Nefesh on programs aimed at highly skilled immigrants, including an initiative to attract immigrants to Israel's Negev region.