Yotam Polizer first met Zaki Djemal in Nepal, where he served as Djemal’s madrich (counselor). On a backpacking trip after his army service, Djemal — an Israeli venture capitalist and activist, who died last month of a heart attack at 38 during a visit to New York — had come to help communities who were struggling with domestic violence and human trafficking in the Himalayan mountains with the Israeli nonprofit Tevel B’Tzedek.
Djemal, Polizer and the rest of the group of volunteers worked and lived together for four months, learning Nepalese and playing music on the streets of Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, with Polizer playing guitar and Djemal on the harmonica. Though he was five years older than Djemal and technically his supervisor, their roles quickly reversed, Polizer told eJewishPhilanthropy.
After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Djemal, then a student at Harvard, became involved with IsraAid, the disaster-relief nonprofit, and the next year, steered Polizer to join the organization — a path that led Polizer to become its CEO more than a decade later. “Zaki was there at the very, very beginning,” Polizer said. “His energy and networking skills were unmatched, really… He was a master of introductions.”
Polizer’s story with Djemal is not unique. Djemal, a backbone of the Israeli high-tech innovation sector, played a similar role for many, investing in people and startups alike from their earliest stages. Equipped with an entrepreneurial mind, Djemal approached venture capital like a philanthropist, funding and scaling initiatives he thought would make the world better, friends and colleagues told eJP. Many of those who knew him both as a friend and a partner in business described him as their “first investor.”
“He was a peace- and human-loving person,” Polizer said. “He really cared about connecting people. He looked at both the individual level but also on the macro level. The whole concept of building bridges… he was a bridge builder.”
Born in London and raised in Jerusalem, Djemal had a deep sense of justice and Jewish values from a young age, his brother, David, told eJP.
Since his brother’s death, many people who knew Djemal have described him as an optimist, remaining hopeful about the world and Israel’s political situation even through years of war. While in some ways David Djemal agrees with the assessment, he said, Zaki’s “optimism” did not originate from a rosy outlook on the world, but from determination to change things for the better.
“It came from almost a mission statement that, ‘No, I’m going to be an optimist because I’m going to make it better, because I have to make it better because I don’t want to live in a world that’s worse,’” said David Djemal. “And so I think that is very Zionist, and I think that he was too, and that didn’t mean that he supported any one political party or government or etc, but in the sense that he was really supporting the ideals of Zionism and of Jewish peoplehood.”
Growing up in a religious community, Djemal’s early interest in social activism often meant he was going against the grain. In high school, he facilitated a “dialogue tent” in advance of Israel’s “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip in 2005. During his pre-army mechina year, he led a demonstration in support of agunot, Jewish women whose former husbands had denied them a get, the religious divorce document required for them to remarry under Jewish law, David Djemal told eJP.
“What Zaki was aiming towards was looking beyond the simplistic or reductionist way of identifying some issue in the culture wars and trying to see the Jewish justice beyond,” his brother said. “He wanted to look deeper. He would get mad, I think, if it didn’t make sense, if it felt hypocritical, if it felt as if, because of the language of the law, the spirit of the law wasn’t being upheld. That would anger him. And I think that came from a strong sense of integrity and a strong sense of justice.”
Ten years ago, Todd Kesselman, a venture partner at Fresh Fund and co-founder and advisor at PICO Venture Partners, met Djemal. Soon after graduating from Harvard, Djemal was exploring the possibility of starting a fund to invest in founders in universities, similar to “dorm room funds” in the United States. That fund became Fresh Fund, now a leading Israeli venture fund focused on backing promising Israeli founders in areas of social impact at their earliest possible stage. As Fresh Fund grew and evolved, Djemal became a pioneer of pre-seed funding in Israel.
“It meant a lot to him to work closely with founders and to help people grow. Seeing a company hire five people, then 10 people, then 20 people, those were things that got him super energized, said Kesselman. “And we were doing investments that are making the world a better place, so that also gave him a lot of meaning… I think that was very important to Zaki. It spoke to him.”
According to Oded Barel-Sabag, a close friend of Djemal’s and an investor at Fresh Fund, Djemal’s investment instincts were often ahead of the curve. Djemal was often most excited by companies at the “frontier” of solving humanitarian crises, and invested in food technology, including Remilk, an Israeli company that engineers animal-free dairy products, when it was just getting off the ground, and prioritized defense technology, before the field became a core part of Israel’s investment landscape.
“It’s a very rare story and combination of a person coming from this background, and then going into VC. He was so curious about everything,” said Barel-Sebag. “At the end of the day, the stuff that he was drawn to the most was the stuff that was really frontier and revolutionary… he liked the story of doing something that is a humanity scale challenge.”
In addition to his work managing Fresh Fund, Djemal was deeply generous with his time and creativity, open to speaking with anyone and everyone, said Kesselman. Often, he recalled, Kesselman would walk into a room to find Djemal having a conversation with “someone’s friend’s brother’s intern’s cousin.”
“He was just happy being around people. He was happy helping people,” he said. “A lot of our founders who were older than him also looked to him as a mentor. And so it’s left a big hole for all of us.”
Even as Fresh Fund became a leading pre-seed fund in Israel, Djemal remained rooted in humanitarian work. For many years, he was chairman of the board of Tevel B’Tzedek. He volunteered with the Israel Gay Youth organization. He was also a part of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation’s ROI community.
“It’s so hard to find people that know how to navigate both worlds and somehow marry them…Zaki was one of those people,” Navonel Glick, CEO of Diptera.ai, a startup funded by Fresh Fund that uses artificial intelligence to curb malaria, told eJP. “He represented something of an anchor or a marker, someone that was ever-present, that I could turn to, and that was also a benchmark for my own transition into navigating those spaces. I still cannot compute that… Zaki, for everything he represented, is no longer there.”
In recent months, Djemal articulated his belief that supporting Israeli innovation capable of improving the world was the way to bridge his own progressive values with his deep support for Israel — and to create a bridge between Israel and the rest of the world, Wendy Singer, former executive director of Startup Nation Central, told eJP.
“It was basically his vision for Israeli innovation as something indispensable, that Israeli innovation needed to be indispensable for other countries,” said Singer. “He had very progressive values, and was fiercely proud of Israel and where Israel sits in the world… He kept coming back to that. He sees Israel as a country that tackles hard problems and builds hard things. And I think that that aspect of him, his pride for Israeli innovation and his ability to put it on a world stage, says a lot about the things that he believed in.”
Growing up in Jerusalem, Djemal was deeply invested in the future of the city — both in shaping it into a high-tech hub and in making it a better place for both its Arab and Jewish residents to live, said Singer.
In 2017, Djemal helped found the Jerusalem Double, a backgammon league named as a nod both to dice and to East and West Jerusalem. Now the flagship program of Kulna, a broader nonprofit that uses social activities to bridge East and West Jerusalem, the league was designed to create organic interactions between Jews and Arabs, and to put Jerusalem on the map for the world backgammon championships, Djemal told the Canadian Jewish News when it launched.
In its first year, the league already had several thousand participants, among them a world backgammon champion from Japan. In June 2017, the project was featured in a video by popular content creator Nuseir Yassin, known online as “Nas Daily,” a close friend of Djemal’s from Harvard. By June 2018, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that the Jerusalem Double had drawn 6,000 people to its events.
Speaking on Michael Eisenberg’s “Invested” podcast in December, Yassin recalled meeting Djemal as a freshman at Harvard and becoming fast friends. When Yassin, who describes himself as an Israeli-Palestinian, forgot his passport and was rejected from an event organized by the Israeli Consulate, Djemal stayed with him, he said. In a video tribute to Djemal released after his death, Yassin described Djemal as his first investor: the first to believe in him, his channel and his company.
“He was the first Israeli to extend his hand to me and say, ‘Let’s be friends.’ That simple gesture changed my world,” he said.
Djemal is survived by his parents, three siblings and his life partner, Ben-Oved Berkovich.