Tom Nides has brought a human touch and open mind to the ambassador’s office in Jerusalem

Gedalia Guttentag with reporting by Yisrael Yoskovitch

Ambassador Tom Nides was busy with meetings one Sunday morning a few weeks ago when his personal phone rang.

On the screen flashed a name that until recently would have merited an immediate response from Israel’s prime minister himself.

“Yanky Kanievsky” read the display. Rav Chaim’s well-connected grandson had a last-minute request for the American diplomat.

“Tom, we’re giving out 4,000 food parcels in Bnei Brak today — can you come and pack some boxes?”

Taken aback by the 11th-hour timing, Nides responded: “You do know that my schedule is arranged weeks in advance, don’t you?”

But Yanky, as he’s widely known, was having none of it. He produced his trump card.

“It would have meant a lot to my grandfather,” he said.

That, indeed, clinched the deal. Tom Nides picks up an enlarged photo of his own meeting with the gadol, which rests in the corner of his office at the United States embassy in Jerusalem.

“I told my staff, ‘Clear my schedule — we’re going to Bnei Brak to pack boxes.’ ”

Nides is still chuckling over the episode a day later when we sit down for a pre-Rosh Hashanah interview, but as becomes clear, the anecdote is more than mere opening gambit. That’s because Tom Nides is convivial, he exudes a certain empathy, and seems genuinely curious about people — notably the exotica of the chareidi world.

“I’ve gone to Bnei Brak many times now to learn about the chareidi community,” he says. “I’ve met many of the rabbinic leaders, and while I don’t understand everything, I see the importance of family, tradition, and studying.”

Over the last year, he’s parlayed those qualities into an ambassadorial style — part diplomatic, part learning process — that involves engagement across Israeli society.

The Jewish ambassador has become a notable fixture at that saddest of Jewish events — the shivah. Through a terror-soaked year, Nides has visited 15 shivah houses, turning up to comfort families up and down Israel.

“I sat with the families after the Elad terror attack, and I went to a Druze family in Nazareth, where I saw firsthand how terror affects everyone.”

Nides posing next to the historic embassy sign honoring his boss’s political nemesis

That empathy has played well with Israelis. More controversially for many on the country’s right, Nides has broken with his Trump-era predecessor, Ambassador David Friedman, making outreach to the Palestinians a priority.

That tilt was obvious when Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist covering a counter-terror operation in Jenin, was shot in May, under unclear circumstances. A State Department report pre-judged an Israeli investigation, saying that it was likely that the Al-Jazeera reporter had been killed by an IDF bullet.

The US embassy followed up with a call for a review of Israel’s rules of engagement, the public nature of which carried overtones of a dressing down.

But inevitably, Tom Nides deals as much with what lies over the horizon — Iran — as with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that plays out in sight of his office windows.

And even as the Biden administration seeks to bring back the Obama-era Iran Deal from the dead — against an Israeli consensus that the agreement is weak — Nides is adamant that this time around, Israel won’t be left out in the cold.

“Every option is on the table,” he says, reiterating the administration’s position on military action. “America will never bind Israel’s hands when it needs to act, even after a deal.”

These are Obama-era slogans rewarmed for the post-Trump epoch, with a hint of the third way that Biden has carved out on Israel.

As Tom Nides wraps up his first year in the embassy that bears the name of his boss’s nemesis Donald Trump, the former investment banker has brought a surprisingly personal touch to the job.

It’s also clear that for the new occupant of “David Friedman’s office,” as Nides jokingly calls his workspace, what’s past is prologue in the altneuland of America’s Israel policy.