every team needs a starting XI. so does a community coming back to life.

The Together Plan launches its first-ever fundraising appeal – and asks supporters to get behind the squad rebuilding Jewish life in Belarus.

This summer, as the world watches its best footballers take to the pitch, The Together Plan is asking a different question: what does it take to put a team on the field in the first place?

Not just eleven players. A goalkeeper coach. A physio. A kit manager. A scout who found the striker in the first place. Nobody sees them on matchday. But without them, there is no matchday at all.

It’s the same story behind the revival of Jewish community life in Belarus – and it’s why The Together Plan is launching its first-ever fundraising appeal today, built around a simple idea: Every World Cup needs a starting XI. So does reviving a community.

a history that was nearly erased

Belarus was once home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Vibrant communities filled towns and cities across the country – Minsk, Nesvizh, and hundreds of places in between – with Jewish life, learning and culture. The Holocaust and decades of Soviet suppression came close to erasing that history completely.

For over a decade, The Together Plan has worked to make sure “nearly erased” doesn’t mean “erased.” We help people trace their ancestors through Belarusian archives. We restore memorial sites so the ghettos and mass graves of the Holocaust are not forgotten. We collect and preserve personal stories before they’re lost forever. We translate and publish books that keep Jewish history and memory alive. Through our Making History Together education programme, we bring that history into classrooms so a new generation understands it. We send humanitarian aid to those in need. And we support the community projects and empowerment initiatives that are helping Jewish life in Belarus take root again – not as a memory, but as a living, breathing community.

the squad behind the squad

Here’s what most people don’t see: none of this happens by itself.

Archive searches don’t run themselves – someone has to know where to look, who to ask, and how to read the records. Memorials don’t build themselves – someone has to secure the site, commission the work, and see it through. Personal stories don’t collect themselves – someone has to travel, sit with a family, and listen. A humanitarian aid shipment doesn’t pack, clear customs and arrive by magic – someone has to organise every step.

Every programme we run exists because the essential, unglamorous operational costs behind it are covered. That’s our starting XI – the people, the logistics, the infrastructure that let the visible work happen. No player takes the pitch without a squad behind them. No community gets its history and its future back without one either.

why we’re asking now

In thirteen years, The Together Plan has never run an appeal like this. We haven’t had to. But the funding landscape has shifted, and we have recently lost a major donor whose support underpinned a significant part of our work. That loss has left a real gap – one that puts our ability to keep every part of this work running at risk.

The timing is not simple, either. With the rise in antisemitism and the war in the Middle East, many people are, understandably, directing their support toward those urgent, immediate causes. We are part of that same story. So much of our work brings into focus the history of Jewish suffering in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union – a history that has too often been overlooked, overshadowed, or simply forgotten. Right now, more than ever, it is necessary to shine a light on this chapter of Jewish suffering. Because if we don’t, it will be lost to time, and the complete story of what Jewish communities across the world have endured – and survived – will never be fully told. We won’t, and can’t, let that happen.

“I’ve spent over a decade building this organisation from the ground up, and I’ve never had to ask in quite this way before. But I’d rather be honest with the people who care about this work than let it quietly struggle. Every archive search, every restored memorial, every child in the Making History Together programme – none of it happens without the team behind it. Right now, that team needs its supporters more than ever. This isn’t just my appeal. It’s an invitation to everyone who believes this history and this community are worth fighting for.”

This is not a story we’re used to telling. But it’s an honest one, and it felt right to tell it plainly: we need our community of supporters to step onto the pitch with us.

get behind the team

A World Cup isn’t won by a superstar alone. It’s won by a squad – and by the people who back that squad, match after match, year after year

The Jewish communities of Belarus are in the middle of a comeback more than a decade in the making. They don’t need spectators. They need a team behind them.

Will you take your place in our starting XI?