The recipients of the 2026 “Lion of Zion” Award are Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar, co-chairs of the Sovereignty Movement. Here are excerpts from the article published in honor of the event
By Josh Hasten. Issue 5 of Ari Fuld's "Israel Shield"- September 2026
For longtime Israeli activists Nadia Matar and Yehudit Katsover, receiving the Lion of Zion Award in memory of Ari Fuld HY"D is not simply a personal honor. It is another opportunity to advance the cause that has defined their lives — applying Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.
The founders of the Sovereignty Movement have spent decades advocating for that vision. They say the award is meaningful because it allows them to continue promoting the values and ideals that Ari championed.
“We don’t work for prizes,” Nadia told Ari Fuld’s Israel Shield Magazine. “We don’t feel that we deserve a prize, because our ultimate goal of sovereignty hasn’t been reached yet.”
But if the award helps spread the message of sovereignty — a cause Ari strongly supported — “then we say thank you,” she said.
Yehudit said receiving an award named in Ari’s memory was a profound honor.
“In my eyes, Ari Fuld is a hero of Israel. He understood that being a proud Jew means knowing how to defend yourself, how to fight, how to use a gun and how to protect yourself.”
Yehudit added that Ari’s message was not only physical self-defense, but also the ability to defend Israel’s story and legitimacy.
Nadia recalled that all three of her sons studied with Ari through his Torah Dojo program, which combined Jewish values with martial arts and self-defense.
“They waited eagerly to go to Ari’s dojo,” she said. “It gave them such strength and such Jewish pride. Ari represented the courage, pride and dignity of the Jewish people.”
A Shared Mission
Ari’s connection to Nadia and Yehudit stretches back decades. Nadia recalled how Ari was deeply involved in many of their activities from the beginning, including the annual Tisha B’Av walks around Jerusalem’s Old City walls, a tradition revived by Nadia’s in-laws in the 1990s.
At the time, Nadia and Yehudit’s organization was known as Women in Green. In later years, Ari would arrive with his camera and phone, documenting the event and live-streaming the experience for others. “When you watched him, it was as if you were really there,” Nadia recalled.
Inspiring a New Generation
Ari was also an early supporter of Nadia and Yehudit’s Sovereignty Movement.
Nadia recalled Ari arriving at the movement’s first sovereignty conference in 2014 full of energy, moving among the hundreds of young participants who had come from across the country.
Yehudit said his greatest strength was his ability to inspire others without making himself the focus. “He let the youth speak and convey things in a very, very clear way,” she said. “He made the young people the focus of the video.” Ari produced one of the conference’s most memorable videos.
Nadia also remembered Ari’s connection to Oz VeGaon, the beautiful Gush Etzion nature reserve founded by the two activists.
During one particularly hot summer day, Ari arrived carrying two bags.
“He comes with two bags and says, ‘Where are the soldiers? Where are the soldiers?’” Nadia smiled as she recalled the story. Inside were special cooling packs donated for soldiers serving in the area.
Nadia’s Aliyah Every Day
For Nadia, activism grew from a deep connection to Israel that began in Belgium, where she was raised in a strongly Zionist Jewish family.
One of the events that influenced her most deeply was the 1976 Entebbe rescue operation. “I remember saying, what am I doing here in chutz la’aretz?” she recalled. “Why am I not part of this?”
Nadia explained her decision to make Aliyah at age 18 through the analogy of a soccer game. “You can sit on the sidelines, watching, cheering for your favorite players and supporting them, but you are not actually shaping the game,” she said. “Or you can be a player on the field, and you decide how it is going to go.”
"When you are in chuts la'aretz you're just not on the field of Jewish history", she said. Although she grew up in a vibrant Jewish community, Nadia said she always felt that Israel was home.
“Whenever I came to Israel with my parents and sister, I remember the airplane door opening at Ben-Gurion Airport,” she said. “Only people who live abroad understand this, but the air itself felt different. I always felt like a stranger abroad, and here I always felt at home.”
She later married David Matar, who had also made Aliyah with his family out of ideological commitment following the Six-Day War.
The couple shared a belief that living in Israel was only the beginning.
“When you make Aliyah, that’s not enough,” Nadia said. “You have to make Aliyah every day. You have to ask: I’m here now, so what do I do? The pioneers of today are the ones who live in Judea and Samaria.”
Yehudit’s Path Home
Yehudit’s path to Israel began in communist Romania, where her family dreamed of making Aliyah but had to wait for government permission and immigration certificates.
She recalled arriving in Israel by boat as a child and experiencing an overwhelming sense of belonging. “I will never forget approaching Haifa,” she said. “It was the month of Nissan, and there was such a light in the sky. We had never seen such an amazing light. It was as if the heavens opened and said: ‘Welcome.’”
Following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, her husband, Tzvi, became convinced that their future was connected to Judea and Samaria.
After Israel liberated the area, he believed Jews had to return and rebuild there.
When Kiryat Arba was established near Hebron, Tzvi reminded Yehudit of their promise that they would move there. She recalled being told, “Not many people will come to Kiryat Arba, so we must go there.”
The beginning was difficult. “There was nothing,” she said. “There was barely water, no sidewalks, nothing.” Yehudit soon joined the group led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger and became deeply involved in rebuilding Jewish life in the region. That commitment would soon place her at the center of one of the defining struggles to restore Jewish life in Hebron.
The Hebron 13
In 1979, Yehudit joined 12 other women who moved into Beit Hadassah in Hebron. The move was part of a campaign led by Rabbi Levinger and his wife to restore a permanent Jewish presence in the city following decades of displacement after the 1929 Hebron massacre. It is one of the great untold chapters of modern Zionist activism. "These were 13 heroic women" Nadia declared. "A movie should be made about them".
Many of the women were mothers with careers and families, but they chose to move into the abandoned building and remain there for a full year in order to pressure the government to reopen Jewish settlement in Hebron. "They left their husbands outside", Nadia said. "They went in with their children".
Yehudit was among them.
Nadia compared their determination to the spirit that later guided their own activism. "They taught us the pillars of activism. They showed us that if you believe in something you do not give up".
After a long year of activism and public pressure, the government finally approved the renewed Jewish presence in Hebron. "Today, when we walk in hebron, we have to say 'thank you' to those 13 women", Nadia said.
From Protest to Sovereignty
Nadia and Yehudit's activism evolved over decades, beginning with opposition to territorial concessions under the 1993 Oslo Accords and the 2005 Disengagement from Gaza, eventually developing into a campaign focused on sovereignty.
After oslo, Nadia said she and others felt they could no longer remain silent. "We were shocked", she recalled. "How can the government of Israel shake hands with this mass murderer Yasser Arafat and give him parts of our land and weapons?"
Before meeting Yehudit and before the creation of the Sovereignty movement, Nadia was already involved in initiatives aimed at strengthening Jewish presence on the land.
Nadia helped establish Women in Green, an organization created to protest territorial withdrawals and oppose what they viewed as a dangerous policy of concessions.
Building, Not Just Protesting
In 1995, she helped establish Efrat's Dagan Hill, driven by the same belief that Jewish presence and initiative were the answer to attempts to weaken Israel's connection to Judea and samaaria. Today, the dagan Hill is a thriving neighborhood of Efrat, home to hundreds of families.
The idea, she said, was not only to protest but to build.
That philosophy later guided her partnership with Yehudit, from local battles to protect "Area C" of Judea and Samaria, to the broader campaign of sovereignty. Years later, the Gaza expulsion of Jewish communities from Gush Katif represented another turning point.
They argued that the lesson of Gush Katif was that Jewish communities could be removed if they lacked sovereignty.
"Settlement alone was not enough", Nadia said.
She recalled that after the Gaza expulsion they watched the Arab and European Union (EU)-funded efforts to illegally seize control of parts of Area C.
They fought local battles in places such as Shdema, Adoraim and Netzer but Yehudit pushed for a broader vision.
"We are emptying the sea with a spoon", she warned. 'The Arabs meanwhile are taking over everything. We need a plan."
That plan became the Sovereignty Movement, founded in 2011.
Nadia said that after Israel liberated Judea and Samaria during the Six Day War, the military victory was not followed by what she believes should have been the next political step: applying Israeli sovereignty.
"As long as you don't have sovereignty, you are basically saying to the world: I have a lot of Jews living there, but I haven't decided if it's really mine," she said, arguing that sovereignty would make Jewish communities irreversible.
"Gush Katif was easy to reverse because there was no sovereignty", she said. "Sovereignty is sealing the victory of the Six-Day War".
Changing the National Conversation
What was once dismissed as a fringe idea has since entered Israel's political mainstream.
Their campaign succeeded in changing the national conversation, and sovereignty in Judea and Samaria is now seriously debated by ministers, lawmakers and the Israeli public -a transformation that reflects years of persistent work by Nadia, Yehudit and the movement they built.
Ari Fuld, Sovereignty and a Changing Israel
Yehudit said that for Ari, the fundamental question facing Israel was one of identity and ownership. "The main question today in our generation is: Who does this land belong to?" she said. "He fought for the fact that the Land of Israel belongs to all of us," she added. "He was sure of his views. He had no doubts."
Nadia said the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre represented a major shift in how many Israelis view questions of sovereignty and security. "I think Oct. 7 was a master switch for many people who understood that the battle here is about sovereignty," she said.
She said the massacre demonstrated the necessity of Israeli control over territory vital to the country's security.
Yehudit said Ari understood the realities of the Middle East and rejected what she described as unrealistic assumptions about Israel's enemies. "He understood and knew very well the mentality of the enemy," she said. "He did not live in this concept that we needed concessions for peace and that we need to cave in. He knew that we need to fight."
She said there is a Hebrew expression asking whether Jews will always have to live "with the sword." "The answer we learned from Ari is 'yes'," she said. "We have to always be ready to fight."
Aliyah and Israel's Future
Both women connected sovereignty to another cause Ari strongly championed: Aliyah.
Nadia and Yehudit called for an ambitious national plan to encourage Jews abroad to come home, saying Israeli shelichot serving abroad should use the "A-word": Aliyah.
Both argued that expanded construction and Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria would create new communities, attract investment and make Aliyah more attainable.
Oz VeGaon: Turning Tragedy into Action
For Nadia and Yehudit, Oz VeGaon represents their belief that tragedy must be answered with action. They established the Gush Etzion nature reserve in 2014 following the Hamas kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers—Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel—near the Gush Etzion Junction.
The night their bodies were discovered, Yehudit called Nadia. "We had to give a Zionist response," Nadia recalled. "We had to show the world that if they think that by killing Jews we are going to leave our land, they are wrong." Their answer would not be retreat or despair.
They gathered supporters and, together with the Gush Etzion Regional Council, transformed a neglected forest area into Oz VeGaon - a nature park and educational Zionist center dedicated to strengthening Jewish connection to the land. "Ari was with us from day one," Yehudit and Nadia said. "He was always excited, always full of enthusiasm."
After Ari's murder in 2018, they established a lookout in his memory, with support from the Cherna Moskowitz Foundation, overlooking Jerusalem and Hebron -two places especially meaningful to him. Today, visitors to Oz VeGaon can see the Ari Fuld Lookout as a reminder of his commitment to Israel.
A Generation of Ari Fulds
For Yehudit, the greatest source of optimism is the younger generation growing up in Judea and Samaria.
"There is an amazing generation being raised here - on the [agricultural] farms and through their service in the army. They are so connected to the Land of Israel. It is a different generation."
Those young Israelis give her confidence that the events of Gush Katif will not be repeated. "They will never give up," she said.
Nadia said this generation represents the continuation of Ari's values. "There are thousands of Ari Fulds here".
For both women, the Lion of Zion Award is not an ending, but another opportunity to continue the mission Ari embodied: strengthening Jewish identity, defending Israel and securing the eternal bond between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.
Few could be more deserving of the title "Lionesses of Zion" than Nadia Matar and Yehudit Katsover, two women who have devoted their lives not merely to speaking about Zionism, but to living it. Nadia and Yehudit helped move sovereignty from the margins into Israel's national conversation.