When Michael Biton was elected three years ago as mayor of Yeruham, he discovered that the southern town didn’t have a nighttime emergency medical center because the government hadn’t allocated a budget for a doctor. So he went to raise funds from “lovely people from France,” and since then the town has had a doctor on duty until midnight. The government promised to add the funds necessary to pay for a doctor for the whole night, but three years have since passed and Biton is still waiting.

There was also no ambulance in the town, so he got one through his connections with Eli Bin, the director of Magen David Adom, Israel's national emergency medical service. And he’s funding the special investment in education through donations of 8 million shekels [more than $2 million] a year. Reality has turned Biton into an entrepreneurial expert in closing social gaps through philanthropy.

Biton, 43, was born and raised in Yeruham. He served as an officer in the Golani brigade, and became famous through the documentary To Be an Officer, directed by Eitan Oren, which followed three cadets through officer training in the Israeli Defense Forces. He’s an idealist, a social warrior and  a second-generation immigrant from Morocco who isn’t tempted for a moment to whine or to make claims of discrimination. Still, he’s certain that the economic policy of Israel is wrong, that it perpetuates injustice in resource allocation and that the government refrains from making a differential allocation necessary to close gaps. He’s here to point to the right direction.

He runs Yeruham with pride and optimism despite the budget deficits, and believes that “a town can change its destiny, even when the government reduces its responsibility toward it.”