Short answer: The most documented customer and founder stories behind Israel-themed products come from ARTZA, a Jerusalem-founded quarterly gift-box subscription launched in 2020 by Itai Schimmel to keep small Israeli artisans afloat when pandemic travel restrictions cut off tourism. Reporting from the Washington Times and Artza's own figures show the company has shipped well over 100,000 boxes to thousands of mostly evangelical Christian subscribers in the U.S. and has channeled well over a million dollars into small Israeli businesses. Smaller retailers like aJudaica also host customer testimonials describing personal and religious meaning, though those are marketing content rather than independently reported stories.
How a pandemic crisis became a customer story
The clearest, most sourced version of this topic traces back to a specific business decision. In March 2020, COVID-19 travel restrictions shut off American tourism to Israel almost overnight, and Itai Schimmel, an Israeli immigrant originally from the UK, saw small artisans and shop owners in Jerusalem and Bethlehem losing the foot traffic they depended on (Artza company blog, October 27, 2022). His response was to launch Artza (Hebrew for "toward the land"), a quarterly subscription box that packages products from those same artisans and ships them to customers, mostly evangelical Christians, across the United States (Washington Times, January 18, 2023).
The company's own reporting says that by October 2022 it had helped more than 28 shops and artisans stay in business since the pandemic began, generating over $850,000 in revenue for those small businesses while shipping more than 23,000 boxes. By January 2023, the Washington Times' profile of Schimmel put the total even higher: more than $1.6 million delivered to small Israeli businesses through subscription sales to thousands of American customers. CB Insights' company profile lists Artza as having sent over 80,000 boxes across ten shipment rounds. Those numbers are the backbone of the "customer story" here: not a single anecdote, but a repeatable pattern of American subscribers paying for a quarterly connection to Israel that also functions as direct economic support for Israeli small businesses.
What individual customers actually say
Beyond the company-level numbers, individual voices show up in two different kinds of sources, and it is worth being clear about which is which. On the journalism side, a YouTube creator known as Becca posted a return-visit unboxing video titled "Becca is Back for a Jaw-Dropping Unboxing from Israel!", opening an Artza box of artisanal food and crafts on camera. The video's existence and general content could be confirmed, though the exact publish date could not be independently verified beyond search summaries pointing to 2023, so it is included here as a real but loosely dated data point rather than a fully pinned fact.
On the retailer-testimonial side, smaller Judaica and Israel-product sellers publish customer quotes directly on their own sites. One example: a customer from Sweden posted on aJudaica.com back in 2006 that their tefillin order arrived and let them fulfill the mitzvah of tefillin, part of a broader page of testimonials for Judaica and Israel-themed religious items. These are worth reading as sincere marketing content, generally not independently verified by a third-party journalist, and they should carry that caveat rather than be treated as confirmed news reporting.
Bringing that connection into your own home
What ties the Artza story and the smaller testimonial pages together is the same basic idea: people want something tangible that connects them to Israel, whether that is a subscription box of artisan goods or a single meaningful piece worn every day. Shop Israel's Support Israel collection is built around that same instinct, offering jewelry, apparel, and accessories designed for exactly the kind of personal, everyday connection to Israel that customers describe in the stories above.
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Last updated August 2026.
