Eagle Star Awards Gala

The Eagle Star Awards Gala was AICC's major community event, held to honour the individuals and companies who contributed most to Southeast-Israel investment and trade. Awards were presented to Israeli companies and their partners in what the Chamber described as a festive evening of celebration.

What the Gala Was For

Every membership organisation needs one evening a year at which the whole network is in the same room, and for AICC this was it. But the gala did more than assemble people. By naming a company of the year and a deal of the year it published, annually, a public statement of what the Chamber considered success — and in doing so it told its own members what to aim at.

It was also the Chamber's principal fundraising occasion. Event sponsorship around the gala sat above the recurring membership tiers and was negotiated per event; sponsor rosters appeared on each year's gala page and are not reproduced in this archive.

The Awards

Award categories recorded in the archive include:

Israeli Company of the Year — recognising an Israeli company whose activity in the region had been most significant that year.
Deal of the Year — recognising a specific completed transaction between an Israeli company and a partner in the region, which fitted the Chamber's habit of measuring itself in completed transactions rather than activity.
Community Partner Award — recognising an organisation whose collaboration had materially helped the Chamber's work.
The Tom Glaser Leadership Award — named for the Chamber's long-serving president and presented for leadership in the bi-national relationship.

Individual recipients are not listed here. The archive recorded them alongside job titles and company affiliations that are, more than a decade later, mostly out of date, and this restoration does not republish current-tense claims about identifiable people.

Scale and Continuity

The gala ran annually across at least the 2006 to 2013 period, with a dedicated page per edition and photography from the evening. In 2012 the Chamber used it to mark twenty years since its founding in 1992 — an occasion it advertised as a celebration of two decades of accomplishments.

The Community Around the Chamber

The gala is a useful reminder that AICC was not purely a transactional body. It sat inside a real community — Atlanta's international business network, its technology sector, the Consulate General of Israel for the Southeast, and the region's economic development institutions — and one evening a year that community was assembled in one place. A great deal of the Chamber's usefulness depended on relationships formed at exactly that kind of occasion rather than in a screening meeting.

The rest of the programme is on the events calendar, and news coverage of individual galas is summarised under publications. The organisation that ran them is described under about AICC.

Where the Name Came From

The eagle and the star are the emblematic devices of the two countries the Chamber connected, and the name was chosen to signal that the evening honoured the relationship rather than either side of it. Awards went to Israeli companies and their partners — the Chamber's own phrasing — which is a small but consistent piece of framing: a deal is not an Israeli achievement or an American one, it is a joint one, and the awards were structured to say so.

The Anniversary Year

The 2012 gala marked twenty years since the Chamber's founding in 1992, and it was promoted as a celebration of two decades of accomplishments. Twenty years is a long run for a regional bi-national chamber, and the milestone is a reasonable measure of how established the organisation had become: what began in 1992 as an attempt to interest Southeastern companies in a distant market had, by then, a five-hundred-strong membership, a permanent programme and a regional presence that included four states beyond its own.

Photography and Records

Each year's gala page carried photography from the evening together with the award citations and sponsor acknowledgements. Those images and rosters are not reproduced in this archive, for the same reason the individual award recipients are not listed: they are photographs and named details of identifiable private individuals, published for a specific occasion more than a decade ago. The award categories and the purpose of the evening are the parts that carry across.

Researching a Particular Year

Each edition of the gala had its own page carrying that year's citations, photography and sponsor acknowledgements, and those pages are not reproduced here. Anyone researching a specific year — who was honoured, which transaction was recognised — will find the original per-year pages captured in the Internet Archive for editions across the 2006 to 2013 period.