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ISRAELI PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT STEPS UP AID TO BELEAGUERED COMMUNITIES
The Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism continues to provide material and social support to southern towns, kibbutzim and moshavim under fire from the Gaza Strip. In addition to the delivery of provisions to local food banks, special respite vacations and solidarity visits (see WUPJnews issues #266, #279 and #306), this support now includes educational and legal efforts, with the establishment of a new beit midrash and assistance to help local residents cut through bureaucratic red tape.
The beit midrash is being hosted by Mefalsim, a western Negev kibbutz just two miles from the Gaza Strip. Most recently, the Israeli movement sponsored a Tu B’Shevat seder at the kibbutz, whose members, according to IMPJ associate director Gusti Yehoshua-Braverman, “were happy to feel embraced by all of us from here and overseas" (see WUPJnews #299). The move to open a beit midrash, she said more recently, “was accompanied by many understandable doubts: Will people come? What will the mood, the atmosphere be like? Will they take the risk to leave home and sit together to learn? Will they show any interest in pluralistic Jewish studies?”
The answer was quickly made clear. Fifteen people attended the first session, held the day nine rockets fell on the area. Twenty-five showed up for the next session two weeks later – the very week that a rocket killed a member of a neighboring kibbutz. Following that session, Alon Schuster, the head of the area’s regional council, wrote: “I see in the beit midrash…the devotion and allegiance to life that exists despite everything that has occurred over the last few days [and,] in fact, because of everything that has happened, and for the sake of the future.”
The IMPJ’s legal and lobbying arm, the Israel Religious Action Center, is providing a different type of assistance: free weekly clinics to help residents of Sderot, especially new immigrants and families with members with special needs, to apply for and receive government and public aid. These clinics are manned by staff from the Beersheva branch of IRAC’s Legal Aid Center for Olim (LACO), which in normal times assists new immigrants in navigating the complex hallways of government bureaucracy.
“When there is a community of olim in the periphery, it is [often] difficult for them to come to the city to receive services,” wrote attorney Reut Michaeli, LACO’s director. “The situation worsens when we speak about a community in an emergency situation.” LACO now receives clients in two Sderot neighborhoods with high concentrations of new immigrants from the Caucasus region and Ethiopia.
Traveling to the area clearly means risking one’s life, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by Progressive movement leaders such as Anat Hoffman, director of IRAC. “When I asked my staff if they would be willing to travel to Sderot, they immediately said yes,” Hoffman recently wrote. “I am proud of [their] courage and the work they are doing to improve the lives of some of Israel's most neglected citizens.”
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