Table to Table, Targum Shlishi – Table to Table Fresh Produce for Children’s Project, Ra’anana, Israel
Table to Table is Israel’s largest food rescue organization, proving approximately ten thousand meals and twenty tons of produce and perishable items weekly to Israel’s needy. It gathers food from catered events, corporate cafeterias, army bases, farms, and food manufacturers. In 2005 Targum Shlishi provided the funding to establish the Targum Shlishi – Table to Table Fresh Produce for Children’s Project, which provides produce to Jewish and Arab children. On average between five hundred kilograms and one ton of food is delivered weekly to two organizations based in Jaffa.
KIDMA Project for the Advancement of Women at University of Haifa, Coexistence: Jewish-Arab Encounters from a Woman’s Perspective, Haifa, Israel
Kidma’s mission is to advance the status and improve the lives of all women in Israel. It reaches out from the academy to the community (it is an independent institution housed at the University of Haifa) to offer resources including courses, mini-courses, workshops, and seminars to increase women’s access to academic and institutional tools needed to enhance their lives, their families, their communities, and society at large.
Targum Shlishi helped fund an academic course in the 2004-05 academic year titled Coexistence: Jewish-Arab Encounters from a Woman’s Perspective. The objective of the course was to develop constructive relations between Arabs and Jews by discussing issues regarding coexistence, with a focus on its implications for women. The course consisted of weekly four-hour meetings with a group of 24 women (12 Jews and 12 Arabs). Sessions were dedicated to topics related to coexistence, democracy in Israel, and gender and minority group issues.
The Rosh Pina Mainstreaming Network, Horfesh Community Learning Center, Horfesh, Israel
The Horfesh Community Learning Center is a new and unique initiative in Israel. The center, established in 2004, offers special education services for children in Horfesh, a Druze village located in the Western Galilee. Providing these services to Druze students within their own community is a model of special needs education that doesn’t exist elsewhere in Israel – special education students typically need to travel long distances to receive the services they require. In Horfesh, there are 31 special education students and 375 children in the village with learning disabilities and behavioral problems who previously received inadequate services because of the limited resources in the village. The Horfesh Community Learning Center addresses the previously unmet needs of these children and is intended to be a replicable model to be used in Arab and Jewish sectors throughout Israel. Targum Shlishi’s funds were applied to supporting parent/child activities and special events (including a summer institute) as well as the development of a therapeutic gymboree.
Yaacov Herzog Center for Jewish Studies, Mabua [Fountainhead]: A Beit Midrash for Social, Educational, and Economic Activists in the South of the Country, Kibbutz Ein Tzurim, D.N. Sdeh Gat, Israel
The Yaacov Herzog Center (YHC) is an Orthodox institution is dedicated to the promotion of pluralism, tolerance, and Jewish renewal. Beginning in 1996, the Yaacov Herzog Center pioneered the development of small Batei Midrash – study halls based on the classic yeshiva model – creating a new kind of learning space by combining encounter group techniques with text study. Mabua is a new program first offered in 2004-05 developed by YHC together with Kolot BaNegev Midrasha that cultivates social and educational leadership among activists in the southern region of Israel.
The program consists of an intensive eight hour weekly workshop in which twenty leading social, communal, and economic activists study together, focusing on issues related to social and personal action. The study is based on Jewish and Israeli cultural sources, on the assumption that these sources can serve as a spiritual and cultural foundation for contemporary social action. The program’s intention is to draw upon the resources of Jewish cultural heritage to develop creative ways of responding to the social and economic issues and problems of modern Jewish life in Israel. Participants develop their abilities and their understanding, which they then apply in relation to the areas of their own community activity, by creating projects relevant to their work. The program’s assumption is that if leaders who are active in their communities undergo a process of deepened understanding, it will have a significant influence on their work and their communities as a whole.
Yad Eliezer, Food Donations, Israel
Yad Eliezer provides low-income families with both short-term relief in the form of food donations and with long-term solutions aimed to help them achieve financial stability. The organization runs more than twelve different food and social service programs and provides services to more than fifty thousand people in seventeen cities across Israel. Targum Shlishi supported various food donation initiatives in 2006.
Jewish Student Press Service, New Voices Israel Correspondence Program and Website Redesign, New York
In 2005 Targum Shlishi continued its support of New Voicesmagazine’s Israel Correspondence Program. New Voices is a national magazine written by and for Jewish college students and distributed to campuses throughout the U.S. Targum Shlishi’s support funds the magazine’s Israel correspondents. In addition, Targum Shlishi is supporting the redesign of the publication’s website, which will update and expand the site.