Israel Gives, Web-based Initiative for Charitable Donations, Israel
The IsraelGives Foundation has created an online resource to act as a clearinghouse for information about charities in Israel. The site is available in both Hebrew and English. The goal is to provide a platform for the 26,500 active charities in Israel, of which less than 200 have websites, and even fewer have English-language websites or the capability to collect donations online. The site offers extensive information and official documentation for the charities, and it provides each with its own mini-website as well as the means of collecting online donations. Targum Shlishi’s support is geared to helping grow awareness of this resource by supporting pr and marketing efforts.
Table to Table, Fresh Produce for Children’s Project, Ra’anana, Israel
Table to Table is Israel’s largest food rescue organization, providing 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. For the past several years, Targum Shlishi has supported an initiative, originally conceived by Aryeh Rubin, Targum Shishi’s director, that provides fresh produce and, more recently, dairy products to Jewish and Arab children at-risk who are enrolled in after-school programs through the Jaffa Institute (the programs’ populations are sixty percent Jewish and forty percent Arab). Currently, the initiative provides 1,100–1,500 pounds of rescued food and dairy products each week to the Jaffa Institute. In addition to providing two meals each day to the seventy children in the after-school programs, which operate from noon to 6 pm, the initiative also provides food packages to 350 of Jaffa’s neediest families each week and provides Israeli Arab women in a work-training course with a meal each day and take-home food for their families.
Midreshet Lapidot, Financial Aid for Sderot, Israel
A significant number of residents in the city of Sderot in southern Israel were experiencing financial hardship, exacerbated by rocket fire bombardment. Targum Shlishi responded to a grassroots effort to raise funds to help needy individuals and families with a range of services—from schoolbags for students to food for families to hearing aids and emergency home equipment sets. The effort also raised funds for scholarships and for a family emergency fund for the city’s residents.
Kolot, Spiritual Education for Security Leadership, Israel
A program directed at Israel’s top security leadership is now available. The year-long curriculum was developed by Kolot at the request of the government, and explores the link between military resilience and spiritual recovery. The objective of the program is to integrate a spiritual and ethical component into the daily operations of Israel’s security community by promoting social responsibility through Jewish learning. The year-long curriculum explores issues such as the limits of power, responsibilities of the ruling majority, the ethics of conflict, and healing after loss. Kolot, which means ‘Voices’ in Hebrew, was founded in 1997 and teaches Jewish values, ethics and Torah to Jews of all ages. Targum Shlishi’s support is being used to help create the program’s curriculum and to fund a number of educational sessions.
Horfesh Community Learning Center and Field of Dreams, Projects of Kaleidoscope, Lod, Israel
The Horfesh Community Learning Center is a 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 must 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. Field of Dreams is a more recent initiative, established in 2008, in which Kaleidoscope’s workshop approach was combined with sports activities to establish an after-school soccer program for Arab and Jewish children at risk, with the goals of fostering social skills, improving academic performance and promoting tolerance and understanding between Arabs and Jews.