Elysa Rapoport gave birth to a stillborn daughter in 2016, and soon discovered a lack of emotional and practical support systems in Israel for those facing pregnancy and infant loss. So she determined to make change and co-founded Candles of Hope, a GPF grantee. Her organization is building and providing resources and channels of support, and is shining a light on what for many is an uncomfortable topic. GPF Exec. Dir. Naomi Eisenberger talks to Elysa about her journey and impact.

Asher Lovy knows the silence.

In the insular and rigidly structured Haredi community of Brooklyn’s Borough Park, he spent his boyhood and young adult years. In an intergenerational home, his mother sexually, physically and mentally abused him.

The silence that raged in the community around him – where discussion of such aggressions was neither welcome nor acknowledged – was too much to bear.

So he got loud.

“I decided to live with the consequences and stigma of going public,” he said. “I needed to go out and yell about it.”

That was 2011, when he started writing a blog about his experiences. His boldness and bravery opened a floodgate of testimonials from others suffering in similar silence, and volunteer work in a drop-in center for neighborhood youth revealed more fully his community’s dark underside.

“Sexual abuse, not to mention suicide, teenage pregnancies, drug use … I didn’t know these things were happening, and I couldn’t believe leaders in my community weren’t doing anything about it and weren’t interested,” he said.

It was not a trajectory that Lovy, now 29, asked for. But at a relatively young age, he is an activist and change maker, and as head of ZA’AKAH (Hebrew for “outcry), an advocate for survivors of child sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community.

ZA’AKAH is a grantee of The Good People Fund.

Under his leadership, the organization is active on the micro and macro levels raising awareness of child sexual abuse, creating channels to address it, and breaking the silence.

Legislative activity is a priority. Among the group’s victories were the landmark Child Victims Acts in New York and New Jersey giving survivors of child sexual abuse and victimization a path to justice.

ZA’AKAH was also instrumental in the passage of Erin’s Law, which mandates that public schools in New York State teach K-8 students about sexual abuse and exploitation prevention. The organization is seeking to extend the requirement to private schools, including yeshivas.

Lovy has sought alliances with other organizations active in related spaces.

ZA’AKAH partnered with Unchained at Last – another GPF grantee – as it seeks to ban child marriage at the state and national levels. This summer, Unchained at Last claimed victory in New York as it became the sixth state to outlaw the practice, not uncommon in the Orthodox Jewish community.

Closer to the street, ZA’AKAH is aggressively bringing the scourge of child sexual abuse and victimization into the light. It organizes educational events to inform parents and teachers about how to identify sexual abuse and how to properly handle and report suspicions or disclosures of it.

In 2020, Lovy established a volunteer-based Shabbos and Yom Tov hotline to provide peer support to anyone regardless of denomination, sex, gender, or sexual orientation.

“Problems can worsen on those days when someone may be at home and there is nothing between them and their abuser,” he said. “They will find empathy and understanding with a peer and that conversation gets them through the door.”

Since it was established, the hotline has registered nearly 200 calls, not only from the New York metro area, but from throughout the United States and Israel and the UK as well.

Day to day, ZA’AKAH does not provide direct victim services. It makes referrals to other agencies for financial support, housing assistance, suicide prevention, mental health counseling, and emergency needs.

So is all of this work making a dent in the Orthodox Jewish community? The question is difficult to answer, Lovy admits.

“The problem with defining progress in the Orthodox community is that the secular society might not recognize it as such,” he said. “Twenty years ago, you could not talk about sexual abuse. Now, there is more of a push to force the community to acknowledge it and there is an active social network in which people talk about it more openly and there is dissent toward the establishment and the community writ large.

“You can have awareness, but if the conclusion is the same, where does that get us? It’s hard to say.”

That being said, Lovy said his goal is not to change that larger community. Rather, he said, his best efforts are devoted to advocating, educating, and helping individuals, survivor by survivor.

“I just want others to benefit from my experience and what I’ve learned.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

She was in her 90’s at the time, living alone, suffering from Alzheimer’s, prone to falling, and increasingly unable to take care of herself. While neighbors and responders thought it might be best for her to be living in a seniors’ home, she refused.

It turns out that she was an escapee from Nazi Germany and spent some of the war years hiding and protected in Christian churches. The thought of facilities or institutions evoked troubling, even terrifying memories, and she said she preferred to die before ever leaving her home.

Through a combination of legal, social, and medical and therapeutic assistance, the elderly woman was allowed to remain in her house with an assigned, fulltime caretaker – her dignity, sensitivities, and needs respected and met.

It didn’t have to end this well, and it often doesn’t. But in this case, a network of expertise and support began surrounding her, one inclined to find and establish new norms for such cases of distress, and eschew practices that very often result in even greater suffering.

“The reality is that people meet crisis, and it can be anyone and at anytime,” said Dr. Mickey Schindler. “We would like to think things only happen on the other side of the fence. But suddenly, things break down. Some outcomes are better and more desirable than others.”

Dr. Schindler is one of the founding visionaries – and now director – of MARVA – Law, Welfare and Empowerment, a Jerusalem-based non-profit organization established by a group of Israeli attorneys and social welfare experts. The acronym itself mirrors the Hebrew words for law, welfare and empowerment, the three legs supporting MARVA’s mission and approach.

The organization, a Good People Fund grantee, assists and uplifts vulnerable populations – from elderly at risk, to individuals with mental disabilities – facing difficulties caring for their own well-being and protecting their own rights.

How it does so is a departure from the standard, which is so often siloed and one-dimensional, applying a this-or-that approach that is less than optimal. Instead, MARVA embodies and models a holistic approach combining legal aid and advocacy for full legal rights while also facilitating and integrating social welfare and therapeutic support.

It’s a multi-disciplinary design making it possible to provide comprehensive solutions to issues affecting the lives and independence of at-risk individuals and families across the spectrum of need, challenge, and crisis.

“So often, legal or social welfare or therapeutic approaches are not enough or sufficient on their own,” said Dr. Schindler, an attorney specializing in elder and disabilities law who has training in social work. “Each can be effective in some way, but not in a whole way, and not give a complete sort of intervention and solution.”

Since its founding in 2015, MARVA has ingrained itself into Israel’s legal and social welfare ecosystem, offering protections and guidance to – for example – older adults undergoing or at risk of abuse or neglect, people with dementia and Alzheimer’s and their families, Holocaust survivors, and young adults with mental or abuse challenges.

A small part of its casework – but one that is expected to grow – is in the realm of “supported decision making,” an alternative to guardianship that assists older people or those with mental or cognitive disabilities to preserve their independence, liberties and autonomy. In fact, MARVA is in a two-year project with two other organizations – JDC-Israel Unlimited and Mosaica ­– to deploy and utilize the practice more nationally throughout Israel.

The organization has built relationships with nearly 50 municipalities throughout the country, working with and enhancing the services of social welfare agencies and stepping into cases. Last year alone, MARVA reached over 2,100 people through personal assistance and casework, and more than 4,000 people through public lecture, advocacy, and education programs.

Its reach continues to expand, sensitive to the fact that Israel’s peripheral regions have less access to services, even though there may be greater need due to lower socio-economic profiles. With Good People Fund support, MARVA recently opened a center in Safed – in the Galilee region of northern Israel – and plans to open another one in the far south.

Six years since its establishment, MARVA has put into practice what was mere theory, formalizing networks of support and activating connections to serve the most vulnerable.

“We didn’t invent this, but we weren’t willing to leave it in the books either,” Dr. Schindler said, adding that marva is also the Hebrew word for Salvia, a healing plant. “Ideas can be beautiful, but it’s more important to implement them in the real world.

“People meet crisis and as much as we can help and empower them with sensitivity and give them all they need so they can continue living their lives with dignity and agency, that is our goal. Life can be complicated and people need help and assistance and that’s simply what we try to do.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz

An unexpected moment of sadness and isolation visited Dr. Anita Shkedi as thoughts of her son Jonathan – an Israel Defense Forces soldier who lost his life in conflict – overwhelmed her.

At the time, she was at an equine center she had founded on the Israeli coast to advance the practice of therapeutic horseback riding. A Pinto horse named Starlight sensed her distress and came close.

“I may have started to cry, as feelings were coming up in me,” she remembered. “She put her head up against me. She pushed into me and we were bonded. As I let my feelings out, she was telling me she was there for me.”

There on the cover of Dr. Shkedi’s just-published book, Horses Heal PTSD – Walking New Paths, is a picture of that very moment. A documentary filmmaker, who happened to be on the property that day, captured it.

Considering that Dr. Shkedi is an established authority on the relational history between humans and horses – and the immense mental and physical healing benefits that can flow from it – the fact that she herself was the recipient at a time of raw vulnerability is remarkable, and makes the book itself even more passionately grounded.

“I will never forget it,” she said. “It was one of the most emotional and genuine moments I’ve had with a horse. It was like together we were not in this universe.”

It is of this relationship that she writes over 238 pages of contextual histories and case studies of how PTSD – afflicting all manner of people from children who have been sexually abused, and soldiers who saw and endured the horrors of conflict, to women who have been raped, and youth living with domestic violence – can be mitigated through purposefully designed interaction with horses, including caring for and riding them, and creating bonds.

The research and practice is colloquially known as therapeutic horseback riding, and more formally as Equine Assisted Activities and/or Therapy (EAA/T). Dr. Shkedi – a pioneer in the discipline – adds to the growing literature on the subject with the new book.

“It is heavy stuff,” she said. “But I hope to the lay reader, this will be almost a self-help book. People have multiple traumas and they spend a lot of time trying to shut them out and avoid the monsters coming to the surface. We need to deal with them and instill hope.

“You can’t quick fix PTSD. You have to work it through a process until you can manage it so it doesn’t take over every part of your brain. That is my aim, by using our relationship with horses and the non-verbal communication that occurs to restore trust and build healing.”

The book is Dr. Shkedi’s second. In 2012, she authored Traumatic Brain Injury and Therapeutic Riding, a more clinical examination of how horse-based therapies can be used to help people suffering severe head injuries.

In 2003, Dr. Shkedi and her husband, Giora, founded the Israel National Therapeutic Riding Association (INTRA) – a veteran and longtime grantee organization of The Good People Fund – as a national center for EAA/T in Israel.

It serves a full spectrum of children, youth and adults with significant life challenges to improve their long-term physical, social, and emotional well being, and is particular known for its work with IDF soldiers with PTSD.

Of the book’s reception so far, Dr. Shkedi said she is already in contact with people seeking help. One woman in Texas, for example, reached out because her 10-year-old son is experiencing PTSD due to multiple physical and psychological traumas.

“If through this book I can give hope to those who are suffering, then it’s done its job.”

Dr. Shkedi will read from her new book and answer questions on a live Zoom event at 1 pm Eastern on Wednesday, May 5.  To register, visit www.anitashkedi.com.

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz

Walk through the inner city and other challenged areas and you’ll see a different food landscape than across town: fewer grocery stores, more fast-food places, and unhealthy choices. FEAST (Food – Education – Access – Support – Together), an LA-based organization supported by The Good People Fund, is changing that reality. FEAST Executive Director Dana Rizer describes how.

Courtney Smith was out of college and living with housemates in Detroit when the doorbell rang. Her brother, six years younger, was homeless and without resources and needed help.

She took him in, at least for the interim. But soon, a handful of his friends from the street – all in similar circumstances – were camped out on air mattresses strewn throughout the basement.

The situation was all too disturbingly and shockingly familiar. Courtney herself had grown up in the foster care system, and was adopted into a family, but left at age 15 due to family conflict and ended up couch surfing, doubling up, and living in shelters. And even in college, she faced housing insecurity.

“Homelessness is very personal to me,” she said. “It can be a cyclical issue that goes on for generations if we don’t do something about it.”

And so she set out to do so, starting on a determined path that led to the founding in 2016 of Detroit Phoenix Center (DPC), the city’s first-ever drop-in center for street-connected youth. DPC is a new grantee organization of The Good People Fund.

The organization offers various low-barrier portals into a safe space for teens and young adults who are at risk of or experiencing homelessness. There, they can access basics that can mean survival – from showers, meals, laundry services, lockers, day beds, and other needs, to career and life skills workshops, computer labs, housing crisis support … and a community of care and concern.

Pre-pandemic, DPC reached and engaged about 150 teens and young adults each year. But for the very fact that there is simply no other such place in Detroit – one designed with a holistic approach to help them with immediate and daily needs, and also to disrupt predictable and unwelcome trajectories – many may have disappeared into the environment with no trace or hope.

As COVID-19 has resulted in increasingly restricted access to DPC, and quite literally exposed a severely vulnerable population to illness and death, the organization has taken to the streets. It is finding street-connected youth where they congregate and live to bring them mobile- and virtual-supported help, assistance and counsel – ranging from basics like face masks and hand sanitizer, to healthy food and housing vouchers.

“Many don’t have anywhere to go to shelter in place,” Courtney said. “Many don’t have access to running water and soap to wash their hands for 20 seconds. Many are living in abandoned buildings in groups of ten or more, and transmission is an issue.

“We’ve had to change our whole service provision during this time and be innovative. They are very high risk and vulnerable during a pandemic. We have to be out there.”

At the heart of DPC is Courtney’s recognition that it would be nothing if not informed by the youth that it attracts and serves. In fact, she labels herself a “servant leader.”

“The work we do is truly driven by heart and humility and selflessness,” she said. “There is no ego here. The youth are the ones who have to be centered and elevated. Their lived experiences form the fabric of DPC, and intentionality in putting their voices first is key to allowing them to be served effectively.”

In fact, DPC has a “Youth Action Board” that provides leadership and personal development for members who have direct experience with homelessness and other adverse societal conditions as they give input into DPC programming, services and reach, and advocate for positive systemic change.

Ask Courtney what’s at the heart of her passion and commitment to uplift and help vulnerable youth in Detroit, and she speaks about that “lived experience.” It’s a term that comes up frequently in conversation with her, framing as it does a worldview of not only challenges, but also solutions.

It took on even deeper significance and meaning when her brother, Blair – who knocked on her door at a moment of need just a few short years earlier – died by suicide at the age of 19. It was on the eve of the opening of DPC, which he’d helped to envision and design, and where he was voted by peers as first president of the Youth Action Board.

“There is a pain point for me in this work,” Courtney said. “Those can either cripple us or force us to show up in the world as the best versions of ourselves. I chose the latter.”

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund