Stav was hanging out with the wrong crowd and getting into trouble. And then he joined a neighborhood club, Sayeret Chesed Yechudit (SAHI) – in English, the Special Grace Unit  – which empowers disenfranchised Israeli teens by turning them into anonymous goodwill ambassadors.

Through SAHI and its founders, Avraham Hayon and Oded Weiss, Stav became attuned to people in need and how to help them discreetly.

When Stav noticed a boy out in winter in short sleeves, he called Hayon for guidance. Hayon said, “Get his size.” Stav introduced himself and invited the boy to play soccer. Purposely throwing the game, he embraced the boy in a victory hug, surreptitiously noting the size on the tag inside his thin shirt. The next day, Stav left four coats at the boy’s door.

“My mom thinks that ever since I started going to SAHI, I’ve become more mature and I know what it means to give. I’ve started taking my life in my own hands,” says Stav in a video about the work of this voluntary organization, which started with seven teens in Kiryat Gat and now encompasses 400 teenagers in 15 clubs throughout several cities.

In 2009, when Hayon was 31, his father became ill with cancer. During a two-month break between treatments, Hayon took leave from his management job and went to India “to do some yoga and breathe.”

“Just before I came back to Israel, I wrote down all the things I wanted to start changing, and I concluded that in the end the only things that stay with you are the things you give. I wanted to give part of my life to the community, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do.”

That very day, a friend emailed him about Oded Weiss, an experienced youth counselor who had founded the Netina K’Derech Chaim (Giving as a Way of Life) Associationin 2007 and was seeking help to empower youth at risk in Kiryat Gat, a southern development town.

“I felt it was coming from karma, or from God; it was very mystical,” Hayon tells ISRAEL21c.

When the two men met, Weiss related that over the past two decades he had discovered that the best way to assisttroubled teens was to teach them how to give to others and thereby recognize their self-worth.

 “I really liked that idea,” says Hayon.

In July 2009, Weiss and Hayon brought a tea kettle and some pillows to a parking lot in a crime-ridden neighborhood of Kiryat Gat. As night fell, they made a bonfire, steamed herbal tea and waited. Slowly,teenagers started arriving.

“While we were sitting around our campfire, we raised the issue of giving food to local people in need. The kids from the neighborhood knew better than anybody who was in need and were excited to be involved in distributing the food,” Hayon recalls.“From finding food for one family a week, our project has grown to giving to hundreds of families across Israel.”

The food distribution, carried out in cooperation with national poverty-fighting organization Latet and other NGOs, is carefully organized. Four teenagers and one adult volunteer do the shopping; another team organizes the food and delivers to the recipient’s door. They knock and then leave quickly, so as not to embarrass the family and to remain anonymous.

“When I bring a crate of food up to some family, I have shivers all over. I feel I’m doing the biggest, kindest act in the world,” says one SAHI member.

The weekly food distribution stops for nothing – not snow in Jerusalem, not missiles from Gaza.

However, SAHI youth do much more. They help people with disabilities, the elderly, the downtrodden and Holocaust survivors with shopping, chores and home repairs. They visit hospitals and nursing homes. If they see someone scavenging in a dumpster, they’ll follow the person home and make a note of the address.

“What we teach them is to open their eyes to anyone who needs help in the community,” says Hayon.“When you’re part of SAHI you’re on a mission all the time. If you see another kid in school sitting alone at recess, you need to go and talk to him and make sure he’s okay, maybe invite him to join your group of friends.”

This simple approach seems to work wonders.

“Before we were in SAHI we would sit around, messing things up, harassing the neighbors, making noise, burning stuff, wrecking the neighborhood, writing on walls. We were bored. Today all I think about is helping my neighbors,” says one SAHI participant.

When Hayon’s father passed away in 2010, he decided to honor his father’s memory by forming a SAHI group in Jerusalem, the city where the Hayons have lived for seven generations.

Now there are five Jerusalem clubs and two more are opening soon in cooperation with the municipality.Each city where SAHI operates pays the salaries of SAHI counselors; local adult volunteers also participate. The remainder of the operating budget comes from donations from individuals and foundations such as the Good People Fund and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.

Seven SAHI groups are active in and around Kiryat Gat. There are groups in Ashkelon and Petah Tikva, and next in Rehovot,Bat Yam, Lod and Tel Aviv. “We have a big vision to have SAHI in every neighborhood in Israel,” says Hayon.

In response to requests from mayors, next year Hayon expects to adapt the SAHI model for Arab communities.

“Because our program is based very much on Jewish values and lifecycle, we’ll research verses from Koran about giving and helping, and will adjust it to their needs,” he says.

SAHI also is running a successful pilot group in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem and plans to open another.

Two offshoot projects recently kicked off: SAHI Golani, which takes 18-year-olds the army initially rejected and works to qualify them for the Golani brigade; and GPS (Girl Power SAHI),focused on issues specifically affecting female teens in the neighborhoods where SAHI is active.

An initiative called Palmach isaimed at stepping up altruistic activities in times of emergency such as last summer’s war, when Hayon and other SAHI leaders were called up to the reserves. Teens showing great promise are enrolled in SAHI’s Young Leaders course.

Until last year, Hayon personally led the first Kiryat Gat group. A grant from the US-based Good People Fund enabled him to become SAHI’s CEO and to hire Kiryat Gat native Yohai Buhbutas area coordinator for the South. Hayon’s army buddy Ronen Cohen, who has a doctorate in education, heads training and Weiss handles program development.

Though Hayon now guides SAHI from behind a desk, “My energy is always coming from the field, so I go once or twice a week to meet with the children,” he says. “I feel very lucky because I’m doing the thing I want to do the most.”

For more information, click here.

How troubled teens become goodwill envoys _ ISRAEL21c

One day in March 2011, Fraidy Reiss went to her lawyer’s office to close on a house. The prosaic routine of paperwork somehow diminished her sense of accomplishment. Not even the seller was present to hear what she yearned to say.

She was only buying a Cape Cod on a small patch of lawn in a blue-collar neighborhood in New Jersey. Yet she and her two daughters had already named the place “Palais de Triomphe,” palace of triumph. The house symbolized her liberation from an arranged marriage, threats of violence at the hands of her estranged husband, and indeed the entire insular community of stringently Orthodox Jews among whom she had spent her entire life.

Four years later, on a blustery morning early this month, Ms. Reiss, 40, stood in a classroom at Rutgers University in Newark telling her story to three dozen lawyers. She spoke with well-practiced pacing and emphasis — childhood in Brooklyn, coerced betrothal in her teens to a man she barely knew, and then the harassment and stalking and death threats, all of it documented in court papers. Finally, there was college and therapy and, after 15 years of marriage, divorce.

Ms. Reiss spoke with a very specific purpose. The lawyers were attending a continuing education course sponsored by Unchained at Last, the nonprofit group that she founded four years ago to help women extricate themselves from arranged marriages. Her hope was that some of the lawyers would be moved to represent Unchained at Last’s clients without charge.

“It’s a moral imperative,” said Katherine Francis, a corporate lawyer from the Trenton area, after Ms. Reiss’s presentation. “I hadn’t even planned to be here, but you know how you start a Google search and wander? And all of a sudden I saw this class and thought, ‘Hmm, there’s the universe talking.’ ”

Unchained at Last operates in the contested crossroad between the modern secular concept of marriage for love between consenting adults and longstanding ethnic or communal customs of arranged marriage. Religion does not require such marriage, but is very often invoked to provide moral justification for it. And the laws of certain faiths, Orthodox Judaism in particular, give a husband the sole right to grant a divorce.

A reliable estimate of arranged marriages is difficult because the definition is inexact. But the Tahirih Justice Center, an advocacy group for immigrant women, reported that about 3,000 cases of “forced marriage” took place in the United States from 2009 through 2011.

Almost all of the 90 women whom Unchained at Last has helped had been pressured into marriage by their religious community: Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Mormon, Unification Church. Most lived in the New York area, though one was in Arizona. The women’s nations of origin stretch through Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

On a basic level, Unchained at Last provides legal services because most of the women’s cases involve divorce and child custody litigation, and some extend into immigration status and restraining orders against a violent spouse. Because the clients’ situations can be so catastrophic — forced at gunpoint to accept a marriage, raped by a husband, essentially imprisoned within the home as a domestic servant — Unchained at Last also provides mentoring, access to therapy and cash stipends for everything from basic clothing to English as a second language class.

Ms. Reiss’s earliest collaborator was Shehnaz Abdeljaber, a Rutgers classmate of Palestinian Muslim ancestry. In their barrier-crossing friendship, the women discovered a common bond. Ms. Abdeljaber had been pushed by her parents into an engagement to a young man from her extended family whom she had never met. Though she managed to break off the engagement, the broader issue intrigued her.

“From the day I met Fraidy, I knew she was going to be part of my life,” Ms. Abdeljaber wrote in an email. “Little did I know that we weren’t going to be just friends. We became sisters, family and partners with her vision.”

In early 2011, Unchained at Last incorporated in New Jersey. Ms. Abdeljaber became the first president of the group’s board, which also included a Hindu woman, Kavitha Rajagopalan.

The annual budget back then came to barely $20,000, most of it from Ms. Reiss’s pocket. By now, Unchained at Last has a $3.4 million budget, with about $200,000 in donations from individuals and foundations and $3.2 million in free services from participating lawyers. In her own life, Ms. Reiss has become an atheist, and, after several years as a journalist, she became a private investigator.

Most clients find the group through word-of-mouth. At the outset, Ms. Reiss said, the organization struggled to find enough volunteer lawyers. Child-custody litigation is particularly difficult. Religious communities have been successful at times in turning out large numbers to paint Unchained’s client as an “unfit mother” because she has left the theological corral.

That has not deterred Ms. Reiss. Unchained at Last successfully lobbied in the New Jersey State Legislature last year for a law easing crime victims’ access to court records. This week, Ms. Reiss took part in an initialplanning session held by the White House Council on Women and Girls to develop a national policy on forced marriage.

Even in its more sophisticated form, though, Unchained at Last has retained the personal touch of what the Rev. Henri Nouwen, writing about ministry, called the “wounded healer.” Ditty Weiss, for one, experienced it.

After 10 years in an abusive marriage, Ms. Weiss decided to risk leaving both her husband and their fervently Orthodox community. The only problem was that she had no idea who could help her. In a sort of desperate whim, Ms. Weiss sent an email to Deborah Feldman, the author of an acclaimed memoir, “Unorthodox,” about her rejection of the Satmar Hasidic sect in which she had grown up.

Ms. Feldman steered Ms. Weiss to Ms. Reiss, who soon lined up two volunteer lawyers from a prominent Manhattan firm. When Ms. Weiss needed cancer surgery, Ms. Reiss babysat for her children. And as Ms. Weiss underwent chemotherapy, Unchained at Last gave her money to hire an au pair and a buy a used car.

“I cannot even describe,” Ms. Weiss recalled, “what it’s like to have an angel sweep down and kiss you on the forehead and then hold your hand and tell you, ‘I’m not letting go until you’re O.K.’ ”

Woman Breaks Through Chains of Forced Marriage, and Helps Others Do the Same – NYTimes

Julie Leven, classical violinist who holds degrees in English and Music from Oberlin College and Conservatory, has always felt an impulse to help the less fortunate and was influenced by her alma mater’s legacy of promoting social justice.

Leven also loves music.

These two passions came together for her in 2010 when she founded Shelter Music Boston, a non-profit organization for which she serves as executive and artistic director. Shelter Music Boston’s mission is to perform live classical chamber music for displaced shelter residents, those who might not otherwise have the financial means or opportunity to experience music in less-accessible venues. It’s Leven’s hope that this will create an environment of dignity and respect for residents.

Leven, a member of the Handel and Haydn Society who has toured with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra, was inspired by a newspaper article about a violinist who plays in homeless shelters in New York City. After recruiting other classical musicians who were also interested in her vision, Shelter Music Boston was born.

Five years later, the ensemble is a thriving non-profit organization whose concerts have a lasting and meaningful impact on both the musicians and shelter residents alike. Currently, Shelter Music Boston is comprised of six core musicians and three guest artists. They perform monthly concerts lasting approximately 60 to 90 minutes at six partner shelters: the Pine Street Women’s and Men’s Inns, the Pine Street Inn Shattuck Shelter, the Community Day Center in Waltham, the Dimock Center and CASPAR Emergency Service Center. A seventh shelter is in the works.

Her hope is to expand to even more shelters, but the logistics and planning of such an endeavor can be challenging. The ensemble’s vision is to make classical music more accessible to the homeless and to bring a sense of peace, joy and relief to people living in harsh, crowded and often chaotic circumstances.

Shelter Music Boston emphasizes the educational and interactive approach of its concerts, which feature Q&A sessions with the musicians, introductions to and backgrounds on the composers they’ve selected to play, explanations about the instruments themselves and feedback and comments from the audiences after the performances. Leven and the other musicians encourage audience interaction and dialogue, which distinguishes their concerts from those they perform in more traditional venues.

Depending on the particular shelter they’re playing at, the number of people in attendance varies. There are regulars, she notes, who enjoy seeing the core members of the ensemble return on a regular basis. She also emphasizes how important this work is to her and her fellow musicians. They regard it as equally important and valuable as any of the performances they are paid to do, and they plan and rehearse diligently in preparation.

Playing for shelter residents is particularly meaningful for the Shelter Music Boston ensemble. The experience of performing for people whose lives have been disrupted or uprooted for various reasons is a powerful one. Leven believes that people living in shelters are just as deserving of the opportunity to enjoy an evening of classical music as anyone who happens to have the disposable income to purchase a ticket.

The audiences at the shelters have been extremely appreciative of and, sometimes, moved by the concerts. People have remarked that, after a concert, they have been able to enjoy a long-deserved good night’s sleep. Others have asked the ensemble to play certain pieces of music again and Leven notes that Beethoven’s works have been a favorite of audiences. Leven regards Shelter Music Boston’s concerts as a sort of  therapy or service that complements  the professional work the shelters’ staff provide. Music, she notes, can be healing and transformative and is a vital and profound form of communication—an expression of our essential humanity.

At the Dimock  Center, the ensemble performs for two female residential substance abuse programs and concert attendance is mandatory for the residents. One guest told Leven that the concerts inspired her to start listening to classical music as a way to relax and cope with stress. A staff member at another shelter told Leven that a resident was newly motivated to set goals for himself in terms of finding permanent housing.

While not all residents will remain seated for the entire performance or watch it attentively, they’re often clearly aware of the music and continue to listen to it throughout the shelter. Given the non-traditional setting, the musicians often play in large, communal spaces and anyone passing through can listen and feel the impact of the music, which often competes with the bustle and noise of shelter life. Shelter staff have noted that, following a performance, a positive shift in the environment and in the mood of many residents often occurs.

Shelter Music Boston believes that classical music should be accessible to everyone and they are aware of the divide between the traditional audience for classical music and the homeless shelter attendees. They have found that the music resonates, however, by creating an interactive concert experience where dialogue between the audience and musicians is encouraged. Some shelter residents have requested to hear more pieces by particular composers and have related these pieces to their own thoughts and feelings. Leven recalls that one resident was surprised to learn that Beethoven was deaf when he composed a piece he had just heard, and he was able to relate to that genius’ personal struggle and Leven and the other musicians strive to create an environment in which the musicians and audiences connect in a way that is transformative.

As Leven says, “It’s a privilege for us to play for shelter residents and bring a sense of relief and peace to them.”

Shelter Music Boston creates human connections