News Archive - Page 2 of 18 - The Good People Fund

Women of Note 2024 – Charmaine Rice

Charmaine Rice was a bright-eyed, recent Wright State University graduate when she realized helping others along their professional trajectory would be a fitting career path for herself.

“I was sitting in a six-week management training course at Ohio Savings Bank, and there was this woman who was facilitating that training,” Rice recalled. “We were not being spoon-fed information for eight hours a day. Instead, we were doing case studies and slowly building up our knowledge to the point where we could be confident that, even if we didn’t know the answer, we could find an answer. … It astounded me. I just appreciated being able to support people with feeling more comfortable that they have the skills and abilities to do their job effectively.”

Today, Rice leads a 12-person team responsible for overseeing the learning and development of AmTrust Financial Services’ nearly 8,000 employees. She was hired initially in 2020 to oversee diversity and inclusion for the global insurance company but “kept sticking” her nose into learning and development while championing cultural competence.

“For many of us, the workplace is the first time we are in an environment with folks who are very different than ourselves, communicate differently, have different observances, different values, different world views,” she said. “So, part of learning to work and be successful at your job can be less about the technical skill and more about the relational skills.”

Rice spent most of her elementary years at a U.S. Air Force base in Germany where her father was stationed, though a brief move to to the Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, exposed the sixth-grader to racism from her classmates.

Rice said the family returned to Germany 18 months later, where they lived until she was 16 and a final reassignment landed her father at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton.

At AmTrust, Rice is proud of the work she’s done “to create a culture that really amplifies employees as individuals, as well as part of the community.” Under her watch, the company has launched an executive diversity council, seven different “employee networks,” including groups focused on abilities, families, military service and multiculturalism, and an internal career development tool that helps employees personalize their professional paths.

“Of course, I can’t take credit for these things alone,” she said. “I have an amazing team.”

She puts her development skills to work outside of the office, as well, from her longtime partnership with the nonprofit Heart to Heart organization in Akron to the 2019 establishment of Cleveland-based Rekindle Fellowship, which she co-founded with Matt Fieldman.

Rekindle is a program that brings leaders from the Black and Jewish communities together for meaningful dialogue and collaborative action. With 116 graduates to date, the program is expanding to Akron this summer.

Fieldman said Rice’s “superpower” is her ability “to get people to shed all those layers of identity and just connect as human beings.”

“We more leaders like Charmaine who can connect authentically person-to-person and create safe spaces to have real conversations,” he said.

Good People Help Good People

Good People Fund and Naomi Eisenberger on the cover of Jewish Standard magazine — Cover of Jewish Standard Magazine, June 14, 2024

Not all charities and nonprofits are big. Not all of them need huge infusions of cash from single donors, big foundations and funds, and other large organizations. Not all of them have to be filtered through a logistically and bureaucratically necessary but still time- and soul-sucking set of requirements.

Some of them are small and nimble. The help they provide is less systemic than individualized and personal. Their creators can use mentoring to guide the internal fires that propel them.

Both kinds of organizations are necessary, but the smaller ones can be less visible.

Naomi Eisenberger sees them. And her background as a serial entrepreneur, shul leader, and volunteer has developed her internal Rolodex, taught her to listen intently, and equipped her to provide those nonprofits with the help they need.

The Jerusalem-based JLM Food Rescuers salvages food for people in need.

Her 17-year-old Good People Fund has given more than $23.2 million to support 242 programs, spent not quite five percent of what it’s raised on expenses, and because some donations are designated for administrative costs, has spent nothing else on overhead.

That’s not bad for an organization that until this year has had only one employee — Naomi Eisenberger.

So who is she?

To begin with, Ms. Eisenberger’s got deep roots in New Jersey. “I’m from Caldwell,” she said. “My parents came from Manhattan and the Bronx to Caldwell in 1932. My father, George Kaplan, came with his brother-in-law to start a men’s clothing store, and he and my mother, Molly, basically became pillars of the Jewish community.”

Caldwell was a small town then; much of it was farmland, Ms. Eisenberger said. “My parents were one of the first Jewish families in town. They opened a small synagogue, Agudath Israel” — now it’s a prominent, flourishing Conservative shul — “and my father was president there.”

Men’s clothing stores seemed to run in the extended Kaplan family’s DNA. Ms. Eisenberger’s father’s store, the Caldwell Men’s Shop, “stood in the middle of Bloomfield Avenue until 1996,” Ms. Eisenberger said; in 1986, she and her husband, Gerry, bought it from her father.

After she graduated from public school in town, Ms. Eisenberger went to Montclair State, and then taught history in Whippany Park High School. She and Gerry moved to Millburn. Then they had children — two of them, Andrew, who now is married, the father of three children, and an oncologist at Columbia Presbyterian, and Sara, a former social worker, the mother of three daughters, who lives nearby in Short Hills — and she became a serial entrepreneur. “I started a plant decorating business, and then I had a needlepoint finishing business, and then I became a kosher caterer,” she said. It was the 1980s, and those businesses were on trend. People decorated their houses with plants, they loved making needlepoint but didn’t know how to turn the finished product into something usable, and it was possible to run a catering business out of your own kitchen. “I was following trends, and I did things that I was good at and cared about,” Ms. Eisenberger said.

BirdieLight reaches high school and college students across the U.S., educating about fentanyl and distributing test strips.

She was also learning a great deal about working with people, figuring out what they wanted and what they needed, and how to adapt as time, technology, and the world around her changed.

In 1991, her children were in college, she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, and she was the newly elected president of her shul, Congregation B’nai Israel in Milburn. “I was in the rabbi’s study” — that was Steven Bayar, now rabbi emeritus — “just about to go on vacation, and I saw some books on his shelf written by Danny Siegel.

“I had never heard of him.”

Danny Siegel is a philanthropist, poet, writer, and charismatic animating spirit behind the Conservative movement’s youth group, USY; he was the international president in 1962, and has influenced generations of once-young people ever since. Ms. Eisenberger had been a USYer, but she hadn’t gone on Pilgrimage, as the group’s summer trips were called, and she hadn’t been active on the national level. Somehow, she hadn’t been influenced by Mr. Siegel — at least consciously.

“So when I saw these books, I asked Rabbi Bayar ‘What is this about?’ and he said ‘Take these books and read them on vacation.’

In Israel, Shutaf provides special-needs kids with time away at overnight camp.

“I did, and I was blown away.

“So I came back and said that we have to bring him here. Our plan was to start a tikkun olam committee — we didn’t have one then — so we hired him for a Shabbat as speaker in residence.

“Like most people, I was totally blown away.”

That was the first time they met, and they stayed in touch. “Then, a few years later, he asked me if I would like to volunteer for his organization, the Ziv Tzedakah Fund, and I said omigod yes! It kind of felt like being anointed.

Waves of Hope provides water therapy and unexpected healing to disaffected young Israelis.

“So I drove down to Rockville,” Maryland, where he lived, “and I gathered up all the records, and I became the volunteer administrator.

“At the same time, we were running our family business, which by that point we had bought from my father.” It was a lot, even for someone as energetic as Ms. Eisenberger.

“I went to Israel with him in the summer, I became very interested in his program, I got to know the grantees, I went to CAJE conferences with him” — that’s the now-defunct Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education.

“And then in ’95, when we decided to close the store, I said to Danny, ‘I can’t continue to do this. I have to get a job. You either have to hire me or I have to go.’

Evan Robbins of Metuchen works with poor children in Africa through his organization, Breaking the Chain Through Education.

“He was of the school that you don’t use donated money to pay anyone’s salary, but he found a donor who would pay a half-time salary.” So Ms. Eisenberger worked half-time for the Ziv Tzedakah Fund and half-time for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, out of USCJ’s New Jersey office.

That didn’t last, though. She was far more interested in philanthropy than movement politics. “So I said to Danny, ‘Full time or nothing,’ and I ended up working full time as the managing director of the fund.”

That lasted until 2007, “when Danny announced that he was retiring. ‘You’ll land on your feet, Naomi,’ he told me.”

When she began to work for Danny Siegel’s fund, it was raising $250,000 a year, she said; by the time he shuttered it, it was raising $2 million annually, and that money was doing good work. So “the night the board voted to close, I just blurted out, ‘This work is too important. We are doing too much good. Our donors believe in us. I’ll start over.’

Everyday Boston, led by a storyteller, is powered by the idea that stereotypes divide but stories connect.

“The next morning I got on the phone and called seven donors.

“I sat down with a friend and we wrote a business plan — he was my first board chair. We came up with a budget. I had to raise $175,000 for each of the first two years. I reached out, and those seven donors I called gave me the money we needed to start.

“We incorporated in the state of New Jersey in 2007. We opened the Good People Fund on May 1. That was 17 years ago.

“My office then was in my son’s bedroom. And it still is.”

What drives her?

“This is not a job,” Ms. Eisenberger said. “This is holy work. Literally holy work.

Za’akah provides support and help to survivors of child sexual abuse in the Orthodox community.

“I don’t have a bad moment, because it is only doing good, and I get to hang out with the best people God has put on this earth.

“We seek out and support small grassroots organizations in the United States and in Israel. They don’t have to be Jewish — in Israel they can be Jewish or Bedouin or Muslim. We fund them.

“And we mentor them.

“Something that’s common to all of them is they each have an individual or small group of people who are visionaries. People who have identified problems in the world and have found creative ways to solve those problems.

The Survivor Mitzvah Project gives financial support to Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe.

“That’s the essence of what we do. These are people who fly under the radar. They are not people who big organizations will fund. Our goal is to make them more visible and help them outgrow us.”

The Good People Fund purposely works only with small organizations. “We will fund only up to a certain budget size,” Ms. Eisenberger said. “Most of them are volunteer-run; if there is any staff, it’s a small one, but often the founder is working alone.

“For the most part, they work in areas that are ‘social-service oriented’” — she used air quotes there. “Programs deal with refugee issues, women’s empowerment, disabilities, hunger, poverty, hatred.”

Combating hatred sounds like an amorphous task, but Good People has funded such groups as Civic Spirit USA, which teaches civics in faith-based schools as a sane way to understand how things should work; Fighting Online Antisemitism, an Israel-based nonprofit whose volunteers recognize and report cyberhatred; Road to Recovery, which takes sick Palestinian children through checkpoints to Israeli hospitals; Tag Meir, which, in response to the violent death of an innocent woman, brings Israeli Jews and Arabs together in mourning and then in hope; and TribeTalk, which helps prepare American Jewish college students to confront hate on campus.

Tag Meir, in Israel, brings people of different backgrounds together to talk and eventually to trust.

As these programs show, Good People can respond to changing needs quickly.

“Because we are very small and nimble, we can pivot,” Ms. Eisenberger said. So a few years ago, when it became obvious that hatred was becoming a problem, we went looking for programs that address hatred in creative, impactful ways.

“There is no shortage of programs like that. There are many people out there who are working very quietly but very effectively, and it is our honor and privilege to be able to help them.

“We have a minimal amount of bureaucracy, and our work is very hands-on. My days are spent mentoring and listening. When you are running a small organization, it can be a very lonely existence. You start to question yourself. ‘Why am I doing this? Does it really make a difference?’

New York-based New Neighbors Partnership matches newly arrived refugee, asylee, and asylum-seeking families with local families who can pass along hand-me-down children’s clothing and provide emotional support.

“We have the ability to listen, and to give them perspective.

“And it’s not only me,” Ms. Eisenberger continued. “I have a board of incredible people, who are deeply committed to what we do, and who use their talents to help their grantees. We have more than a few young retirees on the board who have experience in finance or law or other fields, and who happily make themselves available.”

Although it might be a cliché, when Ms. Eisenberger says “We are a family,” you believe her.

The Good People Fund is ecumenical in its reach but deeply Jewish in its ethos. “We say very clearly that we are based in Jewish tradition,” Ms. Eisenberger said. “Our logo says, in Hebrew, maasim tovim” — good deeds — but religion doesn’t enter into who we support.

Just Imagine provides support for inner-city high school students.

“This fall in New York, we will hold our first gathering of all our grantees in Israel and the United States. It was supposed to be last November, but then October 7 happened. A very generous donor is underwriting most of the cost, because he knows, as I know, that bringing these people together, the energy and what they can learn from each other, will be priceless.”

The fund is also working on a program that will help grantees through the process of “creating a mature model of an operating nonprofit,” based on the assumption that visionaries don’t necessarily know many of the mundane details they — or someone else in the organization — will have to master to make sure that it runs smoothly, legally, and efficiently.

“We will share best practices, let everyone know that they are not alone, and know that whatever crisis they are going through, someone else is, too,” she said.

Among the many projects Good People has funded is one that identifies people who need help with expenses. The help it offers is both direct and anonymous. “That has allowed us to identify people who are smart but otherwise might not have been able to get higher education,” Ms. Eisenberger said.

International Neighbors welcomes refugees and helps them settle into their new lives in Charlottesville.

For the last four years, a donor has put a young woman through law school.

“They don’t know each other,” she said. “I know both of them, but they don’t know each other. We are working through a third party.”

This is the Rambam’s philanthropic ideal. Most people can’t do it. “The donors do it at great personal expense,” Ms. Eisenberger said.

There’s a practical side to this. “I don’t want people knowing that we do this,” she continued. “The requests would be endless. Still, “What drives me more than anything else is kavod.” Honor. Knowing that she’s doing the right thing.

The SPIRIT Club Foundation gives disabled kids the chance to work out.

There is a tension to being unknown, though. It gets in the way of effective fundraising, and therefore limits the amount of good the fund can do. The Good People Fund has expanded. It now includes a marketing and communications consultant and a director of engagement, Julie Fisher, with whom Ms. Eisenberger is excited to work. Ms. Fisher’s husband, Dan Shapiro, was the U.S. ambassador to Israel, she ran her own small nonprofit, and the family lived in Israel for 12 years, amassing yet more connections. That’s a good thing.

“We are the best-kept secret, which is a problem,” Ms. Eisenberger said. “More money allows us to help more people. We have the capacity for a certain number of programs. Our work is very labor-intensive. You are not just writing a check; with every check comes phone calls and meetings. It’s not onerous — but mentoring is just so important.”

Ms. Eisenberger talked again about her motivations, particularly now, after October 7. “If I didn’t have this work right now, I don’t know what I would do with my anguish,” she said. Now, she’s “interacting with my grantees in Israel, trying to meet the challenge of running their organizations while having lost family or friends, and living in a horrific environment politically, socially, and economically. The workloads of our grantees in Israel has increased. Something like $1 billion in aid went to Israel, but none of it filtered down to the small programs we work with. They are dealing with significant problems. And the American Jewish donor community has some amount of donor fatigue.

“It’s true that many Jewish donors don’t give what they gave because they can’t, not because they don’t want to — but that doesn’t make it better.”

Zumwalt Acres is a “regenerative agricultural community” in Illinois.

Reva Judas of Teaneck, the founder and head of Nechama Comfort, the organization that supports women and families whose babies have died or have had stillbirths, gets some funding from Good People.

“Naomi is really unbelievable,” she said. “She is such a calming voice.”

When she wanted Nechama Comfort to grow, Ms. Judas’s father, Rabbi Sidney Green, who always was gifted at making good things happen, “was looking for ways to help me with funding,” she said. “He googled, and found Naomi, and we connected. We met a few weeks later, and it was so natural being with her. We talked for a long time. And she said, ‘You are a fit for what I do.’

“She puts herself into this work wholeheartedly,” Ms. Judas continued. “She doesn’t just write you a check. She really wants to teach you. She wants you to be part of the process. She makes herself available as a mentor and a sounding board.

Road to Recovery transports sick Palestinians – mostly children – to Israeli hospitals for treatment.

“And it’s give and take. Sometimes she’ll call me and ask me for advice.

“She is able to make anybody feel that they are the most important person in the world. She is available. When you call her, she just picks up the phone.

“She is absolutely for real,” Ms. Judas concluded.

Debra Orenstein is the rabbi of Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson. “I love Naomi, and I love what she does,” Rabbi Orenstein said “I have invited her to my synagogue to speak to the Hebrew school. She is so relatable.

“When you talk about big problems in the world, it can be overwhelming. Massive amounts of money are needed. Her approach to tzedakah is targeted and personalized. It enables people to connect, and it also allows a few dollars to make a very big difference.

“It’s not as if we don’t need the bigger charities — we do — but this is not either/or. Naomi’s approach is really helpful both to the organizations that are running on a shoestring and the donors who can see how their money makes a difference.

Rabbi Orenstein has known Ms. Eisenberger for years, but they hadn’t been in touch until earlier this year, “when I read a beautiful email that she wrote about hope,” she said. “I was about to teach an online course about hope, so I called her to ask what if I were to teach it in partnership with the Good People Fund and raise money for her cause.

“The proposal was totally out of the blue. Everything was easy. There was no red tape. She just said, ‘Yes. Let’s do this.’

“What amazes me about Naomi is that she always has her finger on the pulse,” Rabbi Orenstein continued. That was true when she ran her small business from her home, decades ago, and it’s true now, too. “She knows where the community is, and what it needs. I was very involved with freeing slaves, and she was very involved in that, too. When I first spoke to her about #MeToo, she already was involved with #GamAni,” Me Too in Hebrew. “She knew people’s stories. She is so remarkably plugged in.”

It’s not clear how that works, Rabbi Orenstein said. “It’s not that she’s in any kind of boys’ club elite. She knows those people, but she’s not one of them. But somehow she knows Jewish organizational life, writ large, in all of its different incarnations — the big, the small, the medium.

“She knows people, she connects with people in such an authentic and deep way that people share with her, and she shares with them.

“She is easy to partner with. Her default answer to so much of life is yes. That is rare. Most people who are in the difficult but enviable position of being able to grant money see themselves as gatekeepers. They feel they have to say no. But Naomi — who is always totally responsible about where and to whom she gives money — is always game to meet someone new, to try something new.

“Her default is yes, and that is what makes her so delightful.”

This article first appeared as the cover story in The Jewish Standard, June 14, 2024 print edition and on their website.

Harvesting Healing

(l-r): Nir Lahav, Yuval Limon, volunteer Mark Bernstein, formerly an emeritus professor at Michigan State University.

A high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is unfortunately one of the tolls that Israel’s wars have taken on both its military and civilian population. There are different types of PTSD, and each has to be addressed differently.

Understanding that vital need, Yuval Limon, 67, and Nir Lahav, 62, began to build a place to help heal military PTSD a year-and-a-half ago. They received 20 dunams (about five acres of land) that had been lying fallow from two families who had given 10 dunams each in the religious Moshav Chemed, near Ohr Yehuda, in central Israel. There, Limon and Lahav began building hothouses for agriculture, and facilities for group therapy to treat PTSD at three levels: physically, emotionally and socially. Sometimes army veterans are so traumatized by their experiences that the farm is the only place they’ll leave the house to go.

The initiative is called Ruca’s Farm, after Lahav’s mother, who came on aliyah from Argentina in the 1950s, and was one of the founding members of Kibbutz Gazit, in northern Israel. So Lahav is getting back to his roots, quite literally.

Ruca’s Farm has six greenhouses where vegetables are grown organically, as well as fields growing 200 fruit trees, and other crops like corn. The produce is then sold locally (farm to table), and helps support the initiative. It is also served for lunch to the participants and staff, and one of the religious social workers tithes it. The founders are also hoping to create a farmer’s market at the moshav. Everything is built by volunteers.

Research has demonstrated that treatment combining work in nature and agricultural cultivation can improve mood, reduce loneliness, increase physical functioning, raise the effectiveness of drug treatment, and contribute significantly to the future success of those suffering from the severe effects of PTSD.

Ruca’s Farm operates a unique and intensive treatment program for Israeli veterans —an eight-week course in groups of 10-15, which has proven to be successful. There are two types of groups; one composed of soldiers from previous Israeli wars, and a separate group for soldiers of the Israel-Hamas war.

Some of the participants who have come from the current war have witnessed horrible scenes that have affected them terribly. The brutal and bloodthirsty massacre and atrocities of Hamas on October 7 were in some ways more traumatic than the war itself.

The farm has about 50 volunteers, most of them older, who come to work once or twice a week. Many of them are academics and high-tech workers who are volunteering in their retirement years.

After their own army service, both Limon and Lahav had successful careers. Limon founded a famous chain of retail stores called HaMetayel that sells hiking and camping equipment, and Lahav worked for The Jewish Agency. Both were looking for something meaningful to do after their retirement, and they had met through various projects that each was involved in.

The participants of the Ruca’s Farm program are chosen in cooperation with the Rehabilitation Division of the Ministry of Defense. They work for an hour or two on the farm, have lunch, and then do group therapy sessions for another two-and-a-half hours. The staff is of the highest caliber and are remunerated by the donations made to the farm.

Ruca’s Farm is under the guidance of therapists and researchers who are leaders in the field of treatment of PTSD. One of the ranch’s psychologists, Ofer Chai was a medic in the first Lebanon War, in which he lost one of his eyes. He was awarded the Medal of Valor and decided to dedicate his life to psychology.

Yafit and Estella, two volunteers packing the lettuce for distribution.

All of the participants are military, and although most are men, some are women. They encountered scenes they couldn’t have imagined in their worst nightmares. Sometimes, a post-service soldier will not display signs of psychological stress, but then something will act as a trigger, even long after the event.

Both Limon and Lahav stress that they want the people who come to the farm for rehabilitation to feel at home. They are expending much effort, planning and money in building a kitchen, a meeting room and other venues that will give the feeling of home and safety. Right now they are meeting in temporary buildings.

The farm is a work in progress and new things are being added all the time. They are also committed to the highest standard of agricultural high-tech innovation for organic and biological farming. They have also recently started an apiary with a few hives for the production of honey.

“We feel that we owe these people a lot. The trauma they experienced compromises their functioning and we want to help them find peace here so they can return to a normal life. We recognize the Divine Providence we have been privy to,” said Limon. “It isn’t a coincidence that Nir and I met.” He and Lahav want to expand their work, and not just meet the immediate need due to the war. “We’re only just beginning,” they said.

Riding the ‘Waves of Hope’: Surfer champion-turned-Haredi helps at-risk religious kids navigate life’s choppy waters

The waves were a bit strong and the breeze still chilly, on the official opening day of the Shirat HaYam gender-segregated beach in Bat Yam, Israel, last week as Waves of Hope began the first lesson of its therapeutic surfing course for a new group of at-risk girls from the Haredi community.

Exhilarated from her first foray into the sea with a surfboard, Elisheva David, 17, from the mainly Haredi city of Elad, was still wearing a wetsuit while a few of the other girls had already changed into their ankle-length skirts and long-sleeved shirts.

“I was afraid I would be cold, and that I would get water in my eyes, or that I would be stiff afterwards,” said David, who had come to the course for the first time at the suggestion of Elad’s educational and youth counselor, Odelia Levi. “It was freezing, but I am proud of myself. I for sure will come back next week.”

For Eliyahu Ben Zion, founder and director of the nonprofit, those words make his efforts worthwhile.

A former Israeli surfing champion who became religious when he was 19, Ben Zion brought the sport of surfing into the world of religious at-risk youth to help change the course of their lives. His goal now, he said, is to “return them to the path of being human.”

While using sea sports as a tool to help treat such youth is a widely used therapeutic form of treatment worldwide, the Waves of Hope program specifically for at-risk religious youth is the only one of its kind in the world, said Ben Zion, 46. Every year the nonprofit provides classes to 1,500 at-risk youth. All participants must already know how to swim.

Ben Zion initiated the program that eventually grew into Waves of Hope in 2016 when the mayor of Elad approached him with the idea of using surfing to help a group of 10 at-risk boys. Knowing the surfing world from up close since he was 6, Ben Zion said he was initially hesitant to introduce it into the religious community. But then as he created the specially tailored therapeutic program for the disaffected youth who left school and the community, he saw it as a unique way of helping these young people.

“In a classroom setting they can be troublemakers, but when they come to the sea they are really afraid. They feel the danger so I take advantage of that and can keep them on a tight leash and they have set limits. They need limits to bring them to a place where they can surf,” he said.

The religious community is no different than the rest of the population in terms of the problems youth are struggling with, he said, whether their disengagement stems from a history of academic failure, abuse, family crisis or spiritual alienation. At-risk youth from observant Jewish families, who have stepped out of their social framework, can be especially vulnerable because they often face hostility and exclusion from their families and community who regard them as rebellious, defiant or as a disgrace.

“Most of these at-risk kids go to sleep at 3 a.m. and wake up at noon,” he said. “I make it a point that they have to come on time to the course at 10 a.m. This requires them to change habits.”

Sometimes he even arranges for individual lessons at 5 a.m. to help build their self-discipline.

Facing challenges in the sea also helps them learn how to cope with obstacles and problems in their daily lives, he said. A social worker is always present during the classes.

Levi noted that she is in contact with the girls whom she recommends for the surfing course through the welfare office of Elad. The course exposes the girls to a set of experiences usually unknown in the Haredi world, she said.

“It exposes them to different places. They discover within the sea that they can succeed. Through the sea they see there are good things in the world,” said Levi. “You see the joy they experience. All these experiences go with them and give them inner strength, the sense that ‘I did something, I succeeded.’ Even if they don’t succeed, they were here, they came to the course and feel that if they want to succeed, it is all a matter of practice and effort.”

As long as he rustles up enough funding, Ben Zion says he is able to open a 10-session course for a new group of 14 youth — separate for boys and girls. It costs NIS 25,000 ($6,600) to open a course, he said, and the nonprofit receives funds from religious municipalities as well as private donations. There is always a waiting list, he added.

Recently the Good People Fund provided Waves of Hope with a matching grant for a new class of girls from the southern towns of Ofakim and Netivot who have experienced war-related trauma from the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, and he is working to raise his end of the funding. It is the second year the fund has supported the program.

“Clearly we fund organizations, but we also focus on the founder, and that was really what drew us in,” said Naomi Eisenberger, executive director of the Good People Fund. “Our focus is on individuals who have found creative ways to solve problems. Using surfing is a very creative way of dealing with the issue of at-risk youth in the religious community. And Eliyahu’s path to doing this is itself a very interesting path, he was a champion surfer before he became religious and he is clearly very passionate and committed to this work as is his wife. He is charming and he is very committed to these kids. He represents for us individuals who have found creative ways to do tikkun olam with this pretty unusual program.”

For modesty reasons, Ben Zion does not normally oversee the classes for the girls, but his wife, Katty — who said that while all nine of their children have learned how to surf, she only does “a little surfing” — is present, working out of their cramped storage room/office to help the girls who might be hesitant to take the surfing plunge. On one recent morning, for instance, there had been a mini-crisis with David, and Katty had to negotiate with her to give the lesson a try.

“Afterwards she felt like she had succeeded, and like she was worth something,” Katty said.

Those who excel in the course are sent to Wingate Institute for sports excellence, for certification as surfing instructors; they can later be employed by Waves of Hope as instructors for their private classes, which are available to the general public — both religious and secular — and their summer camps, also for the general public. Revenues from both go to pay salaries for the instructors and also help fund the at-risk youth program. Any graduate of the program can also come to surf with Waves of Hope on Fridays when they are open.

Esther Malka Nusbacher, 21, from Beit Shemesh, has been teaching the course for the girls for four years. She first took surfing lessons as a private student in the summer camp. Ben Zion saw her potential, sent her to Wingate and then employed her as a counselor for the girls program.

“Just getting to the sea is for them freedom and they enjoy that and get into the water. It is just simply something else. You come, you surf and you feel like you belong to something. When they succeed you simply see their joy on their faces,” said Nusbacher. “They learn and they succeed. Here we are, the first lesson for these girls and they are present and laughing.”

Some of their students return to their yeshiva studies or to their midrasha, Ben Zion said, while others he helps get drafted into the IDF or start working. Graduates have also gotten married and started families of their own, said Ben Zion.

“They always stay in touch after the course,” said Ben Zion. “Today they stand as human beings.”

Why and how we hope: Rabbi Debra Orenstein’s research in social science and Jewish work leads to online course

Rabbi Debra Orenstein

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all

If there’s any time of year for hope, it should be now — it’s springtime, and every bud pushing itself open, every new leaf on every old tree, every extra minute of sunlight, and yes, every loudly chirping bird is all about the renewal of life.

But it doesn’t feel that way.

“Probably starting in the pandemic, I started to feel that hope was especially needed,” Rabbi Debra Orenstein, who leads Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson, said.

She’ll lead a series of webinars on hope, starting on Wednesday, March 27. (See below.)

It’s often hard for many people to remember the emotions of that first covid spring, in 2020; the world was just a frightening, oddly timeless place, stalked by the novel coronavirus that was locking us in at home in tiny pods.

“During those first few weeks, I got six people from my community together,” Rabbi Orenstein said. “A social worker, a psychologist, a health coach — people with different orientation who all spoke about positivity during the pandemic. There was such a need for hope then. We were in such a bad state, feeling such uncertainty and negativity. We particularly need hope when things are bad or the future is unclear.” In other words, we most need hope during the times when it’s hardest to find.

So Rabbi Orenstein “went deep into both Jewish sources and the social sciences,” she said. “Since then, I’ve been delving deeply into hope as a topic.

Since then, arguably, things have gotten worse: the country seems to have fractured more than it’s healed since the pandemic ended; our divisive politics have widened and sharpened those divides; and then October 7 unleashed hatred, fear, and death.

Hope is in sharp demand but short supply right now.

That’s why Rabbi Orenstein is offering the webinar, based on the reading, consulting, workshops, and talks she’s been giving for the last few years.

“Even before October 7, I felt that times are so difficult, the threats are so big, that we have to cultivate hope or we will fall into denial and despair.”

How do we cultivate hope? “There are times when hope just comes to us — we’ve all had those experiences, when somebody reaches out to you at just the right time, or you get good news, or there are communal experiences that lift us up,” she said. “But hope also is a habit of mind and behavior that you can choose. It doesn’t require good times or bad times.”

Hope is both an emotion and action, Rabbi Orenstein continued. “I have worked to bring together my training in positive psychology and my training as a rabbi.” Positive psychology tells her that “when you have a feeling of hope, your heart lifts, your future is more optimistic and happier. When you are hopeful, you see opportunities and possibilities that you would have missed if you weren’t hopeful. That’s the emotional component.”

But it’s not all unicorns and fairy dust. “Positive psychology emphasizes action, goals, and pathways for hope,” she said.

From the Jewish side, “we know from the tragedies of Jewish history that there are times that there isn’t an action you can take that necessarily will change the current reality, or at best that it will change any time soon. Yet you can still hope for redemption. You can still hope for next year in Jerusalem. That hope comes from investing in a power greater than yourself.

“For many people, that power is God, but it can also be the power of community or of Jewish peoplehood. I think that religion gets this one more right than psychology does. Religion gives us the power of being able to wait with positive expectations, even when there is nothing that you can do. It is the power of gaining hope, or of borrowing hope, from that power greater than ourselves.

“I think that most religions offer that to the world, and Judaism does it in particular. I don’t know who said this, but someone has said that Judaism is an optimistic religion with a pessimistic history. We have in a sense the benefits of both.”

Rabbi Orenstein is doing that.

She was asked to give a talk on hope last November at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on the Upper West Side. “Six months before, in the spring of 2023, they asked me to pick a topic. I said I’d speak about hope. The talk was scheduled for Election Day. ‘We don’t think you want to talk about hope then,’” she reported being told. “Yes, I do,” she answered.

“And then October 7 happened, and they called and asked if I wanted to change the topic. And I said, ‘No. We need hope more than ever now.’

“That’s how I started to talk about hope after October 7.”

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

The word “hope” is unappealing to some people, she acknowledged. “It sounds pie-in-the-sky, or like wishful thinking; people don’t like it because they want to guard themselves against disappointment,” she said. “It can sound passive.

“But it is necessary to separate false hope from genuine hope. Because the antipathy people have is to false hope, the version that says that I can crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head, and hope that someone else will do something. Because nobody likes to live in self-delusion.”

Rabbi Orenstein will “look at the way modern social science measures hope, and I will look at what positive psychology has missed but the Jewish tradition has understood.”

“Social science focuses on agency, which is a very important part of hope, which must be more than a good feeling about the future. It is the fuel that gives you the energy to make a better future.

“There is a lot of emphasis on goal setting and finding pathways. But there comes a point when you don’t see a way forward, when neither you nor your community can do anything more. Then you might feel that everything is hopeless. That you’re lost. But the Jewish tradition knows so much about continuing to hope in seemingly hopeless situations.

“In hospice, one of the questions that sometimes is asked of dying patients is ‘What are your goals?’ ‘What do you still hope for?’ People have lists, even if they have only weeks or days left. Still, often people feel that they have come to the end of their agency — and that’s where Jewish traditional, historical resilience comes in.”

The course is experiential, Rabbi Orenstein said. “So part of it is me teaching, but some is putting it into practice in real time. We do it together live on Zoom, and there also will be a recording available afterward. There will be a forum where people will see each other’s comments.

“There will be a lot of ways to connect. If they want, people can have a hope buddy, but that’s not required — not everyone is a buddy type. There are options and ways to connect, to give and get support.”

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

— Emily Dickinson

This course will be about real hope; “it’s not pabulum or Pollyanna,” Rabbi Orenstein said. “People need a sense of the possibility of a better future, and some ways to build toward it. They need a sense of allyship and partnership, to develop more inner resources and outer support. People can be reminded that even the worst day has a best moment; even the most difficult times have hope shot through them. Finding these pieces and savoring them is not denying the pain that you’re in. We will talk about ways to do that every week.

“We’ll have what I call a hope twist. There’s poetry, art, music, novels, photographs, different ways of feeling hope, and of developing your own personal toolkit, filled with what works for you.”

One of those resources is humor, Rabbi Orenstein said. “The theologian Harvey Cox called laughter hope’s last weapon.”

She’ll provide an armory of those and other weapons in the study and practice of hope.

Who: Rabbi Debra Orenstein

What: Teaches a six-session course on “Real Hope”

Where: Online, both on Zoom and in other forums

When: Wednesday, March 27, April 3 and 17, May 1, 8, and 15, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST

How much: Suggested donation $180

To learn more and register: Go to
www.goodpeoplefund.org/good-people-learn or call (973) 761-0580.

An Israeli Charity for Palestinians Grapples With Oct. 7 Attacks

Yael Noy, left, chief executive of Road to Recovery, walking with Adam Abu al-Rob, a 6-year-old Palestinian eye-cancer patient, and his father Mamoun at a checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank, on their way to an Israeli hospital last year.Credit…Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse

Nearly every week for a decade, Iri Kassel picked up sick Palestinian children at Israel’s Erez border crossing with Gaza and drove them with their guardians to Israeli hospitals for treatment.

But on Oct. 7, the crossing was raided by Palestinian militants who blasted the passport control booths and magnetic scanners as they stormed into southern Israel.

The deadly attacks plunged Israel into all-out war in Gaza and disrupted the work of Road to Recovery, the Israeli nonprofit organization that Mr. Kassel volunteers for, which has ferried more than 1,500 Palestinian patients a year to Israeli hospitals.

Several of the group’s volunteers died in the Hamas-led attack, including Vivian Silver, a prominent peace activist who was killed in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel. Others were taken hostage, like Oded and Yocheved Lifshitz, a couple in their eighties from Nir Oz, a kibbutz near the Gaza border. Dozens more lost loved ones or were evacuated from their homes near Gaza.

The organization’s staff and volunteer drivers were devastated. “It was a blow to the stomach,” Mr. Kassel said. Even for those who survived the attacks, he said, there was “an almost physical pain.”

Road to Recovery was founded in 2010 by Yuval Roth, a peace activist whose brother had been kidnapped and killed nearly 20 years earlier by Hamas militants. The group helps Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank access medical treatment in Israel, where health services are among the most advanced in the region.

In order to be treated in Israel, Palestinian families have to navigate several obstacles. The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health must agree to absorb the cost of the treatment. Then, families have had to obtain permission from Hamas to exit Gaza, and from Israel to cross the border.

Once they are inside Israel, the cost of traveling to a hospital can be prohibitive for many Palestinian families. That is where Road to Recovery comes in.

Yael Noy, the organization’s chief executive, said its work is as much about humanitarian aid as it is about fostering personal connections between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Palestinians see Israelis as soldiers at checkpoints, and many Israelis don’t see Palestinians at all,” she said in an interview. “These rides are an opportunity for a clean, direct human encounter.”

The Erez border crossing this month. The crossing was raided by Palestinian militants on Oct. 7.Credit…Maja Hitij/Getty Images

Mr. Kassel, 77, a retired educator, said he rarely discussed politics directly with Palestinians he picked up, although the conflict surfaced in numerous ways. Once, he drove a family to a hospital during a flare-up in hostilities between Israel and Hamas. “I found myself explaining what they should do in case sirens go off, signaling Hamas rocket fire,” he said. Later, after he had driven them back to Gaza, he heard from the family that their house had been damaged by an Israeli attack.

Some of the drives pass in silence. Conversations are often stilted because of the language barrier. Still, volunteers say they have formed relationships with Palestinian families.

The morning after the Oct. 7 attacks, as gunfights still raged in towns near Gaza, volunteers showed up at the crossing with the West Bank to pick up sick Palestinian children. The group’s work has continued in the West Bank, even as Israel has all but banned crossings from Gaza.

Some volunteer drivers say that, since the attacks, friends have called them naïve or radical for continuing to help Palestinians. The group says donations have slowed, as even Israelis who support its work prioritize giving to other initiatives.

Mr. Kassel said that while he admired friends who continued to volunteer, it was now too hard for him to do so. “I know that people in Gaza are enduring huge suffering: their houses and economy are ruined, they’ve become refugees again, medical care is almost nonexistent,” he said. “But emotionally,” he added, “I feel angry and hurt — even betrayed.”

Still, Ms. Noy said, the group has signed up some new volunteers. In the West Bank, it is back to running its usual number of daily rides. Several volunteers who were evacuated from their homes near Gaza have changed their routes, and now drive from their temporary hotel accommodations to pick up Palestinian patients at a crossing near Bethlehem.

“It’s a way of holding on to hope,” Ms. Noy said. “When we help Palestinians heal, we also heal ourselves.”