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

When combat veterans or terror victims with post-traumatic stress disorder arrive at the Israel National Therapeutic Riding Association (INTRA) in Bnei Zion near Ra’anana, they’re seldom ready to touch a horse, let alone ride it. Some are so debilitated they can barely get out of bed.

Under the guidance of a staff of six trained by Anita Shkedi – considered “the grandmother of equine therapy” internationally — in 10 weeks’ time PTSD patients are in the saddle, opening up emotionally and letting go of their fears. Within a year, most are ready to restart the business of living.

“They come to us in a very distressed state,” Shkedi tells ISRAEL21c. “They’re hyper-alert and constantly worried that they’re under attack. It’s hard for them to leave the house. They are unmotivated, emotionally numb and uncommunicative. They’re taking perhaps 17 pills a day.

“Over the years, PTSD only gets worse and prevents them from working, learning, loving their wife and playing with their kids.”

Little by little, they discover that the horse provides unconditional love and affection. “They begin communicating with the horse and you see the tension being released and the depression lifting. Huge changes take place as they experience the positive movement of their bodies on the horse,” Shkedi explains.

“Their emotional numbness goes away and they say they’re starting to feel alive again. Horse therapy is incredibly empowering.”

Shkedi and her husband, Giora, introduced therapeutic riding to Israel in 1985 and founded INTRA in 2000. They are globally recognized pioneers in using equine therapy to enhance self-confidence, behavior and communication in children and adults suffering from physical, neurological and emotional difficulties.

Thanks in part to the Shkedis, Israel is the only country where equine therapy for children is covered by national health insurance. Now the couple is making notable strides in the area of PTSD treatment.

Cutting-edge PTSD study planned

A native of England with degrees in education, preventive medicine, nursing and therapeutic horseback riding, Shkedi literally wrote the book on equine therapy for traumatic brain injury and PTSD patients based on 30 years of experience in Israel and in the United States. This has become her life’s work.

“More combat veterans have PTSD than any other condition, and that means the numbers are monstrous, especially in the USA,” she says. “In Israel we have a huge number of older guys from the [1973] Yom Kippur War and I’m sure in a few months we’ll start seeing veterans from the Gaza war.”

In 2011, INTRA used donations – mostly from longtime supporter The Good People Fund – to do a year-long pilot study with 25 army veterans suffering from PTSD. Four are back at work, one got married and the others report needing fewer meds and sleeping more soundly.

These improvements were measured only through questionnaires, so now Shkedi is raising half a million dollars to begin a groundbreaking scientific study aimed at quantifying results.

Yossi Shemtov, a soldier with PTSD, often came back after his course of treatment to visit his horse.
Shemtov came back after his course of treatment to visit his horse.

Itamar Medical of Caesarea will provide its WatchPAT and EndoPAT wearable devices to record participants’ vital signs at the beginning, midpoint and end of the 30-week study.

The data stored on memory chips in the devices will be evaluated by Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Prof. Giora Pillar, a pediatric sleep specialist. Psychiatrist Arieh Shalev, a world-renowned PTSD expert, will also participate.

“This type of study has never been done before with technology,” says Shkedi. “In the field of equine therapy, everyone is waiting for us to get started on this research, as like me, they feel we in Israel have been the pioneers in equine therapy and PTSD.”

A little Garden of Eden

Shkedi is often invited abroad to lecture and to help establish or improve therapeutic riding programs — such as Horses for Heroes in Washington, DC, which treats veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Colorado she helps Vietnam vets as well those from Iraq and Afghanistan, including female victims of sexual assault in the US military.

Wherever she goes, Shkedi emphasizes the importance of providing an environment that feels safe. She teaches time-tested techniques for building rider-instructor and rider-horse trust.

Anita Shkedi, right, with a terror victim who flourished after two years of equine therapy.
Anita Shkedi, right, with a terror victim who flourished after two years of equine therapy.

“The therapeutic riding center has to have soul. It has to become a little Garden of Eden for the patients,” she says.

One of her most severe cases was a 30-something survivor of a brutal terror attack. “When he came to us he was completely covered in clothing, a scarf and sunglasses. About 30 seconds after he approached the horse, he heard an electric drill, associated that noise with fear, and left. It took us maybe six months till we got him on the horse.”

This was accomplished in a gentle and patient process to dissipate the fear. “Each week we noticed a layer of clothing was coming off and finally we saw his eyes,” Shkedi reports. “His psychologist told us that all he could talk about was riding. After two years he had learned to walk, trot and canter the horse, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans, with a smile on his face.”

Shkedi was recently asked to help establish a program in England, and to write a national curriculum in Israel for equine therapy students. “Therapeutic riding is now part of the Israeli way of life. We started it, and that is a huge honor, but we have to raise the standards of instruction,” she says.

For more information, click here.

Horseback riding proves effective therapy for PTSD _ ISRAEL21c

Once upon a time, Gideon Ben-Ami brought Israeli musicians to Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. Today he brings fresh food to a shelter for drug-addicted streetwalkers in Tel Aviv.

The former impresario, restaurateur and alternative-energy executive also delivers sandwiches to homeless men, fruit to migrant children, medicine to a refugee clinic, toys and food to a battered-women’s shelter and diapers to destitute young parents and elderly Holocaust survivors.

“There are a million poor people here,” Ben-Ami tells ISRAEL21c as he drives his little white van through the shabby streets of South Tel Aviv. “We can’t reach them all. We are reaching people who are in the worst possible situation.”

The goodhearted 69-year-old grandfather casts a ray of light on a bleak landscape. He knows everybody’s stories and tries to fill their needs. Among the items stashed in the van today are expensive pressure stockings for an African man and woman burned in a grisly arson attack.

“The main thing is food, produce and money to help people recover from overwhelming tragedies, like the couple who was burned,” he says. “But there are smaller cases that are just as tragic, and existing charities don’t have the wherewithal to help them all.”

A messenger

For decades, Ben-Ami owned and managed a popular chain of eateries in Miami and Israel. It killed him to see how much food is tossed out by restaurants, bakeries and caterers. After he retired, he handed out sandwiches to homeless people in Tel Aviv.

When African refugees and migrants began flooding South Tel Aviv a couple of years ago, Ben-Ami volunteered to manage a humanitarian program, bringing rescued food to the makeshift tent city set up by the municipality in Levinsky Park.

A volunteer for the New Jersey-based Good People Fund observed Ben-Ami at Levinsky and recruited him to continue his charitable work with the fund’s support. He was delighted to devote himself full time to something he finds so rewarding.

“I’m basically a shaliach [messenger],” he explains. “The essence of what I do is taking things from one point and bringing them to another, knowing when to pick up and what to pick up because there is so much out there. It’s a small program with many facets.”

He coordinates his activities with other charities including Leket Israel, the national food bank. Ben-Ami delivers tons of Leket’s rescued food and gleaned produce to homeless shelters, battered-women’s shelters, prisoner halfway houses and African daycare centers.

He stores some of the produce in an alcove next to a publicly funded safe house where homeless and drug-addicted women working the streets can shower, grab a bite and sleep in a real bed. This project was formerly managed by his ex-wife, Manya, an addictions counselor and recovery coach.

A nearby commercial building houses Turning the Tables, where women in recovery learn marketable design and fashion skills. On our outing, Ben-Ami takes them some of the sandwiches he’s just picked up at the regional police headquarters near Jaffa.

At least once a week, Ben-Ami pulls his van to the station’s loading dock to receive hundreds of leftover sandwiches boxed up by Officer Eyal Raviv. Sometimes he brings Raviv food packages to take to a destitute family in another city.

“He’s one of a kind. I can only say good words about this man,” Raviv tells ISRAEL21c. Until he and Ben-Ami paired up, the leftover sandwiches were thrown away.

Nowhere to play

Today, some of these sandwiches will help fill bellies at Felicia’s daycare for African children. In this overcrowded and barebones facility, 17 preschoolers crowd around to shake Ben-Ami’s hand and shout “Shalom!” Clearly, the brief visit brightens their day. Ben-Ami calls it “a moment of kindness.”

Felicia doesn’t have a play yard. Once a week, volunteers travel down from Zichron Yaakov to take the youngsters to the park. They work with Ben-Ami to fill a variety of social-welfare gaps in South Tel Aviv through what he calls micro-charity.

A doctor in the group collected medicine samples from her colleagues for Ben-Ami to take to the migrant clinic in the Central Bus Station. Her daughter arranged with Ben-Ami to repair a decrepit daycare with a bunch of her friends. They collect cash to supplement the rent of an Eritrean migrant, Marhawi, whose wife hung herself and left him with two babies. When the older child was in the hospital recently, the group lined up visitors.

Ben-Ami stops at Levinksy Park to pick up a member of the group who has taken Marhawi and his children under her wing. “Every month I’ve been coming down to spend a couple of hours with Gideon helping where I can,” she tells ISRAEL21c.

The volunteers are sometimes heckled as they accompany African children to the park. Ben-Ami can’t understand this. “The Bible commands us about 36 times to care for the stranger. If we are to be a light unto the nations, we need to set an example.”

Caring for others is in Ben-Ami’s DNA. Back in Russia, his grandmother Pesia ran a soup kitchen out of her home for students at the esteemed Volozhin Yeshiva. When poor neighbors borrowed her oven to warm their simple bean stews, she’d slip a piece of meat into the pot.

Born in Israel, Ben-Ami lived in the United States from the age of 12 until the oldest of his own four children was 12. Throughout his long and varied career, he confides, he made and lost millions. Now he is content living a life immersed in charity work.

“I discovered life is so much more beautiful and enriching if you live with voluntary simplicity, and that’s what I want my children to see.”

It seems they’ve taken his example to heart. Several times a week, one of his sons helps with the deliveries. His daughter recently asked him to help her distribute foodstuffs she collected for Holocaust survivors.

Ben-Ami always thinks of new ways to help the downtrodden. He supplied industrial-size pots to eight Tel Aviv women to make soup every week for homeless shelters. He wants to rent a storefront and turn it into a takeout soup kitchen. He finds dishwashing and table-busing jobs for down-on-their luck locals, thanks to his restaurant connections.

“Gideon’s greatest delight comes from feeding hungry people,” says The Good People Fund Executive Director Naomi Eisenberger. “He also has an uncanny ability to discover the poorest and most overlooked people hidden in Tel Aviv’s bustling metropolis. For those fortunate enough to meet him, life can improve dramatically.”

Messenger of mercy in South Tel Aviv _ ISRAEL21c

When “Noam” agreed to work at Kaima, an Israeli organic farm employing kids who have dropped out of school, he was just shy of 15, clinically depressed, doing drugs and distrustful of adults.

Within four months, Noam had stopped abusing drugs. He had gained physical strength and began working once a week with a Kaima mentor to research and design a more efficient method for packing and weighing cherry tomatoes. Now he is starting night school to get his high-school diploma.

“We thought we could give these kids something beyond what they get in sessions with a social worker or psychologist,” Kaima founder Yoni Yefet-Reich tells ISRAEL21c about the unique program he started in December 2012. “We were amazed to see how fast our method works.”

That method is based on giving kids responsibility, listening to them and showing them new possibilities for their future. “The real ‘treatment’ at Kaima happens in the field, when we are simply planting cucumbers or picking tomatoes together and having conversations. When you work with youth it’s all about trust. And to gain their trust you have to be there with them,” says Yefet-Reich.

The 15- to 18-year-olds who choose to join Kaima — upon the suggestion of welfare agencies in greater Jerusalem — work one-on-one with staff members and/or adult volunteers for a few months, a year or more.

They earn an hourly wage to plant, tend and harvest as many as 30 different kinds of vegetables destined for 150 customers on Kaima’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) plan. Kaima distribution centers have been opened in Jerusalem’s German Colony and in the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens, too.

In addition to organic agriculture, the teens are learning a work ethic applicable to any career. One important aspect is arriving on time at 7:30 every morning on their own steam.

“The welfare authorities at first said we’d have to arrange transportation for the kids, and we said, ‘No way.’ We didn’t want to give them the feeling that they’re part of a charity project,” explains Yefet-Reich. “We wanted them to take greater responsibility for themselves.”

Striving for sustainability

Kaima, an Aramaic word for “sustainability,” was conceptualized by Yefet-Reich, a lawyer by training and a graduate of the Ein Kerem Community Environmental School. He earned a master’s degree in nonprofit management from the Hebrew University while heading the informal education program at Reut, a pluralistic religious high school in Jerusalem.

After 10 years at Reut, he gathered a group of teachers, social workers, organic farmers and other young social entrepreneurs interested in creating a farm as a safe place for troubled youth in the Jerusalem area.

On the Beit Zayit moshav (cooperative village) just west of the city, where Yefet-Reich is a third-generation resident, each family has a small plot for agriculture. He asked members who weren’t using their plots if they’d donate them to his project. He ended up with three acres of land. Via Facebook, the group recruited 70 volunteers to come and clear rocks from the soil. By April 2013, the first seeds were sown, and in June a successful pilot was launched.

“The day after we started to publicize that we were selling CSA boxes, we had 40 customers,” relates Yefet-Reich. “A week later we had 60, and now we have 150. We’re not looking for a lot more.”

Income from sales now accounts for 38 percent of Kaima’s budget. “Eventually, we want to get to 60 or 70% income from selling the crops,” Yefet-Reich says. “We are an NGO striving for greater self-sustainability.”

For the initial few years, he aims to cover about one-third of expenses from sales, one-third from government agencies and one-third from philanthropies. The first donor was The Good People Fund in the United States, and other support has come from foundations in Israel, Luxembourg and England.

“We want to give the youth with whom we work the power to understand that life is full of things to learn and that exercising one’s curiosity and taking greater responsibility can make all the difference,” says Yefet-Reich.

“We won’t push them to go back to school, but we’ll push them to find a way to be productive. Whether or not they go back to school, they all benefit.”

Dropout teens blossom at unique organic farm _ ISRAEL21c