I set up this NPO many years ago, and it started with helping families from whom social services had taken away their children. I came across a newspaper article about a Russian-speaking mother who committed suicide because social services had taken her two-year-old child away from her. The story shocked me, perhaps also because I had a third son of the same age.
It was the 90s, the time of the “big aliya”, when about a million new Russian-speaking repatriates arrived in the country and the load on all state structures was almost unbearable. When I delved into the problem, I saw that such an extreme measure as the removal of children is not always justified and is often connected with the lack of a common language (the repatriate does not speak Hebrew, and employees of state structures do not speak Russian), lack of understanding of the mentality and ignorance of the laws. The result is trauma for both the child and the parents.
To give just one example.
A teacher praised a student who diligently does his homework and heard in response: “My mom said that if I don’t do my assignments, she will kill me.” That day, the child did not come home from school. The teacher, unaware that in many Russian-speaking families the phrase “she’ll kill me” often just means “she’ll scold me,” contacted social services and the police. From her perspective, there was a real threat to the child’s safety. From her point of view, there was a real threat to the child. And the mom was simply never told that in Israel there are words that cannot be said to a child under any circumstances, it’s the law. And no one cares how your parents spoke to you in Russia many years ago.
I created a self-help group of 50 repatriate volunteers, and it later became the basis of the Magen Mishpacha NGO. The activities of our volunteer movement immediately came to the attention of Russian-speaking members of the Knesset. Their help was very important to us, because only with them we could get to the special centers where children removed from their families are kept until the court hearing. We needed to see the child and reassure the parents.
Soon I began to be invited to Knesset meetings devoted to family and children’s issues. There I met many Russian-speaking public figures, and each of them had their own program for improving one or another area. But they didn’t speak Hebrew, and no one helped them at the Knesset’s specialized committees. So I started attending all the meetings of the commissions that were in one way or another related to repatriates, to help with translation.
As a result, I received information about a wide range of problems, sometimes requiring urgent solutions. When accompanying people who do not know Hebrew to banks, social services, and other government agencies, Magen Mishpacha volunteers and I have seen that there are problems at every turn. And it’s not even a matter of someone’s malicious intent, although our charges have met both unscrupulous officials and dishonest landlords. I attracted qualified lawyers, teachers, and people familiar with the work of government agencies to work in our NPO. I myself spent my life mostly on buses, sometimes going to three or four meetings a day in different cities. My phone number was circulated among new repatriates and became something like a hotline.
Later, when we officially registered the NPO, we created a real hotline with a 24-hour multi-channel phone number. When we received requests, our operators immediately sorted the problems into those that could be solved by contacting a specific agency and those that required the involvement of several government agencies. In this case, we also undertook to help. It was important to us that the person who contacted us did not hear back: “This is not our profile”.
It was clear that working with individual cases was necessary and important. But the number of requests was growing, and our human resources were simply not enough. Then the idea arose of working with groups where repatriates would receive the necessary information about what they would inevitably encounter: renting apartments, banking services, interaction with Bituah Leumi. I gave quite a large series of lectures. Sometimes these lectures took the form of answering questions from the audience. What to look for when looking at an apartment for rent? What should you do if you suddenly receive a letter from Bituah Leumi about a debt of several thousand shekels and a threat to block your bank account? What if your account is already frozen and you have nowhere to get money for food?
Around the same time we opened a self-help group for parents, where people could ask questions to teachers and psychologists, discuss their problems and just communicate with each other.
To help repatriates with overcoming the language barrier, we organized Hebrew courses with a qualified Zum teacher.
But the main point of application of our efforts has been and remains the family. In recent years, one of our most important projects has been the “Encounter” project. It came about as a result of numerous appeals from parents whose children faced the problem of integration. The children could not integrate at school, could not make friends, and spent all their free time alone.
To help these children, we opened Meetup clubs in Haifa, Bat Yam and Rehovot. As we interacted more closely with the children and parents, we saw that about half of the children had developmental disabilities that were manifested against the backdrop of the stress of the change of country. We realized that this was an inclusion project, involving the creation of a parallel space in which the children could successfully interact. This is a huge undertaking involving psychologists, sensory integration specialists, and our inclusive group mentors. We work together to develop an integration pathway for each child. Now “Encounter” already has 14 branches in different cities of the country. Instructors of children’s and adolescent groups undergo a year-long training course, where they receive, among other things, “road maps” for working with each developmental disability.
Let me say a little bit about what inclusion is. I think this is necessary because in today’s education systems we are actually presented with segregation under the label of inclusion. Children with special needs are isolated in small classrooms and, if only for an hour a day, are brought in with normal (neurotypical) children accompanied by a teacher’s aide. And this is at best, because it is not uncommon for special children to be educated in specialized boarding schools.
As a result, special children find themselves unprepared for life after school. We even have an NGO in Israel that teaches boarding school graduates the basic skills needed to live independently. Theoretically, at the age of 21, when young people with special needs graduate from special schools, they can live independently with individualized support. In practice, many of them live in hostels (the same boarding schools, but for adults).
And many “special people” are fantastically talented. Society needs them, but society should help them by teaching them from early childhood to live together with us, giving them the opportunity to work, to create, to be involved.
It is not by chance that UNESCO experts describe an inclusive society as a type of social relationship in which differences between people are seen not as a threat to stability but as a resource for mutual enrichment.
Let me give you an example from our experience. When the whole country had to stay at home because of the coronavirus, many NGOs working with children simply closed down. We were saved by autistic children who, long before the epidemic, had learned to live from the comfort of their homes, communicating through computer programs, games, and educational websites. They opened their world to us and taught us how to live a full life without what we were all used to.
We are sure that the “Meeting” project, which helps children first of all, at the same time contributes to the improvement of family relations. Both children and parents speak about it. Acquiring communication skills in groups under the unobtrusive guidance of our supervisors, children successfully apply these skills in the family, at school, on the street, in short – in everyday life. And this makes both themselves and the people around them better.
Not so long ago we started organizing vacations abroad for the kids. We have already been to the Czech Republic. In the spring we are planning a trip to Slovakia and Poland, and in the summer – to Hungary.
Group classes and trips are certainly important and helpful. However, there is probably no family that does not know what a crisis in relationships with children is. And this is where individual counseling is needed. We managed to open a course for specialists in child-parent relations at the David Yelin Pedagogical College. People who graduate from this course receive a sought-after profession, a license and an international certificate that allows them to work remotely around the world. It is important to say that this course is fully customized to the needs of repatriates. Classes are conducted with simultaneous translation, there is an opportunity to listen to lectures in recordings, that is, getting a profession does not interfere with, for example, classes in the ulpan. It is also important that the course can be completed in one year.
During this course we had an interesting case that illustrates the concept of inclusion well. The course participants listened to a lecture by an Israeli professor live. This was made possible thanks to a lot of work to provide simultaneous translation in both directions. Students can also watch the lectures in a recording with subtitles in Russian. To put it bluntly, not every new repatriate has already overcome the language barrier, and we help here too. One of the students asked a question that the lecturer could not answer. Let me remind you that in this case the students are people with good education and a lot of experience. As a result, another student answered the question. “Thank you,” said the professor. – I have been looking for the answer to this question all my life.” We clearly see the very mutual enrichment we have been talking about.
We consider the training of specialists in child-parent relations to be extremely important, because this project helps to solve a whole set of serious problems faced by many returnees. In this case, we are talking about people who received a quality humanitarian university education or even an academic degree in the country of origin. Changing the country, such a person hopes that his knowledge and skills will be useful in the new place. However, without Hebrew, he will be offered either cleaning or caring for the elderly. Of course, in time Hebrew will appear, but in a job that does not correspond to his abilities, a person becomes depressed and loses his qualifications. And in the family such a person is, to put it mildly, not a gift.
It turned out that after starting its activities with one local family problem, the Magen Mishpacha NPO came to the point where it is involved in solving the state problem of adapting new repatriates. New wonderful people come to us all the time. Every year there are new projects and training courses. This year we have added 4 branches of Encounters for teens, and in May we are opening a case management course on post-trauma for families. Unfortunately, this need doesn’t even need to be explained. And repatriates with knowledge and certification will be able to help a country that so desperately needs it.
Of course, our path looks smooth only on a computer or phone screen. We face obstacles almost daily, but our years of experience help us overcome them. We cooperate with the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Ministry of Education, as well as with Bituah Leumi. And I, along with volunteers and the most talented NPO staff, try to respond quickly to the needs arising in the country.
