Grantee Focus

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

The call jarred him. An elderly woman from Jaffa was on the other end, asking for a Friday night Shabbat meal.

“It wasn’t an easy conversation,” said Matan Asulin. “It was the first time I heard someone like that asking for food. But if you know someone who needs help, then you help.”

Asulin was a volunteer for a food aid organization at the time, but one that wasn’t equipped for requests such as this. So right after his shift, he went straight to the market, bought the makings of a proper Shabbat meal, and delivered it to the elderly woman’s door.

He didn’t know it at the time, but the incident became the genesis for what would soon become Heart to Plate — the organization founded by Asulin and close friend Ronnie Lee in 2020. Heart to Plate is a new Good People Fund grantee.

The two, who met while university students, determined that that one woman in Jaffa personified a broader void in communities throughout Israel. That is, elderly, isolated people whose emotional and physical well-being could be elevated by a community of care dedicated to bringing them home-cooked meals and some companionship along the way.

“It is more than food,” said Lee. “It may start there, but it goes on to a lot of other things. They know they are not alone in the world anymore. That is the most important thing.”

At its core, Heart to Plate works by creating a cadre of four volunteers dedicated to two isolated, elderly persons. Each Friday night and on holidays, volunteers — on a rotating basis — bring a home-cooked Shabbat meal and create a much anticipated experience of connection.

Heart to Plate began as a small pilot initiative bringing Rosh Hashanah meals and visits to five elderly people in 2020. In the short time since then, it has grown to serving more than 160 beneficiaries in five cities including Haifa, Kiryat Ata, Migdal HaEmek, Rehovot, and Yokneam.

Ask Asulin and Lee about an epiphany moment in the young life of the organization and they tell the story of Chana, an isolated, elderly woman who lives in a small, one-bedroom home in northern Israel with a son who is physically disabled.

“When I first met Chana and her son Lior, I was in shock at how alone they are, without family and living this way,” Lee said. “I said to myself, and to her, that they are not going to be alone anymore and that I am here. She has now become like another grandmother to me.

“This is a special story because I grew up with grandparents and they are very important to me. When Matan and I saw Chana and others like her who live like this, it was very hard and we said to ourselves, this is our mission, to help as many as we can. So we are.”

If there is any indication that Heart to Plate is a journey of passion and impact for them, look no further than the fact that they both quit their jobs — Asulin as a security officer at a senior housing complex, and Lee as an e-commerce specialist at a fashion company — and that they used their own resources to launch the organization. They worked with no compensation until just recently.

“We are not just creating community for our elderly and isolated neighbors, we are bringing them back into the community,” said Asulin. “We see the relationships between them and our volunteers growing stronger and stronger over time.”

Elderly beneficiaries are typically connected to Heart to Plate through social welfare agencies in cities and municipalities where the organization is active. Volunteers — there are about 400 now — come from word of mouth, social media outreach, and emerging partnerships with companies, schools and youth movements.

In fact, Asulin and Lee envision preparing a young generation of Heart to Plate volunteers for a lifetime of service and social consciousness. “It is important for us as a society to teach kids and youth how to help the weak in their communities,” Asulin said.

Looking to the future, this pair of visionaries sees Heart to Plate with a footprint beyond the five cities it is in now, and throughout Israel.

“We are not rushed to grow, but want to be exact and precise as we go forward. Eventually, every city will have a community to take care of our elderly in this way. This is our great hope,” Asulin said.

Asher Lovy knows the silence.

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

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

So he got loud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz, for The Good People Fund

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By H. Glenn Rosenkrantz