Caring For our Children in Bomb Shelters

For 92 years, JDC has worked to help realize the dream of a Jewish State. During the current crisis, JDC has immediately responded by offering relief to children in bomb shelters.

Participants of the Better Together program in Hadar, a neighborhood in Haifa, have begun working to ease the trauma of the current events for local children. Educators in the Better Together program — which focuses on serving children-at-risk as part of Ashalim — are working to take children out of Hadar and traveling to Petach Tikva, a town in Central Israel. Petach Tikva, though not far from their home, offers these kids the opportunity to participate youth group activities.

For children staying at bomb shelters in Haifa, the Better Together staff, 40 volunteers and any friends and family they could recruit are working to fill the children's long days. The volunteers meet in the different shelters and spend the day entertaining the children — hoping that perhaps they will forget about the rockets only if for just a while.

While elsewhere in Israel, teen volunteers in the AMEN program are doing their part to offer relief. Participants in the AMEN program — whose goal is to engage and foster volunteerism in Israeli youth — have begun to create kits for children and youth spending their days in bomb shelters. Filled with activities and supplies, 10,000 kits, which will benefit 500,000 are being put together.

July 2006