Zvi Artzi, the 70-something head of the residents council at the Home for the Elderly in Ramat Efal, was clearly worried.
Rumors were circulating that the Histadrut, Israel’s giant labor federation, which had built and operated the home near Tel Aviv, might sell the facility in its drive to privatize its assets.
How would that affect the 1,000 residents, a quarter of them Holocaust survivors and most of them older than 80?
Helen Blaiberg, a 74-year-old South African native, said she had heard the rumors but paid no attention to them. She was too busy enjoying the concerts, music lessons, plays, Bible classes and synagogue services.
And, she appreciated the in-house medical, dental and therapeutic services.
Before there was a State of Israel, there was the Histadrut, which from the 1920s on created the framework for the nascent Jewish homeland.
The Histadrut created a virtual shadow government, kibbutzim and moshavim, industries and housing cooperatives, banks and cultural centers.
Among its crown jewels was – and in varying degrees continues to be – a social service network that in its heyday encompassed between 70 percent to 90 percent of Israel’s population. The social support system rested on three main pillars: Mishan, Amal and Kupat Holim Clalit.
Mishan, which means “support,” includes nine homes for the elderly – such as the one in Ramat Efal – with a total of 4,500 residents, five children’s and youth villages, and senior citizen centers scattered across the country.
Amal is a national network of 100 schools with 50,000 students, encompassing general and technical high schools, apprenticeship and industrial schools, junior colleges and training centers for adults.
Kupat Holim Clalit, the massive General Sick Fund, counts more than six of every 10 Israelis – Jewish and Arab – among its members. It operates 14 hospitals, 1,200 clinics and 350 pharmacies.
The Mishan and Amal networks are still wholly owned by the Histadrut, though the labor federation has drastically slashed its operating subsidies.
Last year, the Histadrut divested itself of Kupat Holim, which was an immense drain on its resources. Kupat Holim is now the largest of four HMOlike organizations operating under a government-supervised national health service.
The Israel Histadrut Foundation, headquartered in New York, supports selected Mishan, Amal and Kupat Holim projects.
At the opposite end of the age spectrum from the home for elderly in Ramat Efal lies Mishan’s Max Apple Children’s Village in Gan Yavne, near the Mediterranean port city of Ashdod.
The 170 children – from infants to 12-year-olds – come mainly from “problem families, where there is neglect, drug or sexual abuse, or parents are in prison,” said Linda Avitan, a social worker originally from New Jersey.
Others are immigrant youths from Russia or Ethiopia who have no family in Israel.
“We try to give them warmth and food, keep siblings together and maintain their contact with their parents,” Avitan said. The children live four to a room in small cottages.
“There is nothing quite like it in the United States,” Avitan said.
At the Amal school network’s Pedagogical-Technological Center in Tel Aviv, some 5,000 Israeli teachers each year are learning to navigate the information highway.
“About 70 percent of Israeli households have a computer, one of the highest ratios in the world,” said Ami Salant, the center’s director of information services.
The center’s students and teacher trainees work with CD-ROM instead of textbooks, and a project for putting the history of Zionism on CD-ROM is in its final stages.
In an indication of the center’s standing, both Saudi Arabia and Suriname have tried to buy the entire computer lab for reassembly in their respective capitals, Salant said.
Kupat Holim, often criticized for its bureaucracy and interminable waits, is becoming leaner and more efficient now that it must compete with three other health provider services.
In addition, it remains the only HMO to establish clinics in immigrant centers, Arab towns and Jewish settlements in the territories.
One example is the Bridge of Peace Child Health Center in the Israeli Arab town of Taibe. It serves three Arab communities with 55,000 residents in the center of Israel.
The center is headed by an Arab pediatrician, Dr. Lufti Jaber. In addition to the usual range of children’s diseases, Jaber said, his staff must deal with the genetic defects resulting from the large number of marriages among cousins and other blood relatives.
Kupat Holim doctors and nurses face other problems in serving some 700 Ethiopian immigrants at the “caravan,” or trailer park, in Be’erotaim.
Among the challenges are the basic transition of the immigrants’ rural culture to living in a modern urban society, and coping with a relatively high incidence of tuberculosis, parasitic diseases and sexually transmitted diseases.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
