When, not so long ago, the director of an Israeli nonprofit organization noticed that an employee would appear at work every Sunday morning so fatigued that he could barely function, she issued him a stern warning to “stop partying so hard on Saturday nights.”
The gaunt-looking employee burst into tears, explaining that he had not eaten since Thursday afternoon, when he received his last hot meal of the week at work.
That sad tale is one of the stories that got Laurie Heller, the Israel representative of the Baron De Hirsch Fund, to establish a new group to investigate and address the rising hunger and poverty in the Jewish state as the economy has fallen.
The Forum to Address Food Insecurity and Poverty in Israel brings together a number of groups to help match philanthropists with soup kitchens and other organizations that feed those in need.
The sponsoring groups include federations and foundations investing money in Israeli non-government organizations; the Brookdale Institute, which is the research arm of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee; and Israeli government organizations. The Forum is funded primarily by the Los Angeles Jewish Federation, the San Francisco Jewish Federation and the Rochlin Family Foundation.
The forum’s mission is to “make funding opportunities for many philanthropists to find their place in the range of solutions for food insecurity,” Heller, who is the group’s co-chairwoman, says. Using available research, the forum will determine “which problems are not being addressed by existing programs, where we need to put our emphasis collectively, where people can channel funding,” she says.
To that end, the Brookdale Institute began a national survey in March to ascertain nutrition habits among Israelis. The study focused on three factors: food consumption in the general population — quantity, variety and types of food consumed; the nutritional components consumed, including both calories and various nutrients; and household difficulty in accessing adequate and appropriate food due to economic constraints.
The Brookdale survey interviewed Israelis aged 22 and up in a national telephone survey of 1,490 households between March and May of this year.
The study examined the impact of hunger on focused groups of veteran Israeli families, immigrant families and Arab families, and within those groups, on children, the elderly, single-parent families and families with large numbers of children.
Although the results of the survey have not yet been released, some conclusions were leaked from the Ministry of Health, and the report has been discussed around the country.
Consequently, the director of the Brookdale Institute, Jack Habib, issued a three-page summary of the findings.
“With the worsening of the economic crisis during the past two years,” the summary states, “food poverty has again become an issue.” Food poverty is defined as severe food shortages that lead to malnutrition, requiring emergency medical treatment.
“There is enough food, but 22 percent of the population doesn’t have enough money to purchase it on a regular basis,” Heller says.
The Brookdale study found that while there are more than 125 organizations addressing the problem of food poverty through food distribution, such as canned food drives, and recycling food, such as leftovers from restaurants, there is virtually no coordination or shared information between the organizations dealing with the problem.
Heller’s new organization seeks to coordinate the efforts of each organization and also sponsor new laws that will encourage organizations to help.
For example, the forum wants to introduce the equivalent of the United States’ Good Samaritan Law, which protects institutions from lawsuits in the event that people get sick from donated food.
Cheri Fox, who is co-chairwoman of the forum, executive director of the Fox Family Foundation and co-chairwoman of the Jewish Funders Network, emphasizes that she, Habib and Heller are not trying to provide an alternative to the government’s response to hunger, but working to enhance it.
“The study was done with a team of researchers from the Ministry of Health and in partnership with National Insurance and Social Welfare,” Habib says. “We now have fairly intensive discussions with government ministries with the hope that they will move to develop more effective responses to the situation.”
The effectiveness of these responses, say Heller and Fox, is an urgent matter.
“In school-age children,” Heller explains, “malnutrition lowers IQ by 10 points.”
“When malnourishment is found in the 0-5 age group,” Fox adds, it “can create severe, irreversible problems in physical and intellectual development.”
As such, she notes, Israel is beginning to see “enormous gaps between rich and poor.”
Whereas the gap used to be 10 points out of 100 on standardized tests, it is now 20 points.
“The impact of the economic crisis in this country is long-term,” Heller argues. “We are losing another generation to poverty.”
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