United Jewish Communities

From their website: "UJC.org is designed to entertain, educate, inspire and remind you that you are part of a vibrant, bold, sometimes daring community that pursues social justice and human rights -- a community that lives by rich traditions of advocacy, education, and taking responsibility, one for the other. UJC.org is all about helping you take part...It's at your fingertips, with the click of a button."
The UJC website has many tools, resources, and networks, that are waiting to be tapped into to for zedaka work and more generally to help fulfill and implement the vision of K'Cholmim. Make good use of them.

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American Friends of Yad Eliezer

Yad Eliezer started in 1980 in the kitchen of the Weisel family when they began preparing food deliveries for a few poor families in their neighborhood. Now, with a corps of almost 8,000 volunteers and a small staff, Yad Eliezer provides food and social services to over 6,000 families, helping over 50,000 desperately needy individuals. Food programs include monthly food baskets, meals for the sick and elderly, Yom Tov meals for families, baby formula for mothers who cannot nurse, fresh eggs, and a unique project in which produce growers donate almost $2.5 million in fresh produce annually to poor families.

In addition to providing basic food services to meet the immediate needs of poor families, Yad Eliezer also runs a number of social service programs that tackle the long term goal of breaking the cycle of poverty by helping families achieve financial stability. In the last eight years, these programs have helped over 6,000 families to cease relying on Yad Eliezer's food assistance and, in many cases, become donors to Yad Eliezer themselves. The social service programs include an Emergency Fund (Keren Yisrael Mordechai - after Sruly Miller A'H'), for families facing a crisis, The Gitty Perkowski Simcha Fund which provides heavily subsidized weddings to those who cannot afford one, the Big Brothers which deals with over 800 at-risk children and the Job-Training Fund that provides grants to heads of impoverished families to receive job training.

The challenge for Yad Eliezer is to expand to meet the increasing need for help and yet maintain its unique approach of compassion, effectiveness and honesty. The Ministry of Social Affairs' annual report on poverty in Israel found well over a million people living below the poverty line. The poverty line in Israel is extremely low and many of the poor who are helped by Yad Eliezer live in conditions that defy description.

Yad Eliezer is currently the largest anti-hunger agency in Israel, and it struggles to confirm and fulfill the many requests for assistance that it receives every day. As Yad Eliezer's executive director, Dov Weisel describes it, "Every month is a miracle."

Each month Yad Eliezer distributes large boxes of necessary staples such as eggs, oil, tuna, flour, sugar, rice, beans, pasta, bread, soap and detergent thousands of households. Yad Eliezer has over 2,000 teenage volunteers who go door-to-door to collect food in their neighborhood once a month. These young volunteers then deliver their goods to a local collection center in another volunteer's home, from which Yad Eliezer's drivers pick up the donations. Then, at the Yad Eliezer warehouse and distribution center, hundreds more volunteers (many of them students in Israel for a year), put away and reorganize the donations into the monthly deliveries. Yad Eliezer relies heavily on these donated goods, as well as buying staples such as flour, oil, canned goods, olives, beans, sugar, detergent and soap.

Yad Eliezer leverages a great deal of work from very few resources. Over 90% of Yad Eliezer's annual budges is funded by individual donation, many of them very small. With almost 8,000 volunteers, amost $2.5 million in surplus produce, and tons of donated food and furniture, the value of Tzedaka donations is incalculable. Each dollar donated to Yad Eliezer becomes at least $3 worth of goods and services to families who barely subsist.

Yad Eliezer is profoundly grateful for all the donations it receives.
It makes us realize that there is no nation like Klal Yisrael! In the U.S.:

1102 East 26th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11210

718-258-1580
email: sori.tropper@verizon.net

In Israel:
12 Polansky Street
POB 41175 Jerusalem
2-581-3370 *********************************