High Holyday Appeal 5770 David Edelman 28 September 2009

Home Start Hillingdon  ( www.homestart-hillingdon.org.uk )

This is a charity that befriends and supports families and children in Hillingdon. They help mothers suffering from loneliness and isolation, post-natal depression, mothers of a child with a disability or special needs or coping with bereavement or with multiple births, or with several pre-school children.

I met Linda, the Manager, who is a lively lady, about my age and to my surprise had bright orange hair. She is passionate about the work they do and, as a significant part of their funding comes from the local authority and the local health care trusts, she is very concerned that a reduction in funding will affect the level of support they are able to give to families in Hillingdon next year. She told me about two of their recent cases:

Sophie is 21, she is very intelligent. When she was 6 years old her father died and when she was 8, her mother died. There was no family to take her in so she was taken into care and fostered. She lived with several families and was well-clothed and well-fed - but no one loved her. She left school but had no self-confidence and no friends. Then she met Tom and her world changed – someone loved her. She became pregnant.

Sophie is now 21 and has 3 children aged 6 months, 2 and 3½. She is still with Tom who works very hard and long hours to support his family but they live in a Council flat on the third floor of a building with no lift – she cannot even get out to do the shopping – how do you get down 3 floors with 3 children under 4 ?

Home Start provides vital help to Sophie. Without Home Start her children might have ended up in care too. They helped build up Sophie’s self confidence, helped her do a weekly shop,  gave her a chance to have a quiet bath while someone looked after the children, gave her a chance to go out one evening with Tom by babysitting – they had not been out for an evening together for 2 years.

Linda told me about another case; Maggie was a Psychology tutor at a college in London, her husband Colin also works in London. They had both always been very involved in their work. Maggie worked until the 8th month of her pregnancy. When Maggie’s twins were born one had a cleft palate. He will have an operation before he is one but meanwhile it takes over an hour at each feed to feed him and his twin brother still needs looking after at the same time. Colin has no family but Maggie’s parents came down from Liverpool when the babies were born and planned to stay in Hillingdon to help their daughter look after the twins. Unfortunately, when Maggie’s parents went back to Liverpool for a weekend just 3 weeks after the twins were born, her father suffered a serious stroke and they were not able to help Maggie at all.

Maggie was suffering from post-natal depression, grieving for the loss of a healthy baby, coping with having twins and living in an area where she had no friends or family. Home Start made the difference to Maggie  and gave her the emotional and physical support that got her through the first 6 months.

Home Start needs our help to continue helping mothers and children in Hillingdon who are at a crisis point in their lives.

Our second High Holy Day Charity is Tzedek  ( www.tzedek.org.uk )

Tzedek is a Jewish charity based in North London. Its motto is “Jewish action for a just world”. It is a Jewish charity that helps families in different parts of the world who are suffering from extreme poverty by funding sustainable projects. The charity operates in 2 main areas Northern Ghana in Africa and Tamil Nadu in Southern India.

In Northern Ghana in 2003 just over 1 million children under 13 were engaged in child labour.  Tzedek funds schemes to enable at-risk children to attend school and helps their families by providing a sustainable income – the emphasis being sustainable. The most important part of the project is – goats.

Tzedek trains the women to look after goats and the milk and offspring of the goats it provides, create a sustainable income for the community. This assists a previously impoverished and malnourished community to become self- sufficient and the children to be educated.

In Tamil Nadu Tzedek supports 4,000 women in 250 self help groups. The majority of these women are from the dalit caste (often called “untouchables”). All the women and their children suffer from malnutrition at various points during the year and 80% are illiterate. Tzedek funds the setting up of a group of women provides support and training to the women in all the administrative, financial and practical skills to be able to achieve their goals and once they have been saving for 6 months Tzedek provides the group with a loan to fund small businesses set up by the women to generate their own income and become self-reliant. Examples of the small businesses are rearing ducks, producing crisps by deep-frying onions and pulses, making products from coconuts and palms, bicycle repair shops, cattle rearing.     

The affect of these schemes is to empower and educate the women, to enable them to help provide their families with food and education.

Additionally Tzedek  funds a substantial education programme throughout the UK especially in Jewish Schools and Cheders. It also provides an overseas volunteer scheme so that young Jewish students can spend 2 months assisting its projects in Africa and India. 

This Charity is the UK Jewish Community’s response to world poverty.

Leo Baeck Arab-Jewish Summer Camp 2010  (www.leobaeck.org.il )

Our third and final Charity is our Israel charity. The Leo Baeck Education Centre in Haifa educates students from all sectors of the local community – Sabras ( the native Israelis), the new immigrant Jews from Russia, Eastern Europe and Ethiopia, who often live in poverty in Israel, Arabs (both Christian and Muslim), and Druze. The Leo Baeck Centre is committed to democracy, egalitarianism and human rights for all Israelis - black and white, Arab and Jew, religious and secular, new immigrant or native born. At NPLS we share the same principles.

Our appeal this year is to help fund the Leo Baeck Arab-Jewish Summer Camp in 2010. Israel’s Arab and Jewish children have very little and often no direct experience of one another in their daily lives. With its emphasis on equality, respect for language, team spirit built on trust and shared fun, the Arab-Jewish Summer Camp marks the beginning of a process that really can begin to chip away at the fears and even anger that many of the children instinctively feel towards one another. The Summer Camp does not claim that it can bring peace to the region, but at least it can help make a start by laying foundations of hope among 100 children.

The camp will run for 2 weeks and the aim is for there to be 50 Arab children and 50 Jewish children, 20 of whom will be under-privileged children recommended by the Department of Welfare. The camp is open to children from all over Haifa and all activities are conducted in both Arabic and Hebrew. The aims of the Camp are:

1. To build human connections and to learn to listen to one another
2. To break down fears through shared experiences and activities
3. To respect and celebrate cultural differences – whether language, clothing, traditions, music or food
4. To provide a safe environment where co-operation and self-expression are encouraged
5. Finally, to establish long term relationships and connections.

Not only will NPLS support this Arab-Jewish Summer Camp financially, we also hope to be sending some of our young people to act as facilitators at the Camp and in that way we at NPLS will put our own principles into action. 

This is a vital programme that we have a unique opportunity to support in the name of our Community this year. The experience of previous camps is that strong friendships were made, deep respect was forged and empathy grew stronger every day. None of the lives of those attending will ever be the same as they Facebook and Twitter one another trying to work out when and where they can meet again.

Our 3 Yom Kippur Appeal charities are all very worthy of your support. This year there is increased pressure on all of us as well as the Charities because of the recession. I know that in the past only about a third of our members have donated to our appeal. In this very important year, please consider giving if you have not customarily done so in the past. Please help these very deserving charities and give generously.

I wish you all Shana Tova.

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