Our Impact: Overseas & Israel

2022 Grants

Thanks to our 2022 Israel Grants Committee: Cantor Jake Greenberg, Avi Kotler, Annabel Lindenbaum, Shelly Newman, and Fred Schragger we're proud to announce this year's recipients - Shutaf and Crossroads.

We're happy to continue to help youth-at-risk and will have videos to share from the programs we're funding soon.

Crossroads

Shutaf

Shutaf does amazing work since 2007, providing quality, inclusive services for children, teens, and young adults with disabilities. They have camps, year long programs, and a focus on inclusion education.

This year we will be supporting there afterschool teen club, the Shutaf Moadonit project would be most impactful and helpful for the organization. The teens arrive directly from school at different times, they have a snack and choose from a variety of activities - sports, arts and crafts, social games, etc. until everyone arrives and the evening programming begins. This is an important piece of the Young Leadership program for teens, giving them a semi-structured time of relaxation and socializing. The Moadonit also gives parents an opportunity for a long day at work, quality time with other children or for themselves.

Our new grantee is Crossroads, they've been around since 2001, to meet the needs of at-risk English-speaking teens and young adults who were not receiving the professional support that they needed. As a result of language and cultural barriers, these vulnerable young people and their families often end up 'falling between the cracks' of the traditional social welfare system in Israel. This frequently results in these young people becoming involved with unsafe, unhealthy, risky behaviors.

The project we're going to be supporting is Crossroads Theater Shed is an innovative drama enrichment program offering a fun-filled positive developmental experience for teens & young adults. It provides a foundation of vital skills to help them succeed in school, work and throughout their lives. Drama classes provide participants with several fundamental abilities, including self-esteem, confidence, creative thinking, acting skills, public speaking skills, as well as leadership and teamwork skills. Whether an individual has an active interest in acting in the theater, or they simply want to make new friends and explore the development of important attributes, Crossroads Theater Shed is a safe, positive and caring environment to pursue these experiences

Many participants discover the joy of acting and decide to pursue further stage work; other students attend just because Crossroads Theater Shed helps them build important skills that are used in whatever future endeavors they pursue

The creative drama curriculum and teaching methods are great fun and highly developmental. Participants learn experientially through imaginative learning experiences that include, among others, improvisational acting sessions, writing scene vignettes / monologues, participating in rehearsals for staging actual performances.

Crossroads Theater Shed has continued weekly online engagement and acting classes during the pandemic and staged a very innovative and successful online Play Festival.

The program is also fully integrated within their holistic therapeutic support system. Participants have ongoing access to and support from Social Workers through informal relationship building or formal therapeutic counseling.

2022 Grant Updates to Help Global Jewry

2022 Grant recipients: Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI), ORT, and Hillel

Hillel Russia seeks to fill a gap in Jewish life by rebuilding a talent pipeline to support and advance opportunities for engagement, education, and capacity building for young Jews in Russia. Over the last 12 months Hillel Russia’s most experienced local directors and program staff have left Russia due to the war. As a result Hillel Russia had to fully replace teams in Ekaterinburg, St Petersburg, Khabarovsk and partly in Moscow and Novosibirsk so that they can continue to serve young Jewish adults in the region.

In many communities there is now a lack of experienced Jewish educators and engagement professionals. Hillel Saratov was closed in June 2022 due to the majority of the student community having left along with the rabbi. Still, Jewish students remain in the communities where Hillel serves them and demand has grown over the past months.

Over the coming months, Hillel Russia will focus on strengthening existing Hillel communities who have experienced an exodus of Jewish professionals, so that local communities with new staff hired can be reinforced with both access to online Hillel knowledge base and training, but also to in-person practical help and interventions by selected Russia Headquarter staff and Jewish educators along with interns from Moscow and St Petersburg.

ORT

Kfar Silver Youth Village

JDC

Szvara Camp in Hungary

Jewish youth discover the shared roots of Jewish history and potential for a brighter Jewish future.

Read an 1.13.23 update from Szvaras

Jewish Agency For Israel

Just one story! Felegu and her husband, Abay, are both 35 years old and have two children, ages six and two. About 25 years ago, together with her father, her brothers and sisters, Felegu moved to Addis Ababa in order to immigrate to Israel. After about three years of waiting, Felegu’s father and one of her brothers immigrated to Israel while Felegu and her other three brothers were left behind. They made Aliyah on the September 14.

When the brothers received the exciting news that they would immigrate to Israel soon, the brothers called their father to share their joy with him and Gatnet said it was an emotional conversation, filled with tears of happiness, for which they had been waiting for many, many years. The brothers and Felegu finally got to see their father and hug their nephews and nieces whom they had never met. Felegu describes the moment of meeting and hugging her father as “the day I was born again.”

Felegu’s dream is to educate and raise her children to love Israel and its people, and to serve the country as well. She hopes to successfully integrate into society and engage in her field of expertise, accounting.

They are settled at The Jewish Agency’s absorption center in Ashkelon.

keep checking for updates!

2021 Grants

Some of our pre-High Holiday and pre-Passover grants to combat food insecurity went to Israeli and overseas organizations: Leket, Israel; JDC; and Yad Ezra v'Shulamit.

We also contributed to JFNA's grant to aid Operation Guardian of the Walls during the Israel Crisis in May. Funding went to JDC, The Jewish Agency for Israel, MASA, The Fund for Victims of Terror, and Israel Trauma Coalition.

Now we want you to help us decide the remaining overseas grants. Please fill out this 3 question survey!

Watch these videoes. YOUR support helps make this possible.

JAFI

Our grantee The Jewish Agency For Israel highlights work during Operation Guardian of the Walls.

Derech Eretz

Learn more about one of the programs in Israel for youth-at-risk that we help fund.

Support our Overseas Grants

2nd Round of 2020 Grants Announced:

JFOC is proud to award two Israeli nonprofits grants to continue their efforts helping youth at risk.

Shutaf provides camping and other experiences for special needs kids in Jerusalem and the center of Israel. This program not only provides an outlet for these kids, it is a great program for training other teens to work with special needs youth – and in providing parents some support and relief at key times during the year. This is a great way where our support can make a pivotal difference.

https://shutafinclusionprograms.org/teaching-inclusion/

Derech Eretz takes teens from the periphery in Israel – often those who don’t have the same economic opportunities or chances that kids have elsewhere – and offers them enrichment programs, activities that develop leadership skills, and a pre-army preparatory program which is critical to giving these kids a leg up in Israeli society.

https://derecheretz.org.il/en/

See the impact of our grants!

2020 Overseas Grants have been given to JDC (Joint Distribution Committee) and The Jewish Agency for Israel.

We hosted summer Lunch and Learns with our grantees to learn about some of the key challenges in this age of Corona affecting the Jewish community around the world.

Our final Lunch and Learn featured our own Managing Director, Keith Krivitzky. We took a look at troubling areas around the globe, anti-Semitism, and the Israel Diaspora relationship.

Our second Lunch and Learn featured the JDC. They took us on trip around the world highlighting areas where they are providing critical help to Jewish populations and then told us about a krav maga program in Israel that enables an autistic population.

Our first virtual Summer Series program was a fun and engaging lunch and learn. The Jewish Agency for Israel, one of our 2020 grantees, connected us with the global Jewish people as we heard from those on the front lines of working with new immigrants and vulnerable populations in Israel. Plus we learned a bit about Ethiopian cooking.