By Rivka Borochov
The 6,000 people who volunteer for Israel’s charity Yad Sarah are known by people in their communities as angels, not only because they help save the Israeli economy an estimated $400 million in medical costs every year, but also because they offer their time to bring a longer and higher quality of life to people who might otherwise have to be cared for in hospitals or geriatric centers.
Through its 102 branch offices, Yad Sarah lends out more than 300 different kinds of medical equipment to Israelis and tourists -- rich or poor, Jewish or Arab, arriving by public transportation or Cadillac. The nationwide organization is so successful that it was named an official adviser to two United Nation bodies on how to help improve society from within.
Yad Sarah volunteers work with young and old Yad Sarah also provides 16 support services, from rides for the disabled to the doctor’s office or just out for a cup of coffee with friends, to toy libraries for parents of children with special needs. Everything can be arranged with a quick phone call or a visit to a local branch.
Yad Sarah ‘angels’ speak
Avraham Feldman, a former Dan bus driver from Tel Aviv, is a typical volunteer: He has been volunteering at the Jaffa branch of Yad Sarah for about 30 years, and eight years ago became the branch manager when he retired from Dan.
About 20 percent to 30 percent of the people who turn up at the Jaffa office are from the Arab community -- Muslims and Christians who come to get wheelchairs, respirators, crutches, cribs, breast pumps, sleep apnea devices, baby monitors, hospital beds and all the other items Yad Sarah lends out for up to three months with nothing more than a small security deposit asked up front. Often, these gadgets make the critical difference in allowing people to be cared for at home.
Feldman was born in Israel before it was a state.. “I have known a lot of Arabs since I was a kid, and they have a great relationship with Yad Sarah. The equipment we offer really helps them,” he says. “I think it has even inspired the Muslims in Jaffa to create a small waqf, an Islamic interest-free charity, which in Jaffa lends out some smaller medical items like canes.”
But for more serious equipment and services, Jaffa’s Arab citizens come to the charity founded on Jewish religious principles for a Jewish religious community decades ago.
Yad Sarah’s 102 branches have thousands
of wheelchairs for loan
“Like any citizen of Israel, when they come to us they get all the services and equipment they need,” says Feldman, who also tries to match up leftover items donated to Yad Sarah, such as adult diapers, with families who need them.
Meir Handelsman has been volunteering as the director of international cooperation for Yad Sarah since 2009. Coming from Israel’s Ministry of Health, where he worked prior to retiring, Handelsman travels the world, and the world travels to him, so government officials from other countries can copy Israel’s extraordinary model based on two very simple principles, he says.
“In order for Yad Sarah to work, we have to have two factors present in society: we need volunteers who can staff the organization, and we need to be able to ensure that the community will return the items that are lent out. If these two can be established, Yad Sarah can work anywhere,” he says.
Built on Jewish charity
Countries including Turkey, El Salvador, South Korea, Italy, Jordan, Angola and South Africa -- and many more -- have adopted the Yad Sarah model in various forms, though none as large and effective as the Israeli organization built on the Jewish concept of gamach, a Hebrew acronym for the expression gemilut chasadim, acts of kindness.
Gamach funds provide free loans of money, services or objects to anyone in need. One can find hundreds, if not thousands, of gamach funds in Israel lending out money, children’s toys and clothes, centerpieces for weddings, laptops for the infirm -- even food and free dental care.
Yad Sarah started out as a small gamach fund in 1976 in the apartment of Uri Lupolianski, a young teacher who would later become the mayor of Jerusalem. In his religious community in Jerusalem, he noticed that every winter children would be taken to hospitals by ambulance and then returned home the next day.
The reason for this burden on the healthcare system, he found, could be fixed with humidifiers and ventilators to moisten the dry air created by the heating systems in these old Jerusalem apartments. But the parents in his neighborhood couldn’t afford the basic equipment to solve the problem every winter.
“Families with no money wouldn’t dare to buy this equipment,” says Feldman, who knows Lupolianski well. “He decided to take money from his own pocket and buy several inhalers and humidifiers. He told everybody that he has 10 each of those items, and that anyone can come and borrow them.”
When his father sold his shoe business in Haifa, he donated the money to Lupolianksi for the growing gamach – on the condition that it be named after Lupolianski’s late grandmother, Sarah, who was murdered in the Holocaust.
Yad in Hebrew means “hand,” but it also means “memorial” as in Yad Yashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem. Yad Sarah was born.
“He developed Yad Sarah from the bottom up, and that’s the secret to its success,” Feldman believes.
Creative solutions to improve life quality
Yad Sarah offers a whole range of services: clean linens for the bedridden, security systems for the lone elderly, meals on wheels, home visits, legal services, and even a service to help people put their life story into print to share with their family after they are gone.
No other country in the world has this kind of service with everything at one address, Feldman says.
Anat Ben Zaken, who is in charge of the Life Story operation, says that Yad Sarah volunteers created about 100 Life Story books last year alone. A volunteer who is an expert in writing will arrange 10 to 15 visits at the home of the elderly or dying person so their life story can be recorded digitally. Later it is transcribed and edited into a book to be shared with the family.
A Yad Sarah “Life Story” volunteer helps an elderly
woman put together her life story for after she is gone Ben Zaken says that the experience does something positive for both sides – the volunteer and the recipient. “The stories come to life with pictures and family documents and it’s published like a real book,” she says.
This is especially important for Holocaust survivors, adds Feldman, because often they haven’t told their story to anyone in the family before; the memories were too painful.
But easing the pain is what Yad Sarah does best –– and it does it with an impressively low budget.
Most of Yad Sarah’s operational costs come from inside Israel, from donors and also from clients who donate the security deposit after an item has been returned.
The massive organization – Israel’s largest charity and the world’s largest lender of medical equipment -- employs only 200 people and relies on its thousands of volunteer “angels,” mainly pensioners, to staff management and office positions at its branches.
Home visits are one of the services provided
by Yad Sarah “angels” Feldman says Yad Sarah’s annual operating budget is about NIS 80 million, or about $20 million, and 94 percent of that comes from donations locally and internationally. They believe in keeping people at home in their own communities as long as possible, for both humanitarian and economic reasons.
“People from the World Bank didn’t believe us when we told them we saved the Israeli economy $400 million a year on hospitalization and medical costs and we had to open our books to prove it to them,” Feldman reports proudly.
With 2,200 hospital beds to loan out, along with bed hoists, Life Story, tools to help the elderly connect to the Internet, rehabilitation services and so much more, Yad Sarah is now recognized by the United Nations as a model for community-based charity and support. A member of the UN’s Department of Public Information since 2003, Yad Sarah is also a special consultant to the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which monitors the welfare of the world.
One of Yad Sarah’s 16 support services
helps the elderly connect to the intenet. This is what Feldman told a community in the Turkish city of Urfa –– the birthplace of Abraham, according to Muslim tradition –– which adopted the Yad Sarah model in part:
“The Jewish concept of chesed shel emet or a ‘true act of kindness’ means that when you do something you don’t expect to be rewarded. Abraham, the forefather of the Jewish people, exemplified this concept; he was always looking for guests and visitors. Also the Yad Sarah volunteers are doing chesed shel emet – they serve the needy knowing they will not get back what they give. But they do it because they want to,” he concluded.