Garrett Davis, who runs a dog care business in Israel, started a GoFundMe on Oct. 17 for a family whose Beersheba home was destroyed from a Gaza rocket that was reportedly accidentally launched due to a lightning strike.
At around 3:40 a.m. Israeli time, Miri Tamano, a single mother, rushed her three boys – ages 8, 9 and 12 – out of their house and into a bomb shelter in less than a minute. Reportedly, as soon as Tamano shut the shelter door, a rocket struck their house, completely destroying it and all of the Tamano family’s possessions inside.
“Everything has been lost,” Tamano said, asking the public for aid since her family needs basic necessities.
Davis, who is close with the Tamano children after being a volunteer teacher at the Tamano boys’ school through the Masa Israel Teaching Fellowship program, decided to help by starting the GoFundMe page, which has raised more than $20,000 as of publication time.
For two straight years, Davis had been starting GoFundMe pages in honor of his brother, Gabriel, who died in January 2014 from an accidental drug overdose, to provide food for the homeless.
“I did start a GoFundMe in memory of my brother a week before the rocket hit,” Davis told the Journal in a phone interview. “When the rocket hit, I automatically closed the one in memory of my brother and I started this one for the family.”
Davis wrote in JNS that when the rocket hit, “I knew I had to do something special—for them, and for Gabe.”
“Thank God that they [the Tamanos] were in their safe room when the rocket struck their house, and are all fine,” Davis wrote. “But an entire story of their house is destroyed.
“So now is time to rebuild, like I rebuilt my life, by turning an ending into a beginning.”
Donations to the Tamano family can be made here.
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