The Life-Changing Organization That Flies Under the Radar

We live in dramatic times. Everyone is sounding an alarm bell.

As far as American Zionists are concerned, there are those who take to the proverbial microphone — whether the press, social media or other outlets — to magnify their message. And then, there are those who roll up their sleeves and start building.

Both types of Zionists are integral. This week, I was reminded of the extraordinary importance of those who speak less but do more.

I’m specifically referring to four Hungarian grandmothers.

In 1948, they (and their husbands) met in Los Angeles and created something amazing. Concerned about a nascent Jewish state as it struggled amid a housing shortage to resettle hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors and Jewish immigrants from around the world, these women — themselves immigrants who had fled Hungary to live in the United States — brought their solution to the table.

The card table.

Every week, Dr. Irene Halmos, Fanny Fletcher, Rosella Kanaraik and Lily Gould gathered together for games of gin rummy and poker. But none of the winnings went into their change purses; instead, the coins were dropped into a collective pot.

And that’s how Shelters for Israel, a nonprofit celebrating its 72nd anniversary this year, was founded. Its motto: “Every dollar goes to Israel.”

Seven decades later, they’ve stayed true to that motto. The organization has zero paid staff or overhead. It doesn’t even have an office. Everyone who leads or supports Shelters for Israel is a volunteer. These caring people range from Alyse Laemmle, 103 (and daughter of co-founder and first president Irene Halmos) to Joey Ben-Zvi, 24.

In response to the flood of newly-arrived immigrants who were living in tent cities in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Israeli government began building permanent housing to enable these immigrants to own their own highly-subsidized homes. If, that is, they could make a modest down payment. But many of these new citizens couldn’t even afford this option.

Back in Los Angeles, Shelters for Israel was enabling more and more people who cared about Israel — many of them survivors or American Jews who’d lost family members in the Holocaust — to meet socially and … what else? Play cards.

After a few years, those winnings resulted in some impressive seed capital that gave immigrants in Israel an advanced loan with which to pay their down payments. That’s a lot of nickels, dimes and quarters.

It was the true definition of recyclable tzedaka: As each loan was repaid to Shelters for Israel, the funds were distributed to another immigrant to be able to afford housing.

It was the true definition of recyclable tzedaka: As each loan was repaid to Shelters for Israel, the funds were distributed to another immigrant to be able to afford housing.

The organization reached out to prominent American Jews, including Dr. Jonas Salk, the virologist who developed the first successful polio vaccine. A video from the 1950s shows Salk visiting various infrastructure projects in Holon, supported by Shelters for Israel.

Maybe it was because they left their own homes in Hungary behind as they escaped the Nazis, or because they couldn’t bear to let immigrants, especially fellow Holocaust survivors, live in tents on their watch, or because they were homemakers themselves. Whatever inspired those four original women to roll up their sleeves paid off in a big way.

From a few dozen members, the organization grew in the 1960s to include more than 500 families who supported Shelters for Israel as it grew with Israel’s needs. Shelters for Israel began supporting the building of everything ranging from libraries and recreational centers to senior centers and playgrounds. Often, one donor family provided a significant amount of funds to have a name on a building. That name often honored a beloved family member who perished in the Holocaust.

It was a striking way to keep a name and a legacy alive. And it didn’t matter if you were Reform, Conservative or Orthodox. All were welcome around the Shelters for Israel (card) table.

To date, the organization has raised tens of millions of dollars and has built over 70 capital projects in Israel. On November 15, they held their 72^nd-anniversary celebration — albeit a virtual one due to the pandemic — that featured Dan Raviv, former CBS News and i24 correspondent and author of the bestselling book, “Every Spy a Prince.”

During the online event, one thing was obvious: this is an active group of volunteers that loves working together. You could see their love and friendship — from the survivors, like the indefatigable Renée Firestone, who offered a touching convocation in which she stated that “Israel will not be defeated,” to the lay leaders who organized the event. Here were people who really, really liked one another. It was exactly what we hope for when we imagine one big family of Jewish peoplehood.

And the organization is deeply aware of generational divides, astutely using them to keep everyone connected. Shelters for Israel members constantly use terms like “first generation” for survivors and organizational founders, “second generation” for current lay leaders and “third generation” for their children, who are in their 20s. Extraordinarily, there’s even an active fourth generation of volunteers, such as a great-granddaughter or great-nephew of a first-generation member.

“I grew up with Shelters for Israel,” Los Angeles-based Co-President Myra Gabbay told me. “My parents were involved and the group was also their social group and, really, they were all each other’s family.”

Gabbay’s parents were Holocaust survivors who were born in the Carpathian region in what was then Czechoslovakia. “When our parents’ generation felt it was time to pass the baton to us, we felt so strongly that we couldn’t allow this extraordinary organization, made up strictly of volunteers, and from every type of religious observance, to fizzle out,” Gabbay said. “And now we have brought in our friends and the younger generations are also very attached.”

Two of Gabbay’s own children, Cece, 35, and Ethan, 27, also are members. “To me, it’s not really a question of do we want to help Israel? We’re going to help Israel, and what’s the best way we can do that?” Ethan said in a 2015 video about the organization.

This year’s anniversary event, which was organized by a 22-member committee, highlighted three projects the organization supports in Israel. One project is Latet, a nonprofit aid organization whose name means “to give.” Since 1996, Latet has combated poverty and food insecurity, establishing Israel’s first food bank. During the pandemic, it has provided services to 70,000 families and 3,500 Holocaust survivors. Its latest focus is a home repairs project that helps survivors by providing free-of-charge handymen who install everything from better door knobs to grab bars. If you’re a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor living below the poverty line in Israel, a long grab bar that allows you to walk from a hallway into a bathroom, where you can access another grab bar in the shower, are seemingly small, but life-changing gifts.

The November 15 event also highlighted the work of Stop Cancer, Israel’s only initiative aimed at supporting young adult cancer patients and survivors, as well as the Beit Shulamit Cancer Center at the Emek Medical Center in Afula, which serves northern Israel.

According to the Shelters for Israel website, the majority of the organization’s projects are located in “more geographically and economically vulnerable periphery areas of the country, where the needs are the greatest.” These include the Negev and the Galilee. In the past five years, recent projects have included everything from student dormitories to hospital equipment and an ICU ambulance.

One former project, a music education program called Sulamot — Music for Social Change, put musical instruments into the hands of at-risk Israeli youth. Gabbay reflected on the project: “It was easy for us to understand how music could not only be a refuge for these kids, but also learning a skill, and performing well gave them so much positive reinforcement.” For two years, the children came annually to Los Angeles to perform for Shelters for Israel members. “At the luncheons, people were dancing and crying,” Gabbay recalled. “It was very special.”

Another project, Keren Gimmel (The Gimmel Foundation), provides Jewish education, including tutoring programs and day camps, to children in southern Israel. Shelters for Israel helped the organization when, in the past few years, it was forced to re-open camps in bomb shelters as a result of rocket fire from Hamas in Gaza.

Shelters for Israel also provides support for Beit Shanti (Shanti House), which helps runaways and homeless youth in Israel and has a location in Tel Aviv as well as a “Desert Shanti” in Ramat Negev.

Most of Shelters for Israel’s funding ideas for projects come from organization members, including co-president Dave Jackson, treasurer Karen David, and a board of directors.

I asked Gabbay why more pro-Israel supporters in Los Angeles hadn’t heard of Shelters for Israel. “We’re an under-the-radar kind of group,” she said. “We don’t like to spend money on advertising, etc., [because] we want every penny to go to Israel, and also, we all work, and so our time has to be devoted to the most essential aspects of fundraising.”

More than ever, in a world of digital clouds and deletable selfie photos, many of us are drawn to the tangible. It’s comforting to have organizations like Shelters for Israel, which moves beyond the scope of one-time events to create spaces like kindergartens and community centers —structures whose permanence remind us that we can create future realities with our own hands.

And at a time when virtually every event in the Jewish community is dedicated to a supposed crisis and schism between American Jews and Jews in Israel, there’s so much power to the one thing that transcends “Diaspora relations” and “internal politics”: The simple, basic concept of shelter — an intentional concept that begins with a thought and ends, in the words of the Torah, “with an outstretched hand.”

More information about Shelters for Israel may be found at www.sheltersforisrael.com

Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker and activist.