ASHKELON, Israel — Eva Tutai is a lawyer and an educator. She works from her home office. Today, that office is filled with boxes and two refrigerators — and three women arrive carrying more large boxes.
That’s nothing: you should see her living room.
Tutai is part of a network of volunteers who have stepped forward to provide for the needs of people in Israel’s southern towns, many of whom have been unable to evacuate since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and murdered over 1,400 people October 7.
“Since the start of the war, we have no choice,” another volunteer, Bila Abramazon, tells me by telephone. “We have many families with special needs kids who need medicines. You don’t understand what difficult is, until you’ve had to deal with that in war.”
Guy Leibovitz of the Aliyah Foundation has partnered with local volunteers to bring daily shipments of hot, ready-made meals from the Asif Culinary Institute, which prepares nearly 900 meals a day, as Breitbart News reported on Sunday. He drops them off at various apartment buildings in Ashkelon, one of the cities that has been hit hardest by rocket fire.
There, many elderly and disabled people have stayed in their homes because of the difficulty of moving. Some have barely left the reinforced “safe rooms” in their apartments since the war began, because they cannot move quickly enough to reach bomb shelters underground in the 30 seconds or so before the impact of rockets that may have evaded the Iron Dome missile system. They cannot shop for groceries, nor can they even walk to the kitchen to prepare meals.
Guy and the Aliyah Foundation are their lifeline. “One of the people Aliyah Foundation helps is a double amputee,” Abramazon explains. “It’s very moving to know these people have a warm meal.”
Some of those who receive meals every day through the Aliyah Foundation are Holocaust survivors. Guy explains that he is focused on the elderly and disabled because they are often neglected in the rush to donate items to soldiers who are at the front.
The Aliyah Foundation typically devotes its energies to helping visiting Christian groups understand the deep Jewish roots of Israel. But it is focused today on helping Israelis — and 100% of funds donated to its website will go directly to Israeli relief efforts.
Inside Tutai’s living room, there are tables piled high with of donated goods — and not just for the elderly. A pyramid of baby formula is stacked on one table, and Tutai shows me a “special operations” package for a local woman who has just given birth and has no supplies of her own: a car seat, piled with several days’ worth of baby products, shrink-wrapped to hold everything together.
Her partner in the effort, Itai Sahar, talks with voluneers outside as they bring in more boxes and arrange donated clothing into net piles.
He tells me that volunteers are doing just about everything, because both the national and the municipal government have been stretched beyond capacity, paralyzed by bureaucracy, and beset by an incompetence familiar to governments worldwide.
“Some people are living in homes damaged by rockets and have still not been evacuated,” he tells me. That’s who they are helping.
The Hamas attack was the worst tragedy in the history of Israel, but Guy tells me that the volunteer effort has been Israel’s “finest moment.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
