Good Thursday morning!
In today’s edition of Your Daily Phil, we report on the removal of 19 companies that do business in Israel and the West Bank from the Morningstar ratings company’s list of “controversial” firms, and look at how Jewish groups who were active in the Save Darfur movement are responding to the current violence in Sudan. We’ll start with the distribution of emergency grants to recent victims of terror in Israel by the heads of the Jewish Agency for Israel and Jewish Federations of North America.
Within two days of any terror attack in Israel, but normally faster, the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Fund for Victims of Terror provides the victim or their family with an emergency grant of just over $1,000, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Judah Ari Gross.
Jewish Federations of North America President and CEO Eric Fingerhut and Jewish Agency Board of Governors Chair Mark Wilf, each of whom happened to be in Israel this week, were able to distribute these grants personally yesterday alongside the CEO of the fund, former Knesset member Ayelet Nahmias-Verbin. The day before, a Palestinian man rammed his car into a group of people at a bus stop in northern Tel Aviv and then stabbed some of them. Seven people were injured, some seriously, including a pregnant woman who lost her baby.
“When we deliver it, we’re able to say we love you and refuah shlema (get well), but also that the Jewish people of the world are thinking of you and are with you and our hearts are with you. So being able to do that today was very, very emotional,” Fingerhut told eJP on Wednesday night, a few hours after his visit to Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital, where the victims had been taken.
“It’s not so much the financial help – which is of course important – but that we are expressing mutual responsibility from the Jewish people,” Wilf said. “If this occurs in Israel – whatever faith, whatever the background – we are there right away to show our values and show our compassion.”
The Fund for Victims of Terror was established in 2002, in the midst of the Second Intifada. In addition to the immediate grant of NIS 4,000 ($1,080), victims are also eligible for up to NIS 25,000 ($6,750) in payments for up to three years, though this was extended beyond that time limit during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 9,000 Israelis have received grants through the fund.
Nahmias-Verbin said the fund also maintains a close relationship with the victims and their families beyond the grants, providing emotional support, as well as help in navigating the bureaucracy of the Israeli government to ensure they get all of the assistance that they are entitled to under law.
Nahmias-Verbin said that these tight, long-lasting ties – which can continue even after the victims are no longer eligible for grants – led her to consider the victims to be part of the fund’s “family,” quickly adding: “But I am always upset when our family grows.”
Read the full story here.
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