December, 2019 | The Jerusalem Intercultural Center

Living Safer, Living Longer and MiniActive Joining Forces to Make East Jerusalem Safer for Families

Living Safer, Living Longer and MiniActive have enjoyed a fruitful partnership since the project began.

MiniActive Living Safer, Living Longer, visiting local fire department

One group has already been trained, and we are now training a second group of women to advance home safety and preventive health measures from within the community. This group began training on November 12, and they’re already practicing doing individual mentoring in homes, together with our staff.

An integral part of the training is fire prevention, since house fires are a huge problem in East Jerusalem. (You might remember the fire prevention training from the first group, with this unforgettable video here.)

As part of this training group members visited the local fire department in Wadi Joz on December 10, 2019. Here’s a Facebook post (in Arabic, of course) from the MiniActive Facebook page:

And many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for its support of Living Safer, Living Longer and MiniActive, and to the Natan Fund for their additional support of MiniActive.

Naomi Roff2020-01-10T20:49:46+00:00December 27th, 2019|Blog, Living Safer Living Longer, MiniActive|

Atta’a – Awareness-Raising Workshops to Improve Access to Rights

Atta’a is much more than a web site and Facebook page. An important part of Atta’a’s work is also giving lectures and workshops in the community.

Daud, Atta’a director, giving a workshop

During the past few months, Atta’a has been busy giving workshops – sometimes twice a day – on a number of different subjects. These include:

Rights from the National Insurance Institute in general
Rights from the National Insurance Institute on payments for the elderly, welfare payments, unemployment payments
Discounts on municipal property taxes
Rights from the Ministry of the Interior
Rights in health care

Sometimes he gave lectures by himself

And sometimes he gave lectures with Nadine, who is developing the health rights section of the Atta’a web site:

Lecturing with Nadine

All over East Jerusalem, from Sur Baher to Wadi Joz to Beit Hanina:

In the Wadi Joz Community Center

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and the Leichtag Foundation for their support of Atta’a.

Naomi Roff2020-01-10T20:51:32+00:00December 25th, 2019|Attaa, Blog|

Santé Israël – Increasing Reach Together with Maccabi Health Services and Jerusalem Municipality

On Thursday, December 5, 2019, Santé Israël, together with Maccabi Health Services, the Jerusalem Municipality, the Qualita organization for French-speaking immigrants, and the National Insurance Institute, held an information evening about health care rights. Some 80 people were in attendance!

Raising awareness about health care rights

The meeting was held at the Qualita offices, in downtown Jerusalem.

A lot of information was provided

Carol Azoulay, who is in charge of working with the French-speaking community in Jerusalem and the central region for Maccabi Health Services, spoke about rights included in the HMO’s supplemental insurance plans. Many members are now aware of rights they are eligible for.

From experts in a lot of areas

Ayala Blum, Director of the Office for Rights Realization for French-speaking immigrants of the Jerusalem Municipality, who also works for Qualita, talked about her role as a source of information about rights in general, above and beyond the health care field. Dr. Yves Bensoussan, a doctor in at the National Insurance Institute in Jerusalem, who helps many French speakers, spoke about common issues: disability for children and adults, rights for seniors who are retiring. And of course, Santé Israël Director Marie Avigad introduced Santé Israël.

Cooperation between a number of bodies, with best results for everyone

Then there was a time for questions and the issues raised:

What are the health insurance supplementary cover? What are the rates?
Rights regarding maternity leave for a salaried employee and an independent worker
The difference between HMO and the National Insurance Institute
Different situations that enable people to become eligible for disability payments
What is nursing care insurance and what is the difference between nursing care insurance provided by the HMO’s and nursing care benefits provided by the National Insurance Institute? (Answer on the Santé Israël website: https://www.sante.org.il/couvertures-des-caisses/ and https://www.sante.org.il/personnes-agees/_)
Where to go in an emergency
Discounts for dental care for children and the elderly
Eyewear for children and adults
Work disability
Social security rights for a patient being treated with chemotherapy
Mental health – How to get treatment through HMOs
Free telephone translation service from the Ministry of Health and the fact that doctors are required to use it if requested by the patient
MDA services – payment and situations where there is no charge

After this session, Marie received a number of requests on Facebook to have similar meetings in other cities, such as Ashkelon, Ashdod, Netanya, in the north. Stay tuned for more!

And here’s a Facebook post from Sante Israel:

And another from Qualita:

Many thanks to the Pharmadom Foundation for their continued support of Santé Israël over the years.

Naomi Roff2020-01-10T21:00:19+00:00December 22nd, 2019|Blog, Cultural Competence, Santé Israël - French internet platform on the Israeli healthcare system|

The Little Prince – Changing Municipal Priorities

We’ve written in the past about how the Little Prince – Cleaning Up Jerusalem Together is changing priorities across the city, including in the Municipality. You can read examples here, here, and here.

Along this line, we recently came across this article in the Jerusalem Post, which sums up Mayor Moshe Lion’s first year in office. Proof of the success of the Little Prince project, cleanliness has been on of the Municipality’s main focuses this first year. Here is what the article had to say about it:

Lion identified four major challenges plaguing Jerusalem: housing; job opportunities for young, educated people; traffic; and cleanliness, (emphasis ours) and he told The Jerusalem Post that he has acted on all fronts to strengthen the city.

The article went on to describe his efforts:

“The city is much cleaner now than before I started,” [Moshe Lion] told the Post.

Lion has moved to bolster the city’s underground waste collection system, which includes a network of underground waste containers.

The move threatened Jerusalem’s cats, which were accustomed to eating out of the large green trash receptacles that forever littered Jerusalem’s sidewalks and alleyways. To ensure that the cats remained healthy, Lion erected some 150,000 cat-food stands that are filled by a team of community volunteers.

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, deputy mayor of Jerusalem, commented how instituting Saturday night trash collection across the city has significantly impacted the holy city’s cleanliness standards. Moreover, she added, Lion is immediately responsive to mess, if pointed out to him. She said sometimes she will see an area in need of cleaning. She’ll snap a picture on her phone and send it to him with the coordinates. Almost instantly, he will send a team out to take care of the problem.

Lion has also secured a NIS 200m. – NIS 50m. per year for the next four years – investment to repave roads and upgrade sidewalks with stones, benches and trash receptacles.

The city has also issued a poster, summarizing the city’s accomplishments in improving cleanliness in the city:

Jerusalem’s accomplishments in cleaning up the city

The poster says:

In 2019 more than NIS 200 million has been invested in cleaning up Jerusalem.

We’ve added 600 sanitation workers.
We’ve operated 50 street-cleaning machines and 30 cars to deal with trash.
We’re sweeping streets by hand daily in the neighborhoods and are cleaning the streets daily.
We’ve begun collecting trash on Saturday nights throughout the city.
We’ve begun collecting tree cuttings and other landscaping waste every Tuesday.
We’ve installed 650 underground trash receptacles.
We’ve cleared away 2,500 abandoned cars.
We’ve established new public restrooms.

After a year in office, Mayor Moshe Lion was interviewed on the main national Israeli news program of “Kan”. The main title of the interview, as can be seen in the picture below was: Jerusalem Mayor announces (paraphrased from Hebrew): “let’s do more cleaning, less ‘vision-talk'”.

Jerusalem Mayor announces: “let’s do more cleaning, less ‘vision-talk'”

Let’s hope that the city and the Little Prince continue to make Jerusalem a cleaner city. Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and the Rayne Foundation for their support of the Little Prince.

Naomi Roff2020-01-10T21:15:55+00:00December 19th, 2019|Blog, The Little Prince - Cleaning Jerusalem Together|

Semi-Annual Meeting of Healthcare Cultural Competency Coordinators at the JICC

For the past three years, we have organized a semi-annual meeting of Healthcare Cultural Competency Coordinators. Most of the Coordinators are from Jerusalem, but the meeting is open to Coordinators from throughout the country. This meeting was held on December 4, 2019 at the JICC’s offices on Mount Zion.

This meeting focused on two subjects: our own Living Safer, Living Longer project, and the experience of the Haifa-based Bnei Zion Hospital in assimilating principles of cultural competence in the hospital.

Aliza Shabo-Hayut, director of the Living Safer, Living Longer project, gave a short introduction and explained the connection to cultural competency. She explained that it was imperative that the project be culturally competent for it to succeed, since it teaches home safety and preventive health to the elderly and young families through awareness-raising and individual mentoring by volunteers, and the ways to achieve this are laden with culturally sensitive issues in different populations, especially in the Haredi and Arab sectors. Currently, the project operates only in Jerusalem, but the model can be copied and replicated throughout the country.

Aliza explains about Living Safer, Living Longer

Making the project fully culturally competent was not an easy task, it essentially meant needing to create and develop 3 different projects – one for the ‘general’ Jewish population, one for the Haredi population, and one for the Arab population. Content (from flyers and posters to explanatory materials for lectures and mentoring sessions) and training methods were specifically tailored for each group (appropriate for Haredi, Arab as well as ‘general’ Jewish beneficiaries), as were training aides, explanatory materials. Volunteers needed to be recruited and trained in each group as well. Checklists of what the volunteers were looking for in the homes were also adapted to both the age (elderly vs. young families) and group with which they were associated. For example, chains to secure hot water urns (used on Shabbat and often the cause of burns among Haredi children) are distributed in Haredi families, whereas there is no need for this in other groups.

We also welcomed special guests from the Bnei Zion hospital in Haifa, who shared their experience of assimilating cultural competence in the hospital. Orly Altman, a general nurse and the Cultural Competency Coordinator at Bnei Zion, and Ragda Halabi, a midwife at the hospital, told how the project began and gave a short lecture.

Orly said that the first step was to establish a steering committee for cultural competency that consisted of representatives from a variety of communities, with a goal to train agents of change to promote cultural competency that promotes mutual respect and human dignity. The committee created a document with important information about each community, including the rules of “do’s and don’ts,” and each member of the committee built a training session about the community to which he or she belongs, and chose how to present it.

Orly, presenting her experience at Bnei Zion Hospital in Haifa

Ragda, a member of the Druze community, introduced us to the principles of the Druze religion: the life cycle and different rituals, the status of women, visitng the sick, escorting Druze religious women for medical exams and more.

The meeting was fascinating and the participants learned more about Druze culture and religion and their connections to health.

Thanks to Michal Schuster for organizing the meetings. And of course, many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation, for its continued support of Cultural Competency over the past decade.

orna2019-12-23T07:32:24+00:00December 15th, 2019|Blog, Cultural Competence in Health Services, Living Safer Living Longer|

MiniActive at the Gishurim Conference

On December 3, 2019, our Intisar, Director of MiniActive, led a round table about MiniActive at the annual Gishurim Conference. This conference is organized each year for those involved with community mediation centers throughout Israel. We’ve been among the organizers of this conference since its beginning.

MiniActive as an example of communication between residents and the municipality in Jerusalem

The conference included a number of lectures, as well as round-table sessions with a number of initiatives. Intisar spoke about the history and rationale of MiniActive, and how it has gained the successes it has.

She also emphasized 5 main principles that guide MiniActive:

The basis of work needs to start from the bottom-up, from the grassroots toward the local authority.
Small success in a short time period (no more than 3 weeks) are important to the process of building confidence and trust.
It is important to choose one precise issue to take care of, preferably in the local area, in order to be able to follow-up and to demonstrate success.
PR as a way to pressure the local authority into action and to raise public awareness about the problem. Traditional and social media as effective ways to document the problem and provide visual messaging to officials who can help solve the problem.
It is important to publish “before” and “after” photos to the public (via social media) to demonstrate success and to build confidence in the initiative.

Here’s a post (in Hebrew) about the conference, which gathered 500 from all around Israel who are involved in community mediation centers.

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and to Natan for their support of MiniActive!

Naomi Roff2020-01-10T20:44:39+00:00December 13th, 2019|Blog, MiniActive|

Palestinian Kosher Cooking and Tolerance Week, on the Times of Israel Blog

One of our events during Tolerance Week was a workshop on Palestinian cooking. It was hosted by our good friend, Dr. Diana Lipton, and was fully Kosher, to enable those who often aren’t able to enjoy this type of cooking because they observe Jewish dietary laws. Afterward Diana wrote about her experience in her blog in the Times of Israel. Here’s where she described her experience, and described Tolerance Week:

Food bridging cultures

Feeling Hungry in Jerusalem

Last week was the fourth annual Jerusalem Tolerance Week, timed to coincide with International Tolerance Day. Not surprisingly, many of the events organized by institutions and individuals in partnership with the Jerusalem Inter-Cultural Center (JICC) revolved around food.

Most of the food-related activities involved participating restaurants, but one of them took place in our apartment. Our event was called Kosher Palestinian Home Cooking. We invited Magda, a wonderful cook who also cleans for our friends Naomi and Jonathan, to prepare a range of traditional Palestinian dishes that kosher-keeping Jews could eat. Magda bought all the products at Rami Levy, a supermarket where all the products are kosher, and prepared the food in Naomi and Jonathan’s kosher kitchen in pots that belonged to them or were purchased specially.

Displaying the wonderful tastes of Palestinian cooking

Through the JICC’s Tolerance Week advertising, mainly on social media, we invited anyone who, because of dietary restrictions or mere lack of opportunity, could not enjoy Palestinian home cooking, to come to our apartment and make up for lost time. We promised wonderful food, an opportunity to meet the cook and to hear about her life and the role of food within it, and live music!

Ahead of the event, a few people asked me if I was worried that people would simply come to eat free food and leave. I wasn’t worried, and as it turned out, I didn’t need to be. As these photos attest, the 60 plus people who came to our apartment last Thursday night, most of whom we didn’t know and didn’t know each other, certainly had an appetite for Magda’s amazing food, but they were hungry for a lot more.

You can read her entire column here.

Accompanied by a little music as well

Thank you Diana, and thank you for a wonderful event!

And, of course, many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation, the Natan Fund and the Schusterman Family Foundation for helping us to advance tolerance in Jerusalem through Tolerance Week.

Naomi Roff2019-12-20T18:39:58+00:00December 10th, 2019|Blog, Promoting Tolerance in Jerusalem|

MiniActive – Acting on Cleaning Up East Jerusalem, on Problems Big and Small

This is much more than a picture of a wall. It is the picture of a huge success for MiniActive in the A-thory / Abu Tor neighborhood.

This is more than just a wall

For years, there was no wall. It was an open space, which looked like this.

Makeshift garbage dump in A-Thory / Abu-Tor

Since February 2019, MiniActive has been working to clean up a garbage dump in the neighborhood. It was filled with household waste, which is a huge problem in East Jerusalem.

For lack of a better place, residents threw their garbage here

Another problem was that, technically, the land on which the garbage was dumped was private property, not public land, so the Municipality was technically not responsible to clean it up. However, only the Municipality had the tools and equipment to clean it up properly, and it is their responsibility to provide sanitation services to residents. MiniActive held a number of meetings with those responsible to work out a solution. Residents also wrote three letters, demonstrating their own commitment to help keep the area clean in the future. These letters included:

A commitment to make sure the area remains clean, and ensuring that residents won’t throw their garbage there.
A commitment to put garbage receptacles beside every building.
A commitment not to burn garbage or garbage receptacles (which is sometimes done in East Jerusalem as a last-ditch effort to get rid of garbage) and that they’ll report to the Municipality every time garbage is not collected regularly.

After two weeks of cleaning up, better but still not completed

The process of cleaning up the area began in mid-September, and lasted until the end of October. Here’s a Facebook post from the beginning of work in mid-September:

Here’s a later Facebook post, from the middle of work in early October.

In November, the owner added the wall, to prevent further dumping.

Ensuring a clean area

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and to Natan for their support of MiniActive!

Naomi Roff2019-12-27T08:51:22+00:00December 3rd, 2019|Blog, MiniActive|

Tolerance Week 2019 – Continuing a Tradition

There are some things you don’t learn in school – backgammon, capoeira, Debka glue dances and rap. – and certainly not with neighboring schools, [especially between Jewish and Arab schools]. This week we [Kulna] held a special event at the Natural History Museum, Tolerant Double Jerusalem, attended by 100 students, 10th graders from the Comprehensive High School in Beit Safafa and Keshet High School. We hope and believe that this activity will lead to more joint activities during the year between the two schools and other schools in east and west Jerusalem….The event took place as part of Jerusalem Tolerance Week 2019, proving yet again that Jerusalem is the world capital of tolerance.

This is how the Kulna organization summed up one of their events – their Jerusalem Double backgammon tournament – during the 4th annual Tolerance Week in Jerusalem. The week included 50 events in the week surrounding International Tolerance Day (November 16). Events took place between November 14 – 24. Click here for a full list of events. You can find the full list in three languages on the Jerusalem Tolerance Website.

This year, 50 events took place throughout Jerusalem as part of the Tolerance Week, and each one was attended by 20 to 40 people. The events were as diverse as Jerusalemites – tours, lectures, community bonfires, home hospitality that included Kosher Palestinian food, the first conference of Jerusalem’s Tolerance Coalition, and more.

Palestinian Kosher cooking

Community centers also participated widely, and, with assistance from the Municipal Mediation Center, 12 events were held in different neighborhoods. In addition, there was a “What a Dish Tells” festival, in which restaurants throughout the city served a “tolerance dish”, and took part in raising awareness of the issue in the public discourse. This festival was even featured on the Jerusalem Municipality’s Facebook page:

A number of tours took residents to behind the scenes in the Arab neighborhood of Beit Safafa

And a tour about Haredi – non-Haredi relations in Rehavia and Sha’are Hesed:

Holding events in the public space, and recruiting restaurants and businesses in Jerusalem, helped us to reach audiences outside our ‘usual suspects’ and create more of a presence in the city.

‘Pleased to Meet You’ event at the First Station

Schools also took part in Tolerance Week. Below, for example, the Kulna organization organized a special event that included backgammon, capoeira, Debka dancing and rap for Jewish and Arab students from the Beit Safafa and Keshet high schools.

And in closing:

Want to see more pictures? Here’s the week’s photo album, from the Jerusalem Tolerance Facebook page:

And on the Jerusalem Tolerance Website you may find the Photo Gallery of the week!

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation, the Natan Fund and the Schusterman Family Foundation for helping us to advance tolerance in Jerusalem.

talalafi2019-12-20T18:32:17+00:00December 1st, 2019|Blog, Promoting Tolerance in Jerusalem|

Monthly Archives: December 2019