Naomi Roff | The Jerusalem Intercultural Center

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So far Naomi Roff has created 501 blog entries.

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|

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|

Cultural Competence Workshop at Herzfeld Geriatric Hospital

Herzfeld Geriatric Rehabilitation Medical Center, operated by the Clalit Health Services, is located in the southern town of Gadera and serves populations in the Gadera / Rehovot area. As part of the hospital’s efforts to integrate cultural competency into the hospital, we were invited to lead Cultural Competency workshops for staff members.

Cultural Competency workshop at Herzfeld Geriatric Hospital

The workshop, which took place on November 21, included staff from all professions in the hospital – doctors, nurses, paramedical and administration – who shared with us the unique challenges of caring for an elderly population, often for a long time. Patients from different cultural groups come to the hospital, often accompanied by foreign workers. Family involvement is also a key factor, as are the physical, mental, and cognitive difficulties of the older people. The staff itself is also very diverse, sometimes assisting patients or families from his or her cultural group in bridging cultural gaps. On the other hand, treating a person from one’s own group can also cause conflicts and dilemmas. One participant told of how she recently gave birth, and in her culture it is customary to give money to the mother right after giving birth. One of the patients approached her during a shift and gave her money. What should she have done? On the one hand, she’s not allowed to receive money or gifts from patients. On the other – this was a cultural convention and it is difficult to change older people’s habits, especially in this type of situation.

In the workshop, we talked about our key cultural values and those of the patients. We tried to identify them in hospital situations, find ways to bridge the gaps, and most importantly – try to interpret behavior, which may at first seem strange or even irritating to us, positively.

Discussing important cases and different cultural situations

In order to understand worldviews, practices and health considerations of a patient, dialogue is a must. Such a conversation, which is based on asking open questions, is especially important when there are gaps between the caregiver and the patient. After watching a short tutorial video produced by the JICC, the participants shared how they identified with the cases where different people in the room have different agendas, and it is the caregiver’s job is to reveal them, and to consider them when communicating with the patient and those accompanying him.

As part of the discussion, we also talked about cases where cultural competence is not the correct or desired response – cases in which adapting to one patient will hurt another (family member or staff member), or when it would cause unethical medical behavior (such as delivering bad news to the patient instead of his or her family, as is customary in some cultures).

The workshop opened up new horizons for all. One participant commented:

We would like to thank you for the great privilege of participating in the fascinating workshop you delivered today for staff at the Herzfeld Geriatric Rehabilitation Hospital Rehabilitation. The workshop was instructive, enlightening, empowering and interesting. Your excellent delivery, the accessibility of the tools you taught and the vast amount of knowledge you have, along with the extraordinary sensitivity and humor will accompany us and all the participants of the workshop! Participants felt comfortable in taking part and in sharing, and expressed great interest in this important topic and were thirsty for the great amount of information they received. Looking forward to the [next] long workshop.

In our next workshop we’ll work with a professional actress, who will help participants to practice the tools they learned, including through role playing.

Many thanks to Herzfeld Medical Center for organizing the meeting and assistance in preparing the content adapted to their needs.

Naomi Roff2019-11-29T13:52:21+00:00November 28th, 2019|Cultural Competence, Cultural Competence in Health Services|

The Little Prince – Building Long-term Partnerships

In the “Little Prince” program, when we began two years ago with a host of residents’ initiatives, our goal was to make Jerusalem clean. But an equally important goal was to establish a genuine, mutual and active partnership with the Jerusalem Municipality and its various departments. And today, it’s actually happening!

After much work by members of the Little Prince, and slowly weaving ongoing and long-lasting relationships with municipal officials and professionals, we, along with city representatives, built a number of forums in which residents and municipal officials meet to discuss issues, advance common agendas, and solve problems, as well as collaborate in thinking, planning and carrying out additional plans. We’re talking about partnerships with senior-level officials, with residents from many neighborhoods …. a truly exciting moment.

Forums of residents and professionals, building long-term partnerships

During the summer vacation, a broad forum of ultra-Orthodox residents, representatives from all neighborhoods throughout the city, met with the senior level officials from the Operations Administration that included the regional manager, the coordinator of the citywide objective, division managers and their staff, district managers, the manager of the 106 hotline, director of public participation from the municipality, senior managers from the Community Administration, and more.

After the summer vacation, a similar forum was held by residents of the ‘general’ Jewish sector (religious and secular Jews) with senior representatives from every division: Operations Administration, the Culture Society, and Sport Administration, the Community Administration, and the for Service Quality Authority.

Numerous forums, targeting different problems

For those who say that there is nothing to be excited about from two meetings, we can say that in light of these two meetings, there have already been two work meetings in each of the forums, one with the Sanitation Division and one with the Policing and Enforcement Division. All the meetings had a nice atmosphere, were held in a professional manner, and discussions stayed on point. Both ‘sides’ asked questions and received information, raised ideas to advance solutions, thoughts and discussions were shared, needs were raised and initiatives were proposed. Admittedly, this is not a common perception of meetings between residents and municipal officials.

We are currently setting up a Forum for Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, which must be built with the utmost sensitivity to regarding both residents and municipal officials.

Building a partnership of this kind is a fascinating process that requires both sides to change their perceptions of the other, which have taken root and now it is time to change: Replacing perception of waste, inefficiency, annoyances and complaining to one of trust, giving each other credit, mutuality respect and responsibility, and professionalism.

The residents of Jerusalem and the municipal officials are gaining experience in a long-term partnership process on “difficult” issues of sanitation, supervision and gardening, which has never taken place before in the city.

Thanks to the Director of the Operations Administration, who opened the door, and to Mayor Lion who is fully supportive.

Here’s a post (in Hebrew) that originally appeared in the Little Prince – Cleaning Up Jerusalem Together Facebook group in July about the forum for Haredi residents. Today the processes in the Haredi, ‘general’ Jewish and Palestinian sectors are continuing to develop and gain momentum…

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and the Rayne Foundation for their support of the Little Prince!!!

Naomi Roff2019-11-22T13:17:06+00:00November 20th, 2019|Blog, Effective Activism, The Little Prince - Cleaning Jerusalem Together|

The Little Prince – Cleaning Up Jerusalem at a Top Priority in Jerusalem

It started as the dream of one – and now many – activists, and now it’s a top Jerusalem priority.

As Mayor Moshe Lion rounds up his first year in office and plans his second, we see that making Jerusalem clean covers 3 of his top 5 priorities. More importantly, it also means that a significant amount of municipal resources – hundreds of millions of shekels, will be invested toward this goal. According to this article, published in Jerusalem’s Kol Ha’ir local newspaper, top priorities include:

Increasing garbage collection on Saturday nights, both to be in-line with heightened usage on Saturdays, and to have 100 fewer garbage trucks on the roads on Sunday mornings, causing traffic congestion.
Addition of 600 more sanitation workers
Addition of 1,000 underground garbage receptacles, which are cleaner, take up less space, and hold more than the traditional above-ground kind.

Kol Ha’Ir article on the mayor’s 2019 – 2020 work plan

Kol Hakavod – congratulations to all the neighborhood activists throughout Jerusalem who helped this come about! Kol Hakavod to Municipal officials, professionals and city council members, who are our full partners in helping make Jerusalem a clean city.

Many thanks to the Rayne Foundation and the Jerusalem Foundation for their support for this program.

Naomi Roff2019-11-22T13:31:31+00:00November 12th, 2019|Blog, Effective Activism, The Little Prince - Cleaning Jerusalem Together|

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