Thursday, December 14, 2023 • 5 PM Israel Time| 10 AM EST
Maayan Hoffman, Deputy CEO - Strategy & Innovation for the Jerusalem Post, speaks with American volunteer Drea Rice, who visited Israel and volunteered at Pitchon-Lev after the war began and who will be returning to Israel later this month to help Pitchon-Lev once again.
Drea Rice was raised as a Christian, became disillusioned with her faith, and converted to Judaism in May 2018. She made her first visit to Israel in 2018 and, following her conversion, returned in 2021 on a Birthright trip.
After the war broke out in October, Drea was contacted by Birthright, which put out a call requesting alumni to mobilize and come to Israel as soon as possible. Drea says that volunteering with Pitchon-Lev was unlike any other volunteering experience she has ever had. “Walking in the first day, I was impressed that they were able to stand up this logistics center in such a short amount of time to respond to the needs of displaced civilians who don’t have really anything that they had before they had to move. They had to turn over their entire lives because of this war.”
Rice and the other volunteers worked on the assembly line, packaging donations of food for displaced civilians. “The sincerity of the people who were managing shone through. I saw that this truly was an organization that was responding to the needs of individuals who had been impacted, and they’re putting their entire heart and soul into it.” She adds that she found the interactions with local Israeli volunteers especially meaningful and says the entire experience was tremendously moving.
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What distinguishes Pitchon-Lev from other charitable organizations? Explains Rice: “It is a holistic, multifaceted program, or series of programs that seeks to break down the intergenerational cycle of poverty. It’s multi-pronged, and it’s over an extended period of time.” She cites the seven-year program that assists and supports at-risk youth, the rights utilization program, and the passion of the Pitchon-Lev team. “It is an incredible organization,” she says.
Pitchon-Lev provides food parcels to 6,000 families in need on a weekly basis, including single people, the disabled, the elderly, new immigrants, families with many children, the unemployed, employed persons, single-parent families, and single soldiers. Yet Pitchon-Lev is far more than an aid organization. It is a field organization, providing direct assistance daily to those in need.
Since the outbreak of the war on October 7, Pitchon-Lev has been at the forefront of providing emergency assistance to Israel’s security forces and survivors of the Hamas terror attack and established a logistics center for receiving and distributing donations of aid for security forces and evacuees. The Knesset has designated Pitchon-Lev as a recommended agency for donations both from Israel and abroad during the war. This is the first time in the history of the Knesset that it has designated a charitable organization in such a fashion.
Pitchon-Lev has been working in collaboration with the Israeli government to establish a law that will establish a national authority for the fight against poverty that will better address the needs of the 1.8 million Israelis living below the poverty line. This epitomizes Pitchon-Lev – raising the issue of poverty and speaking up for those who are unable to speak on their own behalf.
Since the beginning of the war, Pitchon-Lev has been one of the organizations standing at the forefront of the Israeli home front, in addition to continuing to assist people in need in breaking the cycle of poverty.
This article was written in cooperation with Pitchon-Lev.