THE CENTRAL BRITISH FUND FOR WORLD JEWISH RELIEF
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Mission Statement
World Jewish Relief is the UK Jewish community's international development and humanitarian agency. We tackle Jewish poverty and reach beyond our community. We create opportunities for those out of work to become self-reliant, we bring dignity to the elderly, assistance to refugees and we respond to international disasters.
About This Cause
We support older Jewish people living in poverty in eastern Europe. We meet practical needs with food, medicine, health care, home care and home repair. We meet emotional needs by combatting loneliness, creating community and promoting active ageing. Our pioneering dementia care programme is transforming the lives of people living with dementia and their families. Over the past year, our programmes have reached 13,462 older people; including those who lived through World War II and the Holocaust, and non-Jews who saved Jewish lives during that period. Many of the older people we support lost their life savings when communism collapsed. They now live hand-to-mouth, ekeing out meagre pensions of around £50 a month and having to routinely choose between eating, heating or medicine. With state healthcare virtually non-existent, many older people live in fear of needing medical treatment and increasingly self-isolate in order to minimse risk of illness and injury. We focus on supporting people who are the most vulnerable; people living alone with little or no family support and people living with chronic health problems, a disability or dementia. Partnering with local Jewish community and welfare centres called Heseds, we assess individuals’ needs and provide holistic support. For older people struggling to make ends meet, we provide pre-loaded bank cards to contribute to the cost of food and medicine. In addition, we supply hot meals and/or food packages as well as fuel, blankets and clothing during winter. We fund glasses, hearing aids, cataract operations and mobility equipment such as walking sticks, wheelchairs or zimmer frames. We also provide blood pressure monitors, glucometers and diabetes test-strips, giving older people the ability to monitor their own health conditions and avoid potentially grave consequences. We fund exercise classes and other activities to bring the community together, often with a Jewish focus. For more isolated people, who can suffer from loneliness, we arrange local ‘Warm Home’ gatherings to encourage socialisation. Transport is provided to people with mobility issues, including a helping hand from a friendly driver. If leaving the house is impossible, we fund befrienders to make regular visits. With dementia still a relatively unknown and poorly understood condition in the countries we work in, our team has drawn on expertise from Jewish Care to lead a pioneering dementia awareness and dementia care training programme. This ground-breaking work has reached beyond the Jewish community and attracted participants across health and social care sectors. In Belarus our approach has been incorporated into government policies. In Kyiv, our staff have been invited to instruct university students studying to be social workers. We have trained over a thousand care workers and medical professionals, as well as numerous family carers, teaching them to take a person-centered approach to dementia care, leading to vast improvements in quality of life. We run dementia day care services in Ukraine (Kyiv and Kharkiv), Chisinau in Moldova and Minsk in Belarus. We arrange support groups for relatives and respite for family members. We work to ensure older people with mobility issues can live in dignity, in their own homes, for as long as possible. Our army of trained home care workers cook, clean, shop and provide personal care. They also give much needed companionship to isolated older people. Whilst many older people in the former Soviet Union were given their own apartments under the communist regime, they have now been neglected for decades, resulting in dangerous and dilapidated living conditions. We repair homes to make living conditions safe and to enable older people to live in warmth and dignity. World Jewish Relief works in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova and Rwanda where many people are unemployed, living in poverty or impacted by the legacy of the holocaust. They struggle to feed their children and elderly parents; many in the former Soviet Union countries rely on limited welfare support. By helping people to develop job-specific skills, giving them the confidence to find work and then guiding them into appropriate employment, we create opportunities that can change lives. These programmes enable people to support their families with food, medicine, education, a safe living environment and therefore a route out of poverty. People who gain employment are able to support themselves, their parents who might otherwise rely on welfare and meagre pensions, and their children. Our ‘back to work’ courses give people the skills and confidence to enter - or get back into - the job market. This includes everything from learning how to write a CV to assessing participants’ life goals. Where relevant, vocational training is offered in order to develop practical skills. Our employment advisors work with each person to identify what’s right for them and then support them through the job finding process. They liaise with local businesses to create opportunities and match-make individuals with jobs. We also have projects in Rwanda where we help young farmers, many orphaned by the genocide and/or HIV/AIDS, to become modern agricultural entrepreneurs, significantly and sustainably increase their income and make a difference in their communities. We are doing this by building the agronomic and business capacity of participants including links to commercial buyers and markets as well as training in techniques for growing profitable crops such as watermelons. Every year, emergencies, like floods, famines, earthquakes and wars, put millions of lives in danger. With Britain’s Jewish community behind us, we respond to these disasters by providing emergency aid as well as supporting longer term recovery efforts. In the past five years, we have helped over 165,000 people in 14 countries to survive and recover from life-changing events. In March 2019 Tropical Cyclone Idai devastated Central Mozambique and parts of Zimbabwe and Malawi, killing more than 1,000 people and affecting 3 million, making it one of the worst tropical cyclones to hit Africa on record. Extreme winds, Tsunami-like waves, and storm surges battered the coastal areas of Mozambique and flooded the region, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes and two million acres of crops. With the support of the British Jewish community we launched a rapid humanitarian response, partnering with a trusted local NGO, ADDP and ensuring we were amongst the first to access international emergency aid stocks. We have distributed emergency aid to 19,800 people. Our support has included shelter kits and cooking equipment for 6000 people; essential items such as mosquito nets, jars for water storage, pots and plates to a further 6000 people; dignity and Hygiene kits to 300 female headed households including sanitary products and underwear; food packages including rice, beans, flour, oil and sugar to 6000 people. Following our initial emergency response we continue to work with the people impacted, drawing on our livelihoods expertise to help them recover and rebuild their lives, their homes and their businesses. We are supporting 11,250 people who lost their livelihoods in Cyclone Idai to rebuild their lives and become self-sufficient. Working with small farming clubs, we are providing access to seeds and livestock, infrastructure reconstruction such as water tanks, and technical support. This will help communities to grow back faster and stronger. All of our humanitarian responses are provided in partnership with capable local agencies who have passed our high standards of scrutiny. We believe local agencies know their communities, can access the most vulnerable people, understand the cultural context and will be there when international agencies have left. We focus our relief efforts on the provision of shelter, food and hygiene and our recovery efforts on the rebuilding of peoples’ livelihoods. We prioritise the needs of women who are particularly vulnerable post disaster. We support the increased provision of cash-transfers as a humanitarian response. We are members of The Start Network and the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief. We have a Special Consultative Status with UN ECOSOC and are signatories to the NGO/Red Cross Code of Conduct and the Charter for Change. The refugee story is close to home for many within the Jewish community and these experiences underpin our response to the current global crisis. In 2015/16 when millions were fleeing Syria, we provided emergency relief including shelter, food and medical care to camps in Greece. Since then we have run programmes giving Syrian refugee children access to education in Greece and Turkey, founded a Woman's Centre providing a safe space for psycho-social care and established a legal resource centre for unaccompanied minors in Athens. Our focus has now shifted to refugee employment support programmes, based on our expertise in running livelihood livelihood programmes in some of the world's poorest Jewish communities and beyond, as well as our founding history of helping Jewish refugees build a new life in Britain where jobs led to integration and the ability to make a positive contribution to society. In 2015 we created and began implementing the Specialist Training and Employment Programme (STEP) providing personalised support for refugees who have recently arrived in the UK, enabling them to gain regular and sustainable employment. The bespoke programme is adapted to each individual's needs and helps refugees gain language skills, qualifications and training, as well as providing one-to-one assistance in CV writing, interview skills, finding work or setting up their own business. Graduates of the programme have found work in a range of sectors including retail, hair and beauty, engineering, education, pharmacy and construction. We work closely with a number of employers to find suitable positions. STEP is delivered in partnership with Horton Housing Association, The Refugee Council, Coventry City Council, Business in the Community, The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network, Stand Up and Be Counted Theatre Company.