Linda and Murray Laulicht, second and third from left, visit the site of the proposed center in Ofakim that will bear their name. With them are, from left, Yehudit Kirschbaum, director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s after-school programs; Ofakim officials Aryeh Azulai, mayor; Moshe Yosef, city engineer; Avram Ilgi, welfare director; and Ari Beitan, education director; Amir Shacham, director of Israel operations for UJC MetroWest; and Sigal Drori, director of the UJC MetroWest Partnership 2000 program in Ofakim. Photos by Arik Rosenblum
February 21, 2008
Thanks to a $1 million contribution from the Laulichts of West Orange, a new center will offer children who live in poverty in the Israeli city of Ofakim a wide variety of social services.
With the Laulichts’ assistance, and the collaboration of the Israeli government and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Murray and Linda Laulicht Center is scheduled to open by mid-2009. It will offer after-school educational programs, recreational activities, and counseling sessions. It will even have a kitchen where lessons in cooking and nutrition will be taught to parents and young people alike.
For Murray Laulicht, a veteran volunteer and former president of the MetroWest Jewish federation, and Linda, an active leader in her own right who will join the JDC board, underwriting the center is an opportunity to address serious problems that put many of the 8,700 young people of Ofakim at high risk of dangerous behavior.
“MetroWest and I are very much concerned about issues relating to poverty and nutrition and in some cases hunger in Israel,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Florida. “It is an issue that has resonated for many years.”
Ofakim is linked through the Partnership 2000 program with United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ and receives a great deal of attention from Amir Shacham, director of Israel operations for UJC MetroWest.
Linda and Murray Laulicht, left, visit a classroom in Ofakim in October 2007 together with, from left, Ofakim Mayor Aryeh Azulai and Sigal Drori, director of the UJC MetroWest Partnership 2000 program in Ofakim.
There is a lot of poverty in the Negev town, said Shacham. “Many times the parents are not at home. There are a lot of olim, immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union with a lot of immigration and absorption problems. There are broken families. It is clear that the families do not get enough support for the children to become normal students.”
Laulicht said the MetroWest relationship with Ofakim actually began when he was the federation’s president-elect in 1996. “It had the highest rate of unemployment of any city in Israel. That was the challenge we faced. For many years we have poured a lot of money into Ofakim, and we have seen some very good results.”
Those results may be expedited once the center is completed in June 2009.
According to Laulicht, the building’s classrooms will be used for a three-times-a-week supplemental school program running four hours a day for 50 children. Another area will be used twice a week for 100 high school students for similar after-school programs. “We will add to that each year until there are 2,000 students and 200 teachers involved.”
“This a huge collaboration project,” said Laulicht, as he ran off a list of credits, including MetroWest, the JDC, the Ofakim municipal government, and the Israeli Ministries of Welfare and Education.
The Laulicht center will also give the local youngsters “meals, some social interaction, some physical activity, and help with homework. Parents will be involved with teachers to learn how to cook and what to cook as a way to get parents and children to interact,” said Laulicht.
“We will give them lifelong lessons in issues related to nutrition and health. We will be helping them educationally with schoolwork. There will be a counseling component for those with psychological problems. There will be a socialization component. Ofakim has come out of the depths with our help. Hopefully this will continue the process, and it may create a model for other communities to do this as well through their Partnership 2000 programs,” he added.
“It is going to change lives,” said Shacham. “Right now these kids don’t have a structure that allows them to have normal lives. They have broken families and broken homes and a lot of problems within their families. The current after-school programs are almost nothing, and in the afternoon the kids are out in the streets. This thing will be like their second home.”
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