By Susan C. Levine, Co-Chair, Israel Granting Program 2008 – 2011

My New Year’s visit to Israel was highlighted with an NCJW coincidence. The trip was centered on a medical conference where my husband was the keynote speaker, so I was free to share time with Shari Eshet, Director of NCJW’s Israel Office.

This bonus visit to Israel proved again that when you want to really understand a community, there is no substitute for “home hospitality,” where family and home brings the caring world together.

Shari and I visited the NCJW Israel Granting Program project Neve Michael, a children’s village located in Pardes Hanna, which serves children from all over the country who arrive under traumatic circumstances.

From the moment I entered the 7-acre children’s village, I felt a calm and relaxed atmosphere that was immediately validated upon meeting my guide, Hava Levine, the village development director.

Neve Michael is a family-centered village filled with children living in family settings. These children, torn from their own homes due to abuse, violence or neglect, are welcomed into their Neve Michael substitute families that help to make these difficult transitions as comfortable and loving as possible. Our NCJW project support provides the immediate necessities a youngster might need when abruptly removed from their home.

The children, ages 3-18, are welcomed into their new homes by the Neve Michael staff with a nourishing, loving and empowering embrace giving power to the idea of “home hospitality.” 

From healthy meals (no sweets at lunch!) to the live petting farm for children to show and share their loving feelings; from caring house parents to private music lessons from members of the Israel Philharmonic, these “rescued” children are surrounded by as close to normal home life as is possible.

My insider experience at Neve-Michael only inflated my already proud feelings of representing the NCJW Israel Granting Program, a program that provides invaluable resources to children whose adults have betrayed them and who now are living at a place like Neve Michael: a home-like experience with adults who are tender and adoring.

During our final Israeli evening we shared a family Shabbat dinner at the Jerusalem home of the medical conference’s host. Imagine my surprise when the woman seated next to me, Nechama Moshieff, mother-in-law of our host, told me that in 1951 she received an NCJW scholarship to New York’s Bank Street College!

After studying in New York, Nechama returned to Jerusalem and worked for many years in the Department of Education at Hebrew University, where Nechama watched the NCJW HIPPY program grow, develop and reach a world-wide audience.

From the Neve Michael youngsters studying for their future, to reminiscing with Nechama about her student days at Bank Street College, my short Israel visit filled with home hospitality highlighted NCJW’s never-ending commitment to education and empowerment!