Yad L’Achim Inundated with Calls for Help After TV Broadcast Marking 70 Years of Rescue Work
December 15, 2020
The stage at the Yad L'Achim Salute evening
A special television program saluting 70 years of Yad L’Achim’s rescue work, which aired last Wednesday on Channel 20, has sparked an unprecedented wave of calls for help to the organization’s hotline.
The program, broadcast from Binyenei Ha’uma in Yerushalayim on 24 Kislev, between 9 p.m. and 1 a.m., was planned to coincide with Erev Chanukah in order to signal the light and hope that Yad L’Achim brings to lost Jews.
As part of the broadcast, a variety of panel talks was held that included heads of the rescue organization, media people who are familiar with Yad L’Achim’s activities, social workers, women who have adopted survivors of Arab villages, a member of Yad L’Achim’s legal team, noted lecturers, Yad L’Achim security personnel, and rescued women and children – some of whom covered their faces out of concern for their safety.
Between the panel talks, singers Aharon Razael and Yishai Lapidot performed songs of hope and faith, which they said symbolized what Yad L’Achim does year ’round – bring hope to those in the most dire of circumstances.
The highpoint of the evening was a number of segments broadcast by Channel 20 correspondents who accompanied Yad L’Achim security people on rescue missions. One of them showed a Jewish woman and her children in immediate danger of their lives, being rescued from a hostile village in the heart of the Shomron. Another told the story of Michal, a Jewish woman who agreed to show her face and share what she had endured under her oppressive Muslim husband.
“The day I told him I wanted a divorce, he cut me with a knife and threatened to kill me because, he said, marriage is for life,” she testified tearfully.
Another segment that moved viewers dealt with the stories of mentors who’d helped children raised as Arabs return to the Jewish people. We see one patiently teaching Yossi, who was rescued from a village with his mother, to learn to read Hebrew. At first, Yossi struggles to make out the words, with his heavy Arab accent; but just a year later, he is called to the Torah at the Kosel and reads like an expert.
The final segment shows the Yad L’Achim hotline in action, and the desperate calls for assistance that come from women pleading for help to put an end to their torturous lives.
Operators at Yad L’Achim say that they’ve been inundated by calls since the program appeared. “In the hours that the program aired, we received more than 1,000 calls. Some came from precious Jews who decided that they wanted to partner with us in the great and rare mitzvah of Pidyon Shvuyim. Some wanted to offer assistance and support. But the most important calls, from our perspective, came from those asking for assistance, from people who know up close women in similar distress. To our great joy, this wave of telephone calls just keeps coming. Every day we are inundated with calls for help from people who learned about our activities via the broadcast.”
As one of the organization’s leaders put it: “This special salute exposed viewers to activities that, by their nature, are normally done far from the public eye. At this time, we are already working on new cases that reached us in the wake of the broadcast and are full of hope and prayer that we will be able to bring these women and children their own private Chanukah miracle and light.”
To watch a rerun of the broadcast, press here.
