Help Gaza Families Survive

We can directly help families in Gaza who are being subjected to a genocidal campaign of deprivation. We are directly in contact with more than two dozen families who we support with direct transfers of funds and caring relationship. Everything is critically scarce and is inordinately expensive -- food, drinkable water, gas for cooking, all other necessities. A bag of flour costs ~$250. A tent costs $700. People are crammed 50 to a room in damaged housing with no water, no electricity. While it certainly is not a long term solution, money helps people meet their needs in the moment.

One of the families is a mother, Asmaa, with six children. They lived in a tiny apartment on the eastern side of Gaza which had been under lockdown for months. In November, when Israel assaulted Gaza with its ground invasion, she fled on foot with her six children to her sister's house, which also was destroyed. They all fled and were sheltering in Khan Yunes at a different relative's house. Now they are all in Rafah crammed into a stranger's home with dozens of other people. Asmaa went through having COVID in April. I was sending her $100 every month. She used to send me me pics of her kids with food she buys with the money I send her.  Now, it is an extreme life-and-death situation. I never know if I will hear from her again. Nonetheless, we are sending her as much as we can, several hundred dollars at a time. It sustains her and her kids.

Another woman is Malak, a single mother with two children. She called me by video call on Messenger during the week-long "humanitarian" ceasefire. She and her kids went back to where their house was. I could see it was a pile of broken rubble. Her daughter -- about seven or eight years old -- was clinging to her, looking kind of shy. I said a few nice things to her in the little Arabic that I know. She smiled. I waved to her on the phone. She didn't respond at all. Malak explained that her daughter is blind. Malak and her kids are also sheltering in Rafah. We send her a few hundred dollars when we can.

A number the people in Gaza who we send support to then help other people around them. I get the sense that in this dire emergency, people see that they must help each other -- and they do.

These families have directly asked me to help them. Thanks to the compassion and generosity of people like you, I have been able to send over $100,000 in the past few years, most of it in the past few horrific months. I usually send a few hundred dollars at a time to each family. I am retired and my needs are met, thank God. Whatever you donate will go 100% to these families in Gaza (minus ~3% which GFM takes as a fee, which is entirely legitimate).

I am a rabbi and feel great moral responsibility to help. I think of the "Righteous Among the Gentiles" during the Holocaust who could not stop the Nazi war machine because it was too powerful, but did all they could to help individual Jews and sometimes saved their lives -- and decades later I met those whose lives were saved. While we do what we can to try to stop this horrific killing and destruction, please join me in providing the most basic necessities of life to these totally innocent people in Gaza.