TORONTO — IsraAID founder Shachar Zahavi, who has been working with Israeli humanitarian aid organizations since he was moved by images from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, said that “seeing their faces” inspired him to help the needy.
Shachar Zahavi [Sheri Shefa photo]
“I was finishing the army and the genocide in Rwanda was on TV, and I decided that I really wanted to do something,” said 32-year-old Zahavi, who was in Toronto earlier this year to meet with UJA Federation of Greater Toronto leaders and speak to students at York University about the work that the Israel Forum for International Humanitarian Aid (IsraAID) does.
“I hooked up with a couple of friends. We started fundraising and came up with a campaign to fundraise for a bag of rice for each child, and we were able to raise many tons of rice and that was my first relief mission. We sent food to the Congo where the refugees fled.”
After getting a taste of helping those in need, he said he spent the following years taking care of the logistics for many disaster relief programs led by a variety of Israeli NGOs.
But Zahavi felt that Israeli NGOs could be more effective if they were willing to work together.
“I thought, ‘Why don’t we get all the groups to sit down together and work together to help each other in terms of fundraising, [public relations], co-ordinating?’”
In 2001, Zahavi founded IsraAID, a co-ordinating body of Israeli and Jewish NGOs, as well as other groups based in Israel, that are active in development and relief work.
It has an annual operating budget of about $100,000, and donations come from private sources and federations.
He said that when a community is in need of aid,the directors of member organizations, including Save a Child’s Heart, F.I.R.S.T (Search & Rescue Teams), Jerusalem AIDS Project, the Israeli Friends of the Tibetan People and The Last Great Ape, gather to discuss what each organization can bring to the table in terms of expertise and fundraising capabilities.
“Each one benefits differently from our partnership, but I can say that everyone is in it for two reasons – really helping people in need and showing that Israel and the Jewish people have something to contribute to global issues,” Zahavi said.
In May, IsraAID sent a small team of doctors, nurses and water specialists to the Delta region of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, just four days after cyclone Nargis devastated the area, which killed some 130,000 people and left hundreds of thousands vulnerable to disease and starvation.
When tens of thousands of Georgians were displaced from their homes in South Ossetia after war broke out in August between Russian and Georgian forces, IsraAID established a project to provide hot meals to the refugees in and around Gori, the regional capital of central Georgia.
And most recently, IsraAID sent a team of post trauma experts to Mumbai following the terrorist attack that claimed the lives of more than 160 people to train locals how to support the victims of terror.
When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka in December 2004, IsraAID was one of the first organizations on the ground and within the first few weeks. “ We were the only western NGO who met twice with the prime minister of Sri Lanka,” Zahavi said.
“When something happens, we automatically commit, and I have to tell you that the Toronto federation – and I know a lot of federations – is one of the few that understands that.”
He said that when IsraAID committed to go to Myanmar and to Georgia, he called UJA Federation of Greater Toronto’s president and CEO Ted Sokolsky and within 24 hours, he approved the funding necessary to send a relief team to the affected regions.
“Ted really gets it,” Zahavi said, adding that it’s good to show the rest of the world that Israelis are among the first respondents.
Zahavi, who heads IsraAID on a volunteer basis and makes his living as an adviser on international aid issues and an assistant researcher on foreign aid at Tel Aviv University, said that helping the needy helps him put his own life in perspective.
“Most people that go to a developing country, some have mixed emotions, but I’ve never met someone who had the chance to go to a refugee camp after an emergency and wasn’t hooked on humanitarian aid,” he said.
“It is interesting to see [that] starving people or people who fled a war are more interested to see such a faraway country cares about them.”
