Thursday, December 7, 2023 • 7 PM Israel Time| 12 AM EST
Maayan Hoffman, Deputy CEO - Strategy & Innovation for the Jerusalem Post, speaks with Eli Cohen, CEO of Pitchon-Lev, one of Israel’s foremost humanitarian organizations that assists over 160,000 individuals and families annually. The organization, which was founded in 1988, strives to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty that exists in Israel. Children born into disadvantaged families in Israel today, he says, have a 78% chance of living their entire lives in poverty. Pitchon-Lev wants to break that cycle, and its holistic activities provide a broad spectrum of proven solutions to reach this goal.
Pitchon-Lev provides food parcels to 6,000 families in need on a weekly basis, including single people, the disabled, the elderly, new immigrants, families with many children, the unemployed, employed persons, single-parent families, and single soldiers. Yet Pitchon-Lev is far more than an aid organization. It is actually a field organization, providing direct assistance daily to those in need.
Hoffman and Cohen discuss how Pitchon-Lev helps break the cycle of poverty, including its centers in Rishon LeZion and Carmiel that provide food, clothing, and appliances; rights centers that assist aid recipients with information, guidance, and direction on housing, health, handling debts employee rights, and legal assistance; and its educational empowerment initiatives for youth that assists at-risk-youth from the socio-geographical periphery.
Since the outbreak of the war on October 7, Pitchon-Lev has been at the forefront of providing emergency assistance to Israel’s security forces and survivors of the Hamas terror attack and established a logistics center for receiving and distributing donations of aid for security forces and evacuees. The Knesset has designated Pitchon-Lev as a recommended agency for donations both from Israel and abroad during the war. This is the first time in the history of the Knesset that it has designated a charitable organization in such a fashion.
Pitchon Lev has been working in collaboration with the Israeli government to establish a law that will establish a national authority for the fight against poverty that will better address the needs of the 1.8 million Israelis living below the poverty line. This epitomizes Pitchon-Lev – raising the issue of poverty and speaking up for those who are unable to speak on their own behalf.