“Volunteers”

Volunteer (mitnadev, in Hebrew) is a person working in the Hesed gratuitously. It is difficult to imagine, but in our difficult time, when all the pensioners (and not only pensioners) experience extreme difficulties, there are such persons who has such a desire to take care of others.

Motives of becoming a volunteer are different.

Many of the volunteers are lonely people, who wish to communicate with others.

But in the volunteers’ movement there are also well-to-do people, families, children and grandsons of people supported by the Hesed.

What can I be useful for you in? This phrase is the motto of our volunteers.

Volunteers do not only visit wards either with the purpose to repair an electric range, or to bring a food set and medicines, or just to have a talk about health and so seldom writing grandsons. They also bring them hope, a sense of being an integral part of the big Jewish world represented by Hesed.

Maybe the secret of volunteership lies in the fact that people full of zest and desire to work when being pensioned off, remain beyond the active life and their loneliness depresses them. Or maybe compassion it something inherent in a person at the decline of his or her life.

Or maybe volunteership is quite natural for Jews, maybe it is an opportunity of their self-expression, displaying the Jewish soul and everything best peculiar to it.

Anyway, it is difficult to imagine the present days’ life and work in the Hesed without volunteers.

The program “Home Care” includes the volunteers’ coming to see lying wards, bringing them newspapers, congratulating on their birthdays;

The program “Food Sets” includes the volunteers’ help to make up food sets to bring them to inactive lonely wards;

Within the program “Food to Your Home” volunteers help to bring food; sometimes they advise what is better to prepare;

In the program “Region” volunteers are plenipotentiaries of the Hesed, they are the first to learn about both sad and joyful news about the wards, contact the Hesed, distribute food sets, bring receipts and medicines;

The program “The Daytime center” includes volunteers’ games with elderly wards, conversations. Volunteers help the wards to feed, to cut their hair, to visit a doctor;

In the Club program volunteers help to keep various festivals, Shabbats. They regularly call up the wards;

In the Medical program all the physicians are volunteers. They are highly qualified experts. Sometimes it is rather difficult to visit those doctors at hospital, whereas in the Hesed they are more accessible;

Within the framework of the program “Moked” volunteers repair footwear, TV sets, home appliances, help wards have their hair cut at barbers’, bring linen to the laundry;

There are also volunteers in the warehouse, some of them work on a telephone hotline, others work in the library; to cut a long story short, volunteers are everywhere.