by MAX SPARBER
Community News Editor
There will soon be a building in Tel Aviv named the Joseph Wilf Building, named after the late Polish-American businessman, Holocaust survivor, co-founder of Garden Homes and father of Minnesota Vikings owners and Mark Wilf.
The building got its name the way buildings usually do, as the result of a donation. Specifically, according to New Jersey Jewish News, the Wilf Family Foundation granted $5 million to the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Senior Affordable Housing Initiative, which was looking to begin construction on affordable housing units throughout Israel.
It’s easy to understand why the Wilf Foundation found this project appealing: There is a growing number of older low-income Israelis, and there is a growing housing crisis in Israel.
Additionally, a significant number of Israel’s at-risk elderly population are Holocaust survivors — including half of those on the Senior Affordable Housing Initiative’s waiting list of 27,000 people.
Erez Shani, vice president of resource development and public affairs at Amigour, recently came by the American Jewish World offices. Amigour is a subsidiary of the Jewish Agency and Israel’s leading sheltered housing company and second largest public housing group.
According to Shani, Amigour is in a unique position to address the growing crisis, as it is considerably easier to expand the organization’s 57 existing public housing structures than to build new ones.
Shani explained some of the sources of the growing population of disadvantaged elderly people in Israel: Both Holocaust survivors and recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union came to Israel with few resources — no savings, no property, no pension and few family members. Now unable to work, many are surviving on a monthly income well below the rising housing costs in Israel.
To help address this, Amigour is a partner in a project to build 3,000 affordable housing units which will be built on 17 sites in nine cities.
“Holocaust survivors go to the top of the list,” Shani explained, and there are programs to address their unique needs, as well as to preserve their unique history. An example of this: Amigour’s Book of Life program, in which survivors donate their personal effects, tokens and relics of those dark times to Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. The program also includes documenting the stories behind the donations and the story of the donor.
More information about the Jewish Agency can be found at jewishagency.org; more information about Amigour is available at amigour.com.
