How Israel treats its disabled has been concealed for too long

A version of my opinion piuece below was published by Jewish News Syndicate on January 22, 2023 under the title "Life for Israelis with disabilities is a well-kept secret | For-profit institutions and government neglect have led to brutal abuse and exploitation."

Much has been written about the new Israeli government’s proposed changes to Israel’s immigration laws. This principally concerns the Law of Return, which grants Israeli citizenship to anyone with one Jewish grandparent.

But less attention has been given to another change in aliyah requirements. It affects potential immigrants with disabilities.

Until now, olim with disabilities must physically arrive in Israel before applying for recognition of their disabilities, a demanding and time-consuming procedure. 

Only after this process will they be eligible to receive government disability benefits.

Under the new procedures, they will be able to apply for such recognition before actual immigration.  With their legal rights ensured beforehand, it is anticipated that their assimilation into society will be easier.

This change will almost certainly be enacted. But we do not know whether crucial information will be shared with potential olim during this new process. 

Will they be alerted to what awaits disabled people in Israel? Will they be warned that Israel still warehouses many of its disabled in large, closed and isolated institutions? Will they be informed that the situation with which they are likely familiar in their home countries is a far cry from Israel’s situation?           

In short, will they arrive here with their eyes wide open? 

There are some statistics they would surely like to ponder:

• 88% of Israeli citizens with cognitive impairment who live outside their own homes are institutionalized.  
• 17,000 people live in 491 housing facilities for people with disabilities and special needs. This includes institutions that serve the cognitively impaired, emotionally impaired, autistic and those requiring special rehabilitation. 
• Most Israelis with cognitive impairment and autism live in closed institutions remote from the community, where they are denied the right to autonomy and privacy, and where frequent and severe neglect takes place.
• Some 50% of these closed institutions are operated by approximately 70 different private for-profit companies. The same number of operators are NGOs. Only nine institutions are government-owned.
• Thousands of citizens with disabilities who live within the community do so in difficult conditions of loneliness and without basic services.

These are disheartening numbers that need not be Israel’s reality.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights ofPersons with Disabilities, which the State of Israel ratified in 2012, declares that the state must ensure that people with disabilities live equally in the community and freely choose their lifestyle.

In June 2022, the Knesset passed a law that anchored the right of disabled people to an independent and autonomous life in the community.  This law will remain dormant until the relevant regulations are drafted, with 2024 set as the target date for its implementation. So, there will be no significant change to the status quo for some time.

This is an under-reported topic. As a result, few know that every couple of months, incidents of severe abuse and occasionally death are inflicted on disabled residents of Israeli institutions. When Hebrew news outlets do briefly cover these stories, they tend not to appear on English-language sites.

Over the past six months, four disabled residents have died, three in one institution due to food poisoning, and the fourth in a brutal attack. Another incident of physical abuse was caught on a security camera this month. The perpetrator of the assault, a nurse, has been arrested.

Unfortunately, police investigations are rarely launched and can drag on interminably. Many are closed without any indictments due to “lack of evidence” or “unreliability of witnesses.” When cases are tried, sentences are rarely more than a slap on the wrist. 

Why are these institutions given free rein?

One theory is that the profits they provide are simply too enticing. Greedy operators intensively lobby politicians to keep these institutions open. Naama Lerner of the grass-roots organization Hatnuah L’atzmaut (The Movement for Independence), explains, 

“Since the advent of privatization, operators of institutions receive between 13,000-20,000 shekels/month per resident and are thus highly motivated to retain them. They hire one carer for ten residents so they spend less than 1,000 shekels/month per resident.”

The Movement for Independence is determined to change that. 

Comprised of activists with and without disabilities, family members, experts and laypersons, the group promotes independent living with personal assistance for every disabled Israeli. However, it is facing government apathy and operators’ determination to continue profiting off disabled people.

An Israel-based non-profit called MDF represents these institutions. It was registered in 2009, but its records at the Ministry of Justice appear not to show any activity. The organization has filed only one annual financial report, in 2012. Its registration document indicates that a former member of Knesset, Yoel Hasson, functions as the director of its lobbying efforts. 

In Dec. 2022, MDF organized a protest outside the Jerusalem head office of the Ministry of Welfare to demand increased funding for the operators of privately owned and operated residential care institutions for people with disabilities.

Naama Lerner, who co-founded and today heads the Movement for Independence, staged a one-woman counter-demonstration to criticize the owner/operators.

She said, 

“Death is the really most extreme case. There are many, many, many problems faced by people in institutions. Let’s start with the ‘soft’ items. The ‘soft’ items are that a person is deprived entirely of his privacy. He doesn’t determine who will sleep with him in his room. He will never have a private room. People who are 20, 30, 40 years old who need a private room, personal closet, personal clothing, a moment to be alone. What do the institutions do to prevent this? They shackle them to beds, isolate them in rooms, tie them to restraint chairs, place splints on their arms so they can’t move their arms. All these things are also prohibited by law.”

She went on, 

“A supported housing program is a very important program, and without a doubt, it is the program that every person with a disability will have in the future. Everyone will have an independence-supporter who will accompany them to an independent life, help them build their personal plan and implement it. But unfortunately, today, with the program’s current budget and the severe limitations it places, it really suits but a few, and particularly those who can manage on their own.”

Another organization fighting for deinstitutionalization is Bizchut, founded by the late, legendary social activist Shulamit Aloni. It also believes in the right of every person with a disability to live in the community in a small and intimate setting granting them a life of equality and respect, personal autonomy and full integration.

Bizchut further maintains that, in institutions and hostels, where dozens and sometimes even hundreds of people with disabilities live together, the ability to maintain these basic rights is not possible.

Neither of the above organizations has voiced support for the change in aliyah procedures affecting immigrants with disabilities.

One of the bodies responsible for the change is the Jewish Agency, headed by Doron Almog. Almog is also, ironically, the chairman of two large, closed institutions—Adi Negev and Adi Jerusalem. 

Almog claims to care about the rights of people with disabilities, to which his many speeches and articles on the topic attest. Here is but one example: “The way in which we relate to the most vulnerable among us, those with disabilities and multiple challenges, constitutes the greatest test of our society. It is only when our societies are able to make the care, development and inclusion of everyone part and parcel of our daily lives that we will truly live up to our own ideals.”

But as we know, talk is cheap and it is actions that matter. Almog’s actions consistently contradict his words. For decades, he has championed and helped raise millions of dollars in contributions for the two institutions he chairs. Together they keep 233 citizens, from babies to young adults, locked up and isolated from society.

So, will Almog and the Jewish Agency provide disabled applicants with the information they need before aliyah, such as the contact details of the organizations that endeavor to help people with disabilities live independent lives with government assistance?

Given the disheartening status quo, it is likely that some prospective olim will postpone aliyah until the 2022 legislation has gone into effect or until the advent of a more inviting scenario.

The alternative is an influx of shocked and unhappy new citizens. Would Israel welcome that?

I am the mother of a fragile 27-year-old Israeli woman who suffers from severe physical and cognitive disabilities, including epilepsy and blindness. Keeping her at home where she enjoys loving care from me and my husband is a struggle. But I have no doubt that had we succumbed to the pressure of her teachers and social workers, and institutionalized her, she would no longer be alive.

Now is the perfect time to publicize the ugly truth about Israel’s treatment of its disabled citizens. The secret has been kept for far too long.

A glimmer of hope through the thick smoke

From the Aleh website

The smoke is blowing fast and thick from Aleh's PR whizzes.

In the hope of blinding us to the truth - that Aleh warehouses and locks up people with disabilities in large, isolated facilities - they inundate the public with faux-uplifting stories.

From motorcycle demos to soldier visits to lipstick sessions, their residents are being trotted out for inane photo ops that mask the sad reality of their existence isolated from family and community.

Now some of that smoke is being directed my way to my Jerusalem neighborhood. We are being treated [here] to a series of free lectures on various child-care topics. Free cake and coffee is thrown in to maximize the appeal. The lecturers will, for the most part, be employees of Aleh.

These tactics are thoroughly duping Israel's politicians and government agencies. Our Minister of Education, Naftali Bennett, regularly trots off to Aleh Negev to inundate it with worshipful words: "You at Aleh are the torchbearers; you cast light on us all..."

Our Ministry of Welfare honors Aleh with awards [here] and its own hyperbolic praise of Aleh's

"world view in which the child remains an integral part of the family, and even more – ALEH is an example of a community-integrated residence..." (emphasis mine)

The greedy tentacles of this ever-expanding monster have nearly extinguished all hope for change in the lives of Israel's citizens with disabilities. But they will not succeed if we continue the struggle for genuine inclusion and equality.

As I typed the above rant, I received the following notification from Bizchut about a grass-roots campaign now underway on social media (translated by me from Hebrew to English):

"'I too deserve to be able to roam around and mess around in the big city. I want to be like you and not like a patient in a special village for people with disabilities. I want to do National Service, I want to take a trip to the Philippines or Thailand. I want a dream job. I want a relationship. That's me.' Tommy Berchanko, a youth [in Israel] with disabilities and a social activist." 

In the last month, tens of similar posts have circulated; posts relating the stories of youths with disabilities and their parents. In a short time, hundreds of people joined the struggle. People with disabilities, their parents, friends and relatives who have decided to shout out their dream, the dream of a full life within the community, with personal assistance for every individual with disabilities. All this is in accordance with the international Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Israel signed in 2007 and ratified in 2012. We at Bizchut bless and support all the activists and invite you to join them."

 And the group that Bizchut mentioned posted the following on its Facebook page:

"We are a group working to advance legislation that will enable people with disabilities (without distinction between types of disability) to realize their right to independent and supported lives with equality and dignity within the community in accordance with their needs and wishes and with the necessary support to achieve that."

You can read the full manifesto here.

I was particularly heartened by the phrase "without distinction between types of disability". 

Which means, Aleh, your repeated use of "complex disabilities" to denote the children locked up in your institutions just won't cut it. Even they are entitled to live within the community, with their families enjoying true inclusion. Not visits from dignitaries, donors or volunteers - the crumbs of inclusion doled out to Aleh's residents.

So, dear readers, you can now do something concrete to help Israelis with severe disabilities, particularly those consigned to live out their lives in large, closed institutions like Aleh. Join this nascent campaign to propel Israel into the ranks of other enlightened countries throughout the world.

Inclusion via institutionalization?!

A drawing of mine of a child with severe
disabilities who returns home every day after
school to the family home

I suppose for some the adage "Repeat a lie a thousand times and it becomes a truth" applies. But some are simply jolted by a lie anew each of those thousand times.

Count me in that crowd.

So every additional mendacious op ed, every PR release, every advertisement that Aleh spews out leaves me as livid as its first.

So it was with the recent opinion piece that the Jerusalem Post obligingly published [here] for Aleh, penned by the director of Aleh's Jerusalem institution, Shlomit Grayevsky.

It relates the timeline of Aleh's expansion over its twenty years of existence.

In 1988, Israel passed a law that focused on providing equal opportunities and experiences for all and creating integrated programming in educational settings. With the goal of promoting this ideal of equality in every aspect of life and creating a residence and treatment center that felt like a true home, ALEH... took this breakthrough and ran with it, utilizing this new legislation to pave the way for governmental participation, funding and support... ["Disability inclusion: The ultramarathon of social justice goals", Jerusalem Post, August 15, 2017]

Needless to say, living in large, closed institutions far away from their families does not afford people with disabilities anything remotely resembling "equality" with the non-disabled segment of society.

Israeli law has become much more explicit about the rights guaranteed to people with disabilities since 1988. It is now abundantly clear that the Aleh option and that of all the other institutions warehousing their residents are the antithesis of the options that Israeli law prefers.

The Equal Rights of Persons With Disabilities Law (1998) guarantees “equality to the disabled and the entitlement to make decisions relating to his life, according to his desires and priorities”.

The right to live in the community is specifically dealt with in a 2000 amendment to the Care of the Retarded Law which states that when placing individuals in facilities outside their homes, preference must be given to residences within the community.

That legislation was bolstered by the Lior Levy case (Lior Levy et al v. State of Israel et al. [2008]), in which Israel’s Supreme Court affirmed the right of even the severely disabled to be housed within community.

In 2012, Israel ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities which affirms the right of people with disabilities to live within the community, and to have ”access to a range of in-home, residential and other community support services… and to prevent isolation or segregation from the community”.

It behooves the Jerusalem Post to vet its opinion pieces for accuracy and truthfulness. To claim - as Aleh does in this piece - that its staff  "have dedicated their lives to providing quality disability care and promoting inclusion" is the height of gall. Isolating babies, children and adults from the rest of society because of their disabilities - which is what Aleh's institutions do - is nothing short of exclusion and discrimination.

For anyone who has wondered whether Aleh's  "villages" or "facilities" or "just-like-home" enterprises are in fact institutions despite Aleh's obsessive avoidance of  that word, the definition below should clear up that confusion.

According to Lumos, the respected public organization founded by JK Rowling to advocate for the rights of institutionalized children throughout the world, institutional care is defined by certain characteristics:

 • Unrelated children live in the care of paid adults • Children are separated from their family and often their community • In many cases, they do not have the opportunity to bond with a caregiver • Institutions run according to workplace routines, instead of responding to individual children’s needs  • Although some institutions are well-resourced with dedicated staff, they cannot replace a family • Eighty years of research has shown the negative impact of institutionalisation on children’s health, development and life chances, as well as a high risk of abuse [Lumos Fact Sheets]

Particularly today, when Israeli children returned to school after two months of quality time with their parents and siblings, let's remember the children who through no fault of their own were denied that enjoyment.

Throughout the summer, as they do all year long, many children with disabilities had no outings or one-on-one time with their families. They languished in locked buildings, far from their families and from the rest of society, cared for by strangers.

Misrepresenting that existence as "disability inclusion" does not magically transform it into its antithesis. It is exclusion and discrimination pure and simple.

And that's the truth.

Even Chief Rabbis make mistakes

Source: https://aleh.org/donation/adopt-yosef/

It has been a demoralizing season for people in Israel with disabilities.

On May 25th, we were subjected to yet another Flash-A-Celebrity episode courtesy of Aleh Jerusalem.

This time, it was the chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who was hosted by that institution's director, Shlomit Grayevsky. She told him:

"Thanks to ALEH’s professional staff and innovative programming, Israeli children with complex disabilities of every age are able to live much like their non-disabled peers, are accepted by a wider segment of the population and develop far beyond the boundaries of their initial prognoses...” ["UK Chief Rabbi Is Captivated by ALEH’s Disability Care", May 26, 2017, Jewish Link of NJ]

I fairly choked on those lies. So being locked in a large, closed institution constitutes living "much like their non-disabled peers"? Well,  it probably does in North Korea. But in Israel?

Aleh maintains that institutionalization of these children is in their own best interests. It affords them access to, as Aleh describes them, state-of-the-art services and therapies. To illustrate, in a profile of one of its residents, Aleh states:

Faced with this new reality [the child suffered devastating brain damage], his family decided that the best home for Yosef would be at ALEH, where he would receive the outstanding care and optimal rehabilitative opportunities to help him develop... ["Adopt Yosef | YOUR SUPPORT WILL HELP YOSEF CONTINUE TO DEVELOP HIS POTENTIAL AND KEEP SMILING!"]

Even if this were accurate, why should these unfortunate children be removed from their homes and families in order to receive the "outstanding" and "optimal" care they surely need and certainly deserve?

Just imagine being told by the government:

"Yes, your non-disabled child needs and deserves an education. She will definitely receive an outstanding one with one proviso: that you first transfer her out of your home."

Sadly, it appears Rabbi Mirvis was either unaware of or unconcerned by the injustices being promoted by his hosts. He also appears not to be sensitive to the disparity between the policies of his own home country toward children with disabilities and those of Israel.

Both the UK and Israel are signatories to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Article 19 of that Convention states clearly that governments are obligated to

"...recognize the equal right of all persons with disabilities to live in the community, with choices equal to others and take effective and appropriate measures to facilitate full enjoyment by persons with disabilities of this right and their full inclusion and participation in the community..."

The United Kingdom ratified that Convention in 2009 affording it the force of a national law. The starting dates for strategic change toward community services varied. During the past 2-3 decades, complete closure of the traditional large institutions for the mentally disabled has been achieved in several countries. In England for instance, this had been achieved by 2011.

Nevertheless the Chief Rabbi chose to "applaud" and "thank" Aleh for perpetuating the system that his own country has eradicated.

Perhaps he feels that Israeli children with disabilities don't deserve the quality of life that English children with disabilities enjoy?

He said:

"I am proud that in London we have so many generous people who are very supportive of ALEH. I will make it a priority to share what I have seen here today with our constituents across the UK so that this support only continues to grow.” ["CHIEF RABBI OF UK VISITS ALEH", May 5, 2017 - from the Aleh website]

He also mentioned the trendy term "disability inclusion". Never mind that, as we all know, inclusion is the diametrical opposite of what Aleh practices.

The icing on this tawdry cake was the announcement [here] that same month of the opening of a new educational and residential wing at Aleh's Jerusalem branch.

So while institutions like Aleh have been made obsolete in the rest of the world, in Israel they are flourishing and expanding. And they are doing so in contravention of the law.

At around the time that Aleh was boasting and expanding, another institution was in the news too.

Last week, a shocking undercover video clip from the Feuerstein Institute's hostel for disabled and cognitively challenged adults in the Ein Karem section of Jerusalem made waves in the world of disabilities. Residents come from locations throughout Israel and suffer from conditions including cognitive and developmental disabilities, behavioral and emotional impairments, Down Syndrome and more.

As a result of the exposure on Israeli TV news (via hidden-camera reporting), we now know that residents are horribly victimized verbally and physically.

Some excerpts I picked up from watching:

• "Animal! Pig!" shouts one caregiver at a resident. "No more shouting! The only one allowed to shout here is me!"
• A caregiver is asked by a young female resident: "Can I have another portion?" He replies: "You'll get a beating! What portion? You'll get a beating! Really a portion!"
• A resident is warned: "Keep eating! If not, I'll come and hit you."

The news item said employees at the hostel told journalists they had reported the abusive behavior of their Feuerstein hostel colleagues to superiors but were threatened with retribution if they pursued the matter. The parents, they related, are also afraid to speak up because "there is a correlation between parents who complain about the situation and the residents who suffer."

That is surely a quandary facing parents of children in any closed institution.

Notwithstanding, two parents of children who were in Aleh institutions - one in a day program, the other in a residential one - have recently contacted me to share their bitter experiences. They paint a picture of life there that is a far cry from the one that the Chief Rabbi extolled.