Friday, April 24, 2020

To Aleh: Time for transparency

The death of a 41 year old woman living at Aleh Gedera ["Following a Covid-19 death at Aleh, a troubling silence"] was reported on April 14. Nevertheless, there is still no acknowledgement anywhere on the Aleh sites or Facebook pages of her passing. She was one of the youngest of Israel's victims of the virus.

Despite studiously ignoring that tragedy, Aleh's PR hacks have utilized Covid 19 to the hilt for its fundraising activities.

Aleh staged a lavish welcoming splash - Israeli flags lined the streets, music blared from a van - to greet the return of four other residents who had been hospitalized for weeks with Covid-19. 

On April 14, the news services reported that nine Aleh residents were hospitalized in several hospitals. What is the current condition of the remaining five? Aleh has not shared that information with the public.

This obfuscation on the part of Aleh, Israel's largest chain of closed institutions for people with disabilities is beyond objectionable. It is the height of insensitivity and callousness towards its vulnerable, helpless population, many of whom are babies and children.

This attitude is coupled with a freewheeling approach toward utilizing its healthy residents for photo ops. So on Yom Hashoa, numerous photos of "commemoration" of the day in Aleh institutions were posted on its sites. 

As the mother of a 25 year old daughter with profound and complex disabilities, I can assure you that not one of the residents pictured grasped the significance of the day in any sense! The photos made a mockery of Yom Hashoa by mining it for financial gain.

As a bereaved mother whose child was murdered in the terror bombing of Sbarro in 2001, I dread seeing how Aleh's heartless PR team will cash in on Yom Hazikaron next week. But I have little doubt that is just what they intend to do.

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Following a Covid-19 death at Aleh, a troubling silence

Children in a video clip posted by Aleh [Source]
It is a tragedy - but not a surprising one.

The population of Aleh's several institutions, totaling at their count over 850 children and young adults, are inherently high-risk for contracting Covid-19. Aleh's administration itself describes them as having "complex disabilities" and as being "at high risk for succombing to the virus".

Here is what Forbes magazine wrote about this segment of society:
"The people most often cited as being at serious risk are largely, by some definition, people with disabilities. While simply having a disability probably doesn’t by itself put someone at higher risk from coronavirus, many disabled people do have specific disabilities or chronic conditions that make the illness more dangerous for them." [Source]
When these individuals are congregated in large, confined groups and with rotating caregivers, they are obviously placed at even higher risk for the virus. 

That risk then rises exponentially when youths are invited into those large, closed institutions to replace regular staff members - as Doron Almog boasts of having done [in this Hebrew-language Ynet interview], 

As we are all now aware (perhaps excluding Almog), those untrained teenage volunteers could be asymptomatically infected, highly contagious and therefore capable of spreading the virus to their vulnerable charges!

Despite reports of three separate outbreaks of Covid-19 within Aleh's walls (two in Aleh Negev and one in Aleh Gedera), there have been no updates about the conditions of the ill Aleh residents from Aleh itself. 

After boasting about the exemplary sanitization operations at Aleh and of his success in enlisting those scores of volunteers, untrained 17 year olds to care for our most vulnerable citizens, Almog has gone inexplicably mum.

He hasn't even conceded that his promise on March 25 to set up a hospital for Covid-19 patients in Israel's south within one week was utter nonsense [here - and archived here].

On April 14, we learned from a single news report that a 41 year old Aleh resident passed away of Covid-19. The news source (my  translation from the original Hebrew) added: 
"After all residents of the institutions were tested at the request of the Aleh chain it emerged that more than one fifth of the residents, 26 out of 117, are sick with Corona. Nine of those are still hospitalized in hospitals throughout the country, 12 have been transferred for treatment for mild Corona within the welfare framework and four recovered in the hospital and have returned to the instituion. Ten staff members were also infected with the virus." [Source: Ynet
Meanwhile for Aleh's PR team, it is business as usual. Its sites and Facebook page sport their routine, inane "feel good" photos and video clips intended to inspire in its supporters compassion, guilt and, naturally, a reach for the wallet. 

And these days, Covid-19 is utilized to heighten what Aleh calls its urgent need for donations: "When Kids Can’t Go On an Outing, Bring the Outing to Them (March 17, 2000)".

As recently as several hours ago, the Aleh Facebook page posted a clip [here] about the home garden of one its staff members! After that it was photos [here] of Mimouna "fun" at Aleh Jerusalem. 

The catastrophe of Covid-19 is teaching us myriad crucial lessons about how we have conducted our lives. But will those include one regarding the lives of people with disabilities? 

Will Israel finally acknowledge the fact that these citizens need a better, safer, more loving and more inclusive environment than is offered them in large, closed institutions like Aleh's?

Will our government finally resist the pressures exerted upon it to provide nearly all of Aleh's annual funding?

It is high time our leaders joined the rest of the developed world in shuttering up those institutions and re-directing that money to caring for those citizens in the settings they deserve: in their families' homes, in adoptive homes or in small in-community group homes.

Let's hope Covid-19 will be the wake-up call that our abandoned children with disabilities have so desperately awaited?

Friday, April 10, 2020

No news is NOT good news

For background, click here to review my previous post
While the public has heard no news about the conditions of ill residents at two branches (Aleh Gedera and Aleh Negev) of Aleh's four large closed institutions, we did learn of yet another Covid-19 outbreak there. 

This time it was the intensive care unit at Aleh Negev where a nurse tested postitive. The worrisome announcement was,predictably, given a postitive spin on Aleh's website with lines like these: 
"During the evacuation from the ward, the ALEH staff and volunteers took the youngest residents – babies and toddlers – to the playground to alleviate their anxiety and keep them calm. Testing is ongoing and will take longer than usual due to the fact that so many of the ward’s residents are very young and require consistent intensive care. Following the testing, the residents and staff members will be quarantined in the newly sterilized ward until the results are analyzed and any additional infected individuals are identified." [Source: Aleh]
Needless to say, that should be alarming. 

Those children need not have been enclosed in such a dangerous setting; a large, isolated institution. Residents are in close contact with each other and with the many staff members, rendering it a petri dish for the Covid-19 virus. 

With government funding, many if not most of these children would have been living where they belonged: With their own or an adoptive family!

In addition, there has been no news about the brand-new hospital that Aleh's spokesman, Doron Almog, promised us. Two weeks ago he stated unequivocally (as I posted here) that Aleh committed to constructing one in the Negev within one week. To date, nothing of the sort has materialized. 

No big shock. Vacuous, hyperbolic statements are an Aleh trademark.

Bizchut, the leading advocacy organization for people with disabilities in Israel, has embarked on a campaign to win visitation rights for parents of children locked up in institutions like Aleh. During the scourge of Covid 19, most have been barred from seeing and comforting their anxious children.

In its recent circular, Bizchut wrote:
"Institutions and hostels have announced they are no longer allowing visitors. No-one can enter and no-one can leave. This, despite the fact that for many persons with disabilities, interaction with relatives is essential to their mental and sometimes physical well-being. We also know that in some of these facilities instances of neglect and abuse have been exposed. With the reduction in external staff going in and out, relatives are the only people who can observe and report on what is going on behind the walls of these isolated facilities" [Soure]
Learn more about what has been occuring in large, closed institutions for people with disabnilities since the Covid 19 outbreak [see Institutions and some viral lessons not yet learned]

Friday, April 3, 2020

Institutions and some viral lessons not yet learned

Aleh's Gedera facility [Image Source: Google Maps]
If all else fails, perhaps the Covid-19 pandemic will convince this state that children with disabilities - even "complex" ones - belong at home with their families.

Perhaps, at long last, the resources our government pours into large closed institutions like Aleh will be rechanneled to families who would love to keep their children at home but simply do not have the means to do so.

Even Doron Almog, Aleh's champion cheerleader, conceded last week that senior citizens facilities and institutions for the disabled are incubators (מדגרות) for the Covid-19 virus. Yes, he actually referred to enterprises like Aleh as "institutions" [in this Hebrew-language Ynet interview], forgetting the euphemisms that he and Aleh's PR team usually favor, like "village", "facility" and "home".

With scores of residents and employees at two of Aleh's four branches - Aleh Negev and Aleh Gedera - already infected and in lockdown, it is clear that our most vulnerable citizens ought to have been returned to their families long ago. They would have been exposed to fewer people and thus would be less endangered. 

Most of them have pre-existing conditions that render them more likely to fall seriously ill from this virus. Remember: Israel is alone among developed countries of the world in its dogged promotion of institutionalization of children and adults with disabilities. 

Instead of isolation, Aleh residents are now being exposed to volunteer youths whom cheerleader Almog says he has enlisted to substitute for absent staff members. 

Some of the latter are ill with the virus, others simply "fled" the facilities, according to Almog [Ynet Hebrew]. In the Gedera branch, out of 100 staff members, only 18 remain, he says. He dubs this the "Italy Phenomenon". He then recklessly asserted that "as we all know, youths have better immune systems" so "17-18 year olds can after a brief prep course be brought in and in fact 30 such youths from a pre-army course have arrived there." [Archived]

As the rest of us are all aware that is patently false. Youths can be contagious while asymptomatic. Those volunteers could unwittingly be endangering their fragile charges.

There have been no updates from Aleh for several days now regarding the condition of its ill residents. No update either about Mr. Almog's grand promise to build a hospital for corona virus patients in the South of Israel. On March 25, 2019, he boasted on Facebook [here - archived here] that Aleh will accomplish "with the Ministry of Welfare and with the assistance of the Ministry of Health within one week". That deadline came and went yesterday without a new hospital.

In the meantime, Aleh is clearly short-staffed. It has posted a Help Wanted ad [in Hebrew here - archived here] for caregivers on its Facebook page. 

A still image from a video clip that Aleh posted here
I shudder to imagine how the resident children and young adults enclosed in its four institutions are coping. If this Aleh video clip [here - screen shot on the right] is any indication of the care they are receiving, it is clearly very rudimentary! 

(In normal times, such scenes would probably not be publicized by Aleh's PR team.)

True to form, even in this apocalyptic time, the Aleh PR people persevere with touting this business as a godsend to the world of disabilities. 

We can only hope, however, that when the Covid-19 nightmare is behind us, their distorted view of people with disabilities will be corrected. Perhaps, then, it will finally dawn on Israel's powers-that-be that children, all children, even children afflicted with disabilities, belong in their own or in adoptive loving homes within the community. 

Not isolated from others in closed, large institutions like Aleh.