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.