More Israelis living in poverty on eve of Passover
A special report by the state comptroller published the week before Passover reveals growing poverty, attributed to the new government’s public welfare cutbacks.
Gilles Darmon does not remember having felt such a sense of oppressive distress before on the eve of the Passover holiday (April 14-22). For years, the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Latet (meaning ''to give'' in Hebrew) he heads gears up to provide food to the needy. Every year, thousands of his volunteers are deployed around the country to distribute food parcels to the poor, enabling them to celebrate the Seder with some amount of dignity. This year as well, Darmon supervised the food distribution operation. He was stunned to find out the extent to which the circle of poverty has widened among Israeli families, families that do not have the means to conduct the traditional Passover Seder meal.
Passover is a quintessential Jewish holiday that assembles Israelis in a family-based festival atmosphere. Despite its religious nature, Passover remains the most popular holiday among the public. Secular Jews, like their religious counterparts, customarily gather around the table to celebrate the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their emancipation from slavery. Many of them connect the biblical story to current-day events and view the exodus from Egypt as a historical moral that guides the Jewish people to this very day.
However, this year’s Passover celebration has been tainted by recently publicized findings showing that hundreds of thousands will be hard-pressed to celebrate Passover with their families, because they are unable to finance the holiday meal.
In December 2013, Latet published an Alternative Poverty Report revealing an alarming, gut-wrenching social reality. The shock factor increases when reading about the children who happen to be born in underprivileged families. It seems that 37% of children in poor families rely on bread and various spreads for their main nourishment. Out of 532,000 families suffering from nutritional insecurity, 60% reported that they were forced to reduce the composition of their children’s meals due to economic distress. What's more, 46% of the parents reported that sometimes their children did not eat for an entire day, due to a lack of food at home, while 9% of the children were forced to steal food and 12% were forced to collect food from the floor or from the garbage.
