Cold Comfort

Down, out and homeless on Jerusalem's streets

By EETTA PRINCE-GIBSON

The cold bores through the holes in the walls, and the water drips from cracks in the roof. The Kol-YisraelChaverim school, near the Mahaneh Yehuda market and the Klal Center, was once a glorious school. Abandoned by the municipality, it's a Zulanow, a home to Jerusalem's youngest street people.
In some rooms, the filth is over a foot deep. Human and animal feces, discarded drug syringes, used feminine hygiene products, moldy bread, and a lone shoe, covered with soot.
The stench is putrid and sour, mixed with the smell of burned out fires.
"They probably burned things to keep themselves warm at night," says Relly Katzav, the director of Galgal, an outreach program sponsored by Elem, a non-profit organization for runaway, homeless, and neglected Israeli youth.
"They live on the streets. If we want to make any difference in their lives, then we first accept them as they are, and meet them where they're at. On the streets. In the zula's," Katzav says.
She walks down a hallway that's been swept with a dirty broom, and knocks on a closed door.
"It's the only home they have," she explains why she knocks. When no one answers, she peers into the dark cold, to make sure that no one is lying inside, severely ill or unconscious. In this room, the dirt has been pushed off to one side, creating a space where the street people who live here have put down dirty mattresses and a makeshift table. There's even a picture of pop singer Sarit Hadad ripped out of a magazine and stuck to the wall.
The former school is deserted. It's cold during the day, and the street kids hide out in heated hallways or soup kitchens. It's even colder at night, but at night there's no where else to go, so they will come back to the only place they have to sleep. Last week, seventeen people slept here, she says.
Natalya will be here tonight, or in another zula like this one, somewhere in downtown Jerusalem. Panhandling for change in Zion Square late at night; she seems only slightly drunk. With the money she gets, she'll buy more vodka, which, she claims, keeps her feeling warm. She won't say much else, only that she's 22, that she came from Russia at age 16 with her mother and grandmother, and that her mother threw her out of the house three years ago. Since then, she's lived on the streets.
With young bravado, she says that she makes out fine, and that when she needs a shower or feels too cold, "there's a man who takes me in. For free."
Natalya is one of the estimated 140 young people, ages 18-26, who live on Jerusalem's streets. According to Shabtai ("Shabi") Amedi, in charge of the Unit for the Promotion of Youth for the municipality of Jerusalem, there are few, if any, younger teens or children on the streets. The Israeli social welfare system is still intact enough, he says, and the municipality's youth department is still strong enough to take care of most of them. The Israeli Youth Law gives social workers wide-ranging authority to help dysfunctional families and place runaway and troubled young kids in therapeutic institutions or foster homes, even against their will.
But by the time they're 18, the Youth Law no longer applies, and older teens can't be forced into any framework against their will, unless they pose an immediate threat to themselves or to their surroundings. And for some of them, it's a very steep, and very short, slip down onto the streets. Yet thanks to organizations like Elem and the efforts of the municipality, the number of youths living on the streets is slowly, yet clearly, decreasing.
By law, youths between the ages of 18 and 26 who are diagnosed as homeless are entitled to a wide span of social services and benefits, emergency housing, including education, longterm housing subsidies, rehabilitation and therapeutic services, and half-way houses. They can even get money to open a savings account.
But in order to take advantage of these services, they have to agree to abide by the rules, to detox, and to stay clean of the drink and the dope. And they will have to learn to trust.
And sometimes, they succeed. Amedi remembers a young girl from the former Soviet Union. She'd come to Israel on her own and didn't adjust to the boarding school to which she had been sent: Amedi, then a social worker, found her, undernourished and sick. Once he had her evacuated from a zula by ambulance, in a state close to clinical death. She went back to the streets several times, but he never gave up on her.
"Somehow I knew she had it in her," he recalls, "I knew she could make it."
Slowly she responded to his treatment. It took her years, but she was able to finish her high school equivalency. Today, she's studying physics at an Israeli university, lives in the dorms - and volunteers in a drug rehabilitation program for youth.

Since most of these young people aren't going to make their way to a drop-in or rehab center on their own, groups like Elem go out into their spaces.
Several times a week, since 1997, the Elem van is parked in Zion Square from 10:30 p.m. until early in the morning. There's a mixed group of youths there - lapsed ultra-Orthodox, Arabs, kids who ran away from the settlements in Judaea and Samaria, immigrants, and middle-class Israeli kids from "good homes." There are lots of troubled kids here, but by 12:30 a.m., the last bus has left town, and so most of the youths still milling around are the ones who have no where to go. They gravitate towards the van.
"Even Cinderella had a place to go to after midnight," says Elad Greenberg, who is in charge of the van for Elem.
Many of them are substance abusers, but there's a tacit understanding between Elem, the police, and the youths themselves. The police keep their distance, and the youths respect the van and keep a safe, clean, drug-free space around it.
The van isn't there to provide therapy, but to provide initial outreach and to try to connect the street youths to some aspects of normative life.
Trained volunteers search out the street kids, and counselors in the vans offer boreqas, donated by local bakeries, munchies, and hot drinks. The volunteers invite the youths in, to play a game of sheshbesh or to chat - and to get away from the cold, biting, latenight winter wind.
The Israel Museum provides art supplies and an art teacher, Dahlit Sharon, who invites the young people milling around to come up and draw.
It's not art therapy, she says carefully, but it's an attempt to give them something else to do, to bring them just a bit closer towards normative society, to provide another way to communicate. The goals are modestly small.
A young woman, in clothes that were once elegant and are now worn, comes every week. She sits at the table that Sharon has put up drawing faces, mostly in black, for over an hour. "I don't know if she has a place to live," says Dahlit. "But something must be hurting her if she comes every week, in the heat and in the cold."
Tellingly, she points out, the young woman never takes her drawings home. Few of the people in the square ever do. [Some of the abandoned drawings are featured on these pages.]
"I keep coming back," Sharon continues. "In the rain, in the snow, we volunteers and staff always come back. I know it sounds corny, but I really do receive more than I give. I might be able to earn the trust of one of these people, who have been hurt so much - just for that, I will keep coming back."
She continues, "Each one of these people has the potential to become a productive person. To stop being a drug or alcohol abuser, and contribute to society and himself. I know we're not changing their lives, but sometimes we really do make the difference between life and death."
Greenberg discretely points out a young man gulping the hot tea. He's tall and broadshouldered, but skinny; with dyed blond hair and a coat that's too small and too light for the bitter weather.
For months now, he's been "stopping by" the van twice a week. He chats, he drinks some tea, he doesn't say much about himself. Greenberg doesn't know his story yet, only that he's living on the streets.
"If we can let him move at his own pace, and really accept him for what he is and where he's at, and let him get help in a way that allows him to keep the lest dregs of dignity that he still has - then maybe he can change his life."

Before coming to the van, some of the street youth were at the Galgal ("Wheel") Center, a block away on Jaffa Road.
Galgal is a drop-in center where the homeless and runaway youth can come and have a hot meal, take a hot shower, and get a change of clothes. One hundred and forty youths between the ages of 18 and 26 came to Galgal last year, most of them homeless, most of them from the former Soviet Union. The center is open from 6 until 10 p.m., three times a week. After that, most of these young people have no where to go.
Many of these Russian youths came to Israel on their own, without their families, through Jewish Agency programs. But for various reasons, they just never fit in. They wandered away, dropped out of contact. It doesn't take much to fall onto the streets when you have no one to turn to, don't speak the language, and don't know your way through the culture.
Others are from veteran Israeli families, girls who ran away from sexual abuse, boys who wouldn't tolerate the violence any longer. Or kids who just couldn't make it in the normative world.
Soon, they start taking drugs to dull the pain or because they think (wrongly) that it will keep them warm or because they want to fit in. Or they begin to prostitute to make a few extra shekels.
The process is quick and mean, Katzav says. They lose contact with normative society. They don't belong to any framework, they have no address, they don't eat well, and they get sick. Each year, three or four of them die on the streets.
The Galgal center also provides medical and legal services, offered by volunteer professionals. They provide clean hypodermic needles, in the hope of at least reducing the spread of infectious diseases. There's even a volunteer reflexologist once a week. The Russians, Katzav says, like to read, and there's a bookcase filled with Russian-language paperbacks.
Says Katzav, "Most of these people are heavy substance abusers, and so they aren't eligible for the services that the municipality provides. We're the first link. We accept them unconditionally. We respect their choices, and accept them as they are, yet we're always trying to create some motivation for change, for a small return to the normative world."
Wherever possible, the volunteers and staff at Galgal and the van try to convince the youths to turn to the municipal services, to get their identity papers organized so that they can claim the money from the National Insurance Institute to which they are entitled, and, first and foremost, to get into a detox and rehabilitation program.
She recalls one young woman who, after visiting Galgal regularly for months, told a volunteer that she hadn't seen a movie for more than eleven years. With money from the petty cash box, she and a volunteer went out to see "Ocean 12."
"Her story isn't a fairy tale," says Katzav. "She's still on the streets, and she's still abusing [drugs]. But at least she had one positive experience, and gained a bit more trust."
Trust, says Amedi, is crucial. "By the time they come to us, these youths have been through hell. To survive on the streets, they have to break the law, so they're in trouble with the law. The world hasn't been good to them - why should they trust us? To help them, we have to earn their trust, be worthy of them."

Sergei is 48, and he lived on the streets for seven years before allowing himself to be helped by SHEKEL, a non profit organization to whom the Jerusalem municipality has outsourced the provision of services to adult street people.
According to the Welfare Ministry, a street dweller is defined as a person "over the age of 18 who lives on the street, in abandoned buildings, in public gardens, or public spaces and at building sites, in deep physical and emotional neglect, disconnected and alienated from family and friends."
According to Adit Dayan, who is in charge of the Homeless Unit in the Rehabilitation Unit in the Department of Welfare at the Jerusalem Municipality, there are several hundred street dwellers in Jerusalem today, up by about 60 per cent from last year.
It's difficult to know exactly how many there are, she explains. Some of them are simply not known to any of the authorities or social services. Others make repeat visits to the shelters or the detox centers, so the numbers appear inflated.
The data that has been collected reveals that the average age of an adult street dweller in Jerusalem today is 42. Eighty-five percent of them are men. Sixty five percent of them are addicted to alcohol, while another 30 percent are addicted to drugs. Only 28 per cent of them have severe mental health problems.
Over eighty percent of them are immigrants from the former Soviet Union, although the number of veteran Israelis is growing steadily.
"Once, living on the streets was simply unthinkable for Israelis," says Dayan. "But in this age of privatization and destruction of the welfare state, it's become thinkable. And we, the public, have become used to them. We don't see them anymore, even when they are under our feet."
Many of them have stories like Sergei's. In the former Soviet Union, Sergei was a doctor. He came to Israel with his wife and son in the 1990's. But he couldn't get a job as a doctor and worked as a practical nurse. Feeling bitter and degraded, he began to drink more than he ever had before. When he showed up drunk at the hospital, he lost his job. When, in a drunken rage, he beat his wife, the neighbors called the police. His wife obtained a restraining order against him, so he couldn't return home. He had nowhere to go. He slept on a park bench. In hallways. He ate at soup kitchens. He began to beg for money, which he used to buy more vodka.
He tried detoxing three times, but each time he went back on the streets and back to the vodka. He wanted to die. The cold, drunk stupor was much easier to bear than the recognition that he'd hit rock bottom. He lost all contact with his wife and child. He lost all contact with everybody.
"I'd even forgotten how normal people shower and dress," Sergei recalls now.
He was on the streets for four years before he was able to begin to climb back up from the streets, first to a shelter, then to a rehabilitation center, then to a half-way house.
Now he lives in a group home operated by SHEKEL. He's learning to live with others, to prepare himself for moving on into his own apartment. He works as a dish-washer now, but at least he works, he says. After an eight hour stint, he comes back to the group home, where he has obligations and chores, just like everyone else.
"I know I'll never be a doctor again," Sergei says. "And that hurts. I still want to drink that away. But I want to find my son again. And now I want to live. I don't know what kind of a life I will have, but at least now, I think I can try." Similar to the programs for the youths, SHEKEL's programs are multi-step programs, from emergency shelter through half-way houses, employment counseling, and transitional homes and apartments.
Dayan notes that the immigrants from the former Soviet Union can be distinguished by the period in which they came to Israel. In the 1990's, many of the immigrants who later wound up on the streets had lived normative lives in Russia, but were not able to manage the crisis of immigration. But in recent years, she accuses, "The Jewish Agency emissaries have to fill quotas for immigrants. And they seem to be just picking people up off the streets, people who did not live normative lives in their countries of origin, and they did not prepare them for the reality of life here."
(The Jewish Agency's spokesman's office did not reply to In Jerusalem's requests for a respond to this accusation.)

According to Dayan, the current level of services is adequate, and the Welfare, Housing, Labor, and Health Ministries have all increased the budgets allocated to the street people. They are entitled to rehabilitation, housing supplements, vocational training, psycho-social therapy, and other services. But not all of them are willing or able to take advantage of them.
"Living on the streets is a way of life," says Dayan. "The street people are disconnected from the rest of society, but this gives them degrees of freedom that some of them do not want to give up. It may be a terrible freedom for us, and even for them, but sometimes they prefer it to the pain of recognizing their reality, to the fear that they will fail if they try to rebuild their lives."
"Of course, some people do rebuild their lives," Dayan continues. "And then, there are other successes. It depends on what we call success. A man came to the shelter, for the first time, when he was already dying. We couldn't save his life. But he died in a bed, not on the streets, with clean sheets. Is that a success? Perhaps."
"Society treats the homeless as if they're transparent," says Katzav. "Maybe you drop a coin in a cup, but you don't see them. But once you realize that they exist, that the street really isn't another world, then you begin to see. You develop a third eye. And you learn to truly love another human being."

*On February 15, Elem will be conducting its annual drive for donations, under the slogan, "Let's look them in the eyes."
*Shekel, Community Services for People with Disabilities, is a nonprofit organization providing services in the community for 5.000 children and adults with physical, mental, and emotional disabilities. 673-0157/8
*The Municipality's Crisis Hotline: 625-6202