by Malkah Fleisher Shevat 10, 5770 / January 25, '10 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/135698
(IsraelNN.com) Israeli citizens are hoping to give opportunities for new life to children who have been orphaned by Haiti's January 12 earthquake.
Emergency humanitarian aid group Israel Flying Aid and Orange Israel Telecommunications announced January 25 that they will establish an orphanage to accommodate over 200 children in Haiti. At least 70 children will be taken in immediately. To assist the project, the Israel Defense Forces will create infrastructure for fresh running drinking water, an electric generator, tents, and primary medical supplies.
The orphanage will essentially be a re-creation of one destroyed in the earthquake. CEOs of the two companies visited the ruins of a girls' orphanage in Port-au-Prince to find the children without food and suffering from severe malnutrition. These are the orphans who will benefit first from the new project. They are between the ages of 2 and 14, and will be cared for by Haitian and Israeli volunteers.
"From showers to electricity and computers, from water, food and clothing we will rebuild this orphanage," said Orange Israel CEO David Avner. "As for today we will take a yard and put up tents as it is unsafe for the children to remain in these cracked and unstable buildings."
IFA and Orange Israel will try to raise 1-2 million dollars from Israeli businesses for the project.
At least 30 couples have contacted the Welfare and Social Service Ministry's Adoption Department over the past 10 days hoping to take in children left orphaned by the earthquake.
Israel's Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog has asked his staff to begin looking into the possibility of developing an adoption protocol with Haiti. Israel's envoy to the Dominican Republic and consular official to Haiti, Amos Radian, will submit the official request. International treaties and adoption laws are also being consulted. The potential to bring Haitian orphans to Israel will be clarified within a few weeks.
Herzog told Israel's Army Radio that aside from being a form of humanitarian aid, the adoptions would "bring great joy" to Israeli couples hoping to raise a child of their own.
Israel helps prospective adoptive families by subsidizing the cost of international adoptions. Low-income couples yearning for a child receive a 15% discount, which usually translates into a saving of over 17,000 shekels. The children are converted to Judaism upon arrival in specialized rabbinical courts.
Israel is not the only country which has come forward to adopt Haitian children. The United States, Spain, and the Netherlands have also submitted adoption requests.
The humanitarian effort resulted in an unintended but badly-needed boost to Israel’s image in foreign media after accusations of alleged war crimes in fighting terrorism in Gaza last year and causing an alleged humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Nevertheless, several anti-Israeli websites accused Israel of stealing body organs in Haiti, and the British Guardian published an article about Israel's rescue efforts under the headline "Israel's double standards over Haiti."
Israel already has offered to help search for survivors of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea, two miles west of Lebanon early Monday morning, shortly after takeoff from Beirut. Terrorism has been ruled out as the cause of the crash, which occurred during a fierce winter storm. Approximately 90 people, 50 of them Lebanese, were on board.
The IDF aid delegation in Haiti will continue to provide assistance and support even after most of the support team flies back home on Thursday. The supports teams this week built three water towers capable of holding up to 12 thousand liters of water each and built shelters for the homeless.
Israeli civil engineers in Haiti also opened central traffic routes that had been blocked in the aftermath of the earthquake. Medical personnel have performed 233 life-saving surgeries and delivered 10 babies.
The Jewish State’s help in Haiti startled the Western world, especially the United States, whose hospital ship arrived only three days ago and took some of the pressure off Israel’s state of the art field hospital that was featured on major American television outlets four days after it was set up.
Approximately 250 doctors, 25 nurses and support teams participated in the rescue and search efforts that continued even after Haiti officials officially said the rescue operations were over. Two days ago, the Israel team saved an earthquake survivor who had been living under the rubble for 10 days, living on soda and cookies that he found.
The army's ”Oketz” unit sent dogs to look for people trapped in the debris that devastated Port-au-Prince. Orthodox Jews comprised part of the ZAKA rescue team that identified victims and gave first aid to the wounded.
Israel’s long experience in disasters and constant terrorists attacks since before the re-establishment the Jewish State in 1948 has helped the country develop advanced systems for search and rescue missions. Israel's Center for International Cooperation has assisted more than 140 countries, noted Middle analyst Emanuel A. Winston.
Special teams are equipped with fiber-optic cameras and microphones that can be snaked through the rubble to see and hear buried victims deep inside collapsed buildings. Past recipients of Israeli global disaster aid have been Mumbai, the place where Muslim terrorists murdered six Jews at the Chabad House and more than 150 others in nearby hotels more than a year ago.
Israel also sent help to China after an earthquake and to Myanmar after a cyclone in 2008 and assisted Turkish earthquake victims in 1999. Other assistance was given to Peru, India and El Salvador earthquake victims in 2001 and Sri Lankan flood victims in 2003.
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