From Dead Sea to Sydney, volunteers step up to help homeless Israelis

As Dead Sea hotels gain a new identity as evacuation centres, Australians are also helping Israelis from afar. ITTAY FLESCHER meets a volunteer helping evacuees in Israel and a charity chief in Sydney.

Since the start of the  war, more than  200,000 Israelis from the Gaza  and Lebanon borders have been evacuated from their homes to hotels, mainly in Eilat, the Dead Sea and Jerusalem.

Orit Angel, a multimedia artist and startup consultant from Jerusalem, has spent the past two weeks volunteering with evacuees from Sderot at the Dead Sea hotels. Speaking to The Jewish Independent, she said: “even though I need to take care of two elderly parents, as soon as I saw the call for volunteers at the hotels, I made arrangements and put everything in my life on hold so I could go down and help.”

After short training from the local councils in charge of the evacuation operation, volunteers undertook a range of tasks from operating a school in the hotel, organising trips for families, birthday parties for kids, setting up a laundry service, emotional counselling, providing clothing and toiletries and much more.

There are currently over 11,000 evacuees from the south in the Dead Sea hotels which are now operating at almost full capacity with all the tourists out of the country. Angel said some of the families from Sderot were initially quite excited to be put up in these hotels, being places they usually couldn’t afford to go on a holiday.

But within a few days, once they realised their stay there would be far longer than excepted, any sense of excitement turned to fear and trepidation about the future.

Angel added that some families were so traumatised from what they saw on October 7, many of whom saw Hamas terrorists with guns standing outside their houses shooting people in the street, that they are now unable even to leave their hotel rooms. “They are crushed, people just break in these moments.”