Published: 26 March 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
ONLINE DRAMA CLASSES, deliveries of Kosher meals to the ill and vulnerable, virtual bedtime stories, and sessions on mindfulness and positive mental health: these are some of the ways members of Melbourne’s Jewish community are assisting each other through the online Facebook group, Jewish Response Coronavirus.
Founded by social justice organisation Stand Up, this volunteer-run platform has created a space for community members to ask questions, request assistance, offer their help and stay socially connected as the increasing number of coronavirus cases forces us into stricter social isolation measures.
For Gideon Reisner, the Facebook group’s administrator and Stand Up CEO, creating the group was about establishing a community hub to bring people together in this time of crisis.
“It is simply to connect people who need help … with people who can help,” Reisner says.
I knew that the community needed one place where they could go if they needed help and if we brought everyone together and we did it in a coordinated fashion, we could do it more effectively - Gideon Reisner
“I knew that the community needed one place where they could go if they needed help and if we brought everyone together and we did it in a coordinated fashion, we could do it more effectively.”
The assistance the group provides is varied. One member offers accommodation for people needing to self-isolate. A family posts that their tennis court is available for use by one family at a time during the school holidays, with dedicated access and a strict schedule to ensure that social distancing is observed.
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There are requests for EpiPens and face masks, community charities making daily food deliveries to the ill, aged or vulnerable people, wellbeing committee updates on ways to cope with stress and anxiety and webinars on managing mental health.
Other members offer employment to those who have lost their job and babysitting services for frontline healthcare workers. Responses to questions posted on the page come quickly, and solutions to problems are practical and creative.
Reisner launched the group on March 17 and membership has already grown to more than 5000 people. Volunteers from across the community have put their hands up to coordinate and manage the assistance the group can provide.
Shopping coordinators oversee requests for products and items and organise deliveries, while teaching materials coordinators post details of activities for children and ways they can continue to learn and keep active while housebound.
Kade Bernam is a healthcare wellness packs coordinator who is helping to organise packages for healthcare workers to be delivered to major hospitals. So far, the group has received donations of care items such as chocolate and lip balms, and community members and school students have written letters of appreciation to doctors and nurses.
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Even this gesture of recognition comes with much thought and planning. Strict measures are in place to ensure the packages meet hospital hygiene requirements, such as handwriting and illustrating letters on hygienically printed cards which are then scanned and sent to healthcare workers.
“I think it’s really important to recognise the people who are trying so hard to keep the community intact,” Bernam says. “Once we start helping the people that help us, there’s a beautiful cycle that emerges.”
The need for community members to help each other resonates deeply with Simonne Whine, the group’s charity liaison and volunteer group coordinator. Since helping to set up the online group last week, Whine has been involved in organising responses to requests, liaising with other Jewish charity groups and helping to set up similar online communities in Sydney and Perth.
Once we start helping the people that help us, there’s a beautiful cycle that emerges - Kade Bernam
“We have to work together to help each other because we don’t know what’s about to happen. We need people in place, like a volunteer army that is going to help people who are in need but also in a state of panic.”
For Whine, the “wins” of the past week are many. They include offers from over 300 volunteers to assist the Jewish community, donations of exercise classes and tutoring services, offers of portable dental services to elderly or immuno-compromised patients, and deliveries of food and medical supplies to those who cannot access them. Due to interstate quarantine restrictions, and after much logistical organisation, a Tasmanian Pesach Operation will even see the Chabad community in Tasmania receiving Pesach orders via a driverless truck on the Spirit of Tasmania.
For Gideon Reisner, the efforts of these 300-plus volunteers is a reminder of how the Jewish community sticks together and supports each other in dire circumstances.
“Every time I start to get a handle on [the virus] it just slips away. The job losses, the fear and the loneliness and the isolation and how it’s an invisible enemy, it’s just extraordinary,” he says.
“What this group does is make us think as a collective, and when we think as a collective in the community, we’re invincible,” he says. “Fundamentally, I feel like the Jewish community, we’ve got each other’s backs … and this group has just reinforced that.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the creation of a database for volunteers to call people in need of company or a friendly chat. The well-being committee matches callers with those who have contacted the group and are feeling socially isolated.
“I think that at a fundamental level, this group is showing people that we can still be together, even though we can’t,” says Reisner.
“It’s a source of hope.”
Illustration: John Kron
