Summit Institute, which is responsible for finding foster families in southern Israel and Jerusalem, is urgently looking for foster families for about 20 children from the south aged 10-3, including siblings.
These are at-risk children, who were removed from their homes by court orders and are now staying with emergency foster families. These families are a temporary home, until a permanent foster family is found to provide the children with a stable place. The children who seek a home for them are traumatized after being abused, neglected, violent and not having a basic solution in their parents' home. Now they are undergoing a double trauma in the experience of war and the security situation, without a stable home.
Among the children who are looking for a warm home are a quartet of siblings, the eldest is 8 years old and the youngest is 3, three brothers aged 10-3, a couple of siblings and other children. All of them, up to the age of 10, some have special needs.
The goal is not to separate the brothers, and there is an understanding that it will be more difficult to find one home for the quartet of brothers. In this case, Summit Institute intends to find them two close homes and ensure that a connection is established between the two foster families, in order to preserve the all-important bond between the siblings.
Mira Werker, director of foster family recruitment at Summit Institute, says most of the new inquiries have come in the past two weeks because the war has stalled, as it did during the pandemic. This was mainly because the children stayed at home and the educational frameworks were closed, so there were no reports to the Welfare Department about these children.
"Once you get back to normal, there are more reports of welfare. During the war, we couldn't tell what was happening in the houses. Now the reports are back. We are now in an emergency period of recruiting families," says Werker. "These are children who are already traumatized from the moment they are born. They were born into a dysfunctional family, experienced abuse and neglect and were removed from the home. The trauma accumulated in them from the day they were born, and now during this period it intensifies even more, with the alarms they experience, the frameworks that did not work, and some of them were even evacuated from their homes. They are undergoing not only a personal upheaval but also a national upheaval. We must find them a home as soon as possible, with our close accompaniment."
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us