Salman Kablan, a 15-year-old student from the Druze community living in Arad with his family, decided together with his friends from the ORT Arad school to help Holocaust survivors in their city use computers.
"Before I became a Druze I was a human being," said Salman, whose family is the only Druze family in Arad, adding, "Religion is the only thing that differentiates us. That's the least I can do for Holocaust survivors."
Every week they reach out to a couple of Holocaust survivors and help them open a Facebook page, use software to register family trees and listen to their personal story from the Holocaust period.
Salman says he knew a few elderly people in his neighborhood, many of them Holocaust survivors.
"I would visit them and check on them. I felt their pain, and I felt I had to do something for them," he says.
Salman Kablan (in black), with his friends, Photo: Yachz
Salman and his 15-year-old friends meet Holocaust survivors in their area of residence as part of the "Connected" project.
As part of the project of the Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund, the ORT network, the Ministry of Welfare and the British-Jewish organization JNF UK, Holocaust survivors also received hundreds of computers and an Internet connection.
Salman Kablan was only three years old when his family moved from the Druze settlement of Beit Jann in the Galilee to the Ramon base in the south, where his father, the officer, served in a senior position.
In recent years, he and his family have been living in Arad.
"I'm 88, and I're just recently starting to understand what to do with the computer," says Michael Rubinchak of St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, adding, "They explain to me how to sign up for Facebook or order products. They also help me build a family tree on the computer because I had a family. "It's very big."
His wife Nella tells how they were forced to flee during the war from St. Petersburg to Siberia, to a cold of minus 40 degrees.
"We lived in a hut without heating, the food was very limited and we were quite hungry, but we stayed alive, thank God," she says, adding that thanks to volunteering she has become very active in various Facebook groups.
Shmuel Haik, Chairman of JNF UK, Photo: Yachz
Shmuel Haik, chairman of the JNF UK partner in the project, said: "With the UN decision to fight Holocaust denial, on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day and in these days when the Omicron strain is rampant, it is important not to forget the elderly Holocaust survivors, some of whom live alone. "The youth in Arad, without religious differences, allow them through technology to feel part of the community and not be forgotten in old age."
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