Israel Active

Israel’s Guy Cohen will take part in the 20 Bridges Swim around Manhattan - one of the hardest swims in the world. He is raising funds for research by Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center into Sudden Cardiac Death, which took his six-year-old daughter Netta 15 years ago.

I reported previously on Israel’s Tech-Career which has helped over 400 young Ethiopian-Israelis launch careers in the Israeli hi-tech industry.  Here is a more recent article about the work of this vital non-profit organization.

Thanks to "Refuah V'simcha," an organization which helps sick and needy people, Israel will have its first separate handicapped-accessible beach in Ashdod.  It will have an access route right up to the water line, allowing the physically handicapped to preserve their dignity.

As part of the Finance Ministry’s family assistance program, Israel is subsidizing afternoon daycare for all families. The Israeli Parliament also passed a law capping prices for after-school care.

Following Montenegro’s appeal to NATO for international help, Israel dispatched firefighters and 4 planes to assist the Balkan state in tackling devastating forest fires that have spread across the country’s coast. A new heatwave in the region is expected to cause further wildfires.

Israeli non-profit Haifa 3D prints prosthetic hands for children and adults at no cost. Haifa 3D volunteers receive assistance from Israel’s Technion and donations for computers, printers, plastics and all other parts. They even designed a hand that can hold a guitar pick.

A 100-strong delegation joined Philippe Couillard’s first official visit to Israel by a Quebec premier. His priority was to open a Quebec trade office in Israel and set-up an artificial intelligence and metadata partnership. A $12 million program will support bilateral industrial R&D projects.

In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed agreements with the (Jewish) Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman covering disaster co-operation, medicine and health, trade statistics and temporary workers.  Ukraine recently voted against UNESCO’s anti-Israel resolution.

In the IDF’s “Operation Good Neighbor”, which began Aug 2016, there have been over 110 individual aid events. The goal was to reach as many needy Syrians as possible, without violating Israel’s carefully crafted policy of non-intervention in the Syrian civil war.

Thanks to fingerprint readers and workers’ buses, it now takes only 8 minutes for 50 Palestinian Arab factory workers to cross the “Green Line” each day on their way to work. The new system is being piloted prior to being rolled out across Israel, Judea and Samaria.