Middle East

When you’ve had cancer, your emotional taste buds change everything. A sunset is more brilliant, smells of flowers are magnified, music touches the heart more. So when my daughter sent me a WhatsApp in December, 2017, that she was in the delivery room in a hospital in the Negev, I burst into tears. We have, bli ayin hara, many grandchildren, and I’ve attended some of those births, but I never cried before upon hearing that a daughter was in the delivery room. Yet here I was sobbing uncontrollably.

… “Arugot” is Hebrew for “flower beds” and in the last 30 years Arugot has planted seeds for the success of more than 4,000 children.

Dr Jeremiah Lubasch, founder of Arugot, is a pediatrician from Argentina, to which his parents had fled from Germany and the Nazis in 1939. He made aliya to Israel with his family in 1977 and they settled in Haifa, where he discovered, through his work, that there were  problems that were going untreated, especially among the Haredi population, who were unwilling to send their children to secular pre-schools or therapy centers.