250 tourists from Poland hosted and celebrated Sukkot with hundreds of survivors of the Holocaust in the Jerusalem area. The event comes after thousands of food baskets and shopping bags were distributed to Holocaust survivors by Israeli activists and volunteers to help Israel. A group of 250 Polish fans of Israel found an original way to celebrate their first stay in Jerusalem.
This past weekend, they organized and hosted an impressive tribute event to hundreds of survivors of the Holocaust throughout Jerusalem and the surrounding area and invited them to a gourmet Sukkah holiday, parent dancing, joint prayer and music at the Wedding Club event complex in Jerusalem. Luke Gasiorowski, Director of Helping Hand Coalition Israel, who co-organized the event with the Reverend York Reichertsky, said that this is the first time that tourists from Poland have been staying for 10 days in hotels across the city of Jerusalem, they will visit the Kotel, Yad Vashem and the city’s tourist sites and seek to strengthen the ties between the Polish people and the people. In Israel and especially to help as much as possible to survivors of the Holocaust.
The tourists stayed in previous years in Ashdod and Or Akiva and this year they decided to focus on Jerusalem. Hundreds of survivors of the Holocaust throughout Jerusalem and the surrounding area were brought from their homes on 10 buses to the event and during a gourmet dinner and evening packed with activities sung in Polish, Russian and Hebrew and at the same time danced with members of the Polish parent dance delegation. Vladimir Zranitsky, a Holocaust survivor from Jerusalem, thrilled the crowd as he sang Jerusalem of gold and made peace. Chairman of Helping Hand Coalition, Andre Gasiorowski, said that the distribution of thousands of food baskets, including diverse groceries and basic staples, to thousands of survivors of the Holocaust across the country today, has ended.
Hundreds of Helping Hand Coalition activists and volunteers have assisted in distributing commodities in over 25 cities and communities including Jerusalem, Mevaseret, Mateh Yehuda and throughout the country. Food baskets included basic essentials, gift packs including wine, shopping notes for food chains, hygiene and toiletries, kitchen tools and more. Some of the products recently arrived in containers from Global Aid Network(GAiN) in Germany and were distributed through survivors of the Holocaust volunteers, needy families, single mothers, and especially single elderly people. Helping Hand Coalition Israel is an organization that works to help survivors of the Holocaust across the country through a variety of actions and measures including the Shalom House project operated by 25 local authorities and allows survivors to enjoy a hot meal and social gathering, import containers with private clothing that is distributed free to survivors, food coupons for use by survivors of the Holocaust, documenting survivors’ memoirs, calling for medical help, initiating bar mitzvah celebrations for survivors who did not celebrate it as a child, assisting and participating in the parade, assisting individual IDF soldiers in the northern region, and dozens of other projects.
In the photo: Andre Gasiorowski, Luke Gasiorowski, and Pastor York Reichertsky
Public Relations: Yitzhak Ravichia, Communication: 054-7999209