NEURIM

The dropouts

They dropped out from wherever they were.

They dropped out of school, kicked out of high school, moved around from one framework to another.

Boys and girls, with a baggage full of pain, wandering around, with confusion and many questions unanswered.

With a fierce look on their face, which tries to conceal their helplessness.

A determined expression with a silent cry behind it:

H E L P! I’m lost!

According to recent research, 16% of Israeli youth are at risk and in distress. From our vast array of activities for needy families at the various Chasdei Yossef projects, we are constantly exposed to difficult and intricate cases in which young men and women from ultra-Orthodox families experience violence, suffer from behavioral or mental disorders, or are in neglect and being abused. Some of the teenage boys and girls we meet live in difficult circumstances and life puts them in risky situations: They are raised in broken homes, in the shadow of their parents’ divorce, lonely and widowed, live in abject poverty and experience genuine existential financial troubles, have a family member either physically or mentally ill, go through immigration issues after making aliya and other situations that we would all rather not know about…

Unfortunately, only less than half of ultra-Orthodox youth at risk are treated by the authorities and the welfare institutions. And the rest? The rest are those youths you meet in city squares during the night at the best of cases…

If you stop for a moment and try to get into that boy’s clumsy shoes, that girl’s bleeding heart, try to understand what lies behind the defiance, what lies beyond the courage, you will find a ripped-apart and bleeding inner world that is hurt and hopeless, lost…

But in Neurim, nothing is lost!

In various and unusual ways, with creative thinking requiring flexibility and improvisation, we hire the best professionals who have a warm and inclusive heart, and recruit them to solution-finding rescue missions for support and rehabilitation.

The fruits of investment speak for themselves: In the past year alone, with the expansion of our activities among youths:

–We have launched a program to avert drop outs of the education system.

–We have assisted dozens of youths who were expelled from the education systems by returning them to the system with a cover of support or placement in a suitable alternative framework.

–We have provided hundreds of hours of individual counseling to parents and educational staff.

–We have held psychodrama therapy classes with the integration of arts by senior and experienced A-rated caregivers.

–We initiated and employed a detection and identification tool of addiction victims in the community through social workers in our services.

–We turned dozens to professional, mental or emotional care.

As a community-based organization, we have managed to create collaborations and trust with many community, educational and professional entities, and we have also used volunteer men and women in support, adoption and mentoring activities.

All those activities are just a drop in the bucket of needs. Please help us assist many more desperate appeals that clamor from the depths of pain!