A Table for Two and a Longing for More

Dear Friends,

This past spring, as our team prepared the Passover gift card distribution, the skies over Israel were anything but calm. Missiles from Iran were falling from the sky, sirens were sounding, and families everywhere were running for shelter. It would have been understandable to pause, to wait until the danger passed. But the families counting on us could not wait. And so, even as the alarms wailed, our team carried help to those who had no one else to turn to.

One of them was D., a young mother.

To a passing stranger, D. and her little boy might look like any ordinary pair. He is just four or five years old, full of the questions and wonder of any child his age. But behind their door is a kind of quiet that most of us can scarcely imagine. D. is divorced and raising her son entirely on her own. She is cut off from the very family members and friends who would gladly host her, isolated in a way that is hard to put into words. There are no invitations to a parent’s Shabbat table, no holidays spent surrounded by cousins and laughter, no one to share the weight of an ordinary week. Her whole world has narrowed to just two people: herself and her son.

There is one other soul under her roof. Her elderly father lives with her, and she nurses him day and night. He is the only family connection she and her boy have left, and he is frail, in need of constant care rather than able to give it. So D. carries the weight on her own. She is mother, daughter, nurse, and provider all at once, and she does it alone. Loneliness settles over her home like a fog that never quite lifts.

Then there is the matter of the dinner table.

D.’s finances are stretched so thin that preparing a proper Shabbat or holiday meal is simply beyond her. And so she has developed a habit that breaks our hearts. When a holiday draws near, and she feels the crisis pressing in on her small home, she takes her son to a playground and stays there until the sky grows dark. She does this on purpose. She is trying to spare her little boy the questions she cannot bear to answer. Where is our holiday meal? Why don’t we visit family like the other children in my class?

Only late at night, when those questions have faded into tiredness, do they return home and eat whatever happens to be there.

Consider for a moment what this means for her son. At his young age, he has never known the simple experience of sitting at a family holiday table. He has never felt the warmth of belonging that a family gathering brings. The only family figure in his little life is a grandfather who is himself too unwell and unable to give much. This is the world D. is trying, against impossible odds, to hold together.

When our staff placed a gift card in D.’s hands this Passover, it was so much more than a sum of money. It carried a message she desperately needed to hear: we see you, and we have not forgotten you. With that card, D. could walk into a store and choose food for her son without shame. She could prepare something for the holiday rather than hiding from it. For one season, the table could be full.

D. is one woman, but she stands for thousands across Israel who are carrying heavy burdens in silence. They are cut off from family, stretched past their limits, and frightened by the sirens overhead. Vision for Israel exists to reach them, one gift card, one meal, one act of love at a time. And we are able to do it only because friends like you choose to stand with us.

This is the very heart of our calling. Scripture tells us that God is a father to the fatherless and that He sets the lonely in families. When you give, you become His hands and His heart, drawing a weary mother and her little boy into a family far larger than they ever knew they had.

Would you help us reach the next person before the next holiday arrives? Even now, families are bracing for the difficult months ahead, and the need has not slowed. Your gift today, of any size, places food on an empty table and hope in a heart that has nearly run out of it. To stand with families like D.’s, please give now and dedicate your gift to “Aid to the Poor”.
Through every siren and every shadow, the people of Israel endure. And because of friends like you, they do not have to live alone.


With love and gratitude,

Barry & Batya

*Price changed due to the low dollar rate.