Offering help to the world’s neediest people

A woman arrived on the shores of the Greek island of Lesbos. She and hundreds of others were fleeing civil war in Syria. They had been adrift on a flimsy boat for at least a day without food or water.

The woman was also about to give birth.

Luckily, IsraAID, an Israeli non-profit humanitarian group, was there to help, giving the refugees blankets, food and medical aid — and delivering a baby.

“She asked if it was a boy or a girl,” Navonel Voni Glick, IsraAID’s chief operating officer and deputy director, told an audience of about 60 people at the Oceanside Jewish Center on March 17. “They turned and said, ‘You’re now the proud mother of a healthy baby boy’ … That was the first of six births on the beach.”

The mother and her child now live in Germany.

The organization, headquartered in Beer Sheva, Israel, helped people after earthquakes in Haiti, an earthquake and tsunami in Japan, a typhoon in the Philippines and the aftermath of war in the new nation of South Sudan. It also helped families much closer to home clean out their homes after Hurricane Sandy. “I haven’t been back to Long Island since Hurricane Sandy,” Glick said. “That was my first time in New York.”

In Nepal, an IsraAID team arrived four days after an earthquake and dug bodies out from beneath a collapsed guesthouse. Rescuers removed 21 bodies, but residents knew there had been 22 people in the building. Using a life-detecting microphone, they found the last person — alive. A cleaning woman had found a pocket of air under a dead body. The team pulled her out of the rubble five days after she had been buried.

IsraAID also provides psychological and social support to those who are rebuilding after trauma and devastation. “We generally focus on one thing — saving lives,” Glick said of the first few days after a crisis. “But then, very quickly, the question becomes what happens once … it’s been a few months. Do you still keep giving out food? When do you stop? How do you help people that are terrified, that are traumatized? How do you help them not just today … how do you help them think about tomorrow?”