Jerusalem Diaries:In Tense Times -Dafna, Shmuel and Lives that Were Changed by Judy Lash Balint
http://jerusalemdiaries.blogspot.com/2016/01/dafna-shmuel-and-lives-that-were-changed.html
I’ve been writing for Emunah Magazine for years. Emunah runs a network of residential homes and educational facilities for disadvantaged kids that change lives.
Dafna Meir, the mother of 6 murdered earlier this week by a 15 year-old Arab terror-teen, came from a difficult home background and was raised in Emunah’s Achuzat Sara Children’s Home in Bnei Brak.
Achuzat Sara is an oasis of order and stability in a rundown neighborhood peopled almost exclusively by poor, ultra-orthodox families. What’s most striking about Achuzat Sara is not its fancy building–it was built in the early 1960s–but the quiet dedication of its leadership and staff. Shmuel Ron, director of the home, moved his wife Ita and their four kids into the grounds when he started working there, back in the 1980s.
I interviewed Shmuel several years ago, and he told me, “My first job is to make the children feel comfortable here, to be a better place than the homes they came from. We give them a home that looks a lot like a house, not an institution,” he explained as he proudly showed me around the tidy, cluster-style accommodations, each headed by a Torah observant young couple.
“Our next goal is to take them as they are, and to help them go as far as possible,” Shmuel added.
As we walked around the immaculate campus where thousands of needy and traumatized Israeli kids have found a refuge over the years, Shmuel told me that most institutions steer away from the really difficult and most needy kids. “Here we see them as a mission. That’s what drives me; to do whatever we can to heal the wounds.”
Dafna became a nurse, a wife, a mother and foster mother, an adviser and teacher on halachic issues regarding fertility and a pillar of her community, Otniel.
I’d say Dafna, Shmuel and Emunah fulfilled their mission.
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