The goals of Keren Malki

This 'open letter' was composed in September 2001. The activities of Keren Malki have come a long way since then, but the focus has never shifted. Go here to see what we're doing now.

Arnold Roth

The life of our lovely daughter Malka Chana was tragically ended on 9th August 2001 by an act of barbarism. 

When thinking about the right way to remember and honor her life, we - her family - felt that the most appropriate thing we could do was to continue her acts of hesed (Hebrew for loving-kindness) through the establishment of a charity.

Malki took an exceptionally strong interest in helping children with disabilities. You can read more about this in her mother's letter. In her memory, Keren Malki is dedicated to providing specific services and equipment for families of severely disabled children. It seeks to provide essential and practical assistance to severely handicapped children in Israel; assistance of a kind that is almost completely unavailable at present, although the need is great.

Enabling home care as an option

Broadly, the goal of the foundation is to fill the gap in the care of these children and thereby improve the quality of life of both the severely handicapped child and the family by:

We plan to extend our services in the future in response to the on-going needs of families caring for a child with severe disabilities.

The challenge

Israeli law and practice discriminates against those families who wish to care for their severely handicapped child at home, rather than placing them in an institution. The law stipulates a minimum monthly number of therapy hours to which every brain-damaged child is entitled. On average, this comes to about 3.5 hours per week, which covers the full range of therapy options: physiotherapy, speech, occupational, musical and so on. A drop in the bucket, relative to the needs of the seriously handicapped. But in actual fact, even this modest level is rarely achieved.

The problem is that the government and the health funds only support these services if they are provided at an institution. But the Catch-22 is that therapists are often woefully underpaid and in short supply. So the institutions frequently lack the budget and the resources to deliver those critically important services.

Malki's involvement in the care of her youngest sister, Haya-Elisheva, who suffers from severe health problems, sensitized her to the needs of handicapped children from a very young age. Apart from the help she so willingly gave at home, Malki volunteered to work with special-needs children whenever her busy school life and youth movement obligations permitted. She experienced directly the problems that exist for a family like ours which was determined to take care of our handicapped child at home. There are a limited number of options, none of them very satisfactory.

An ongoing battle

Our experience has been that the health and education systems, the health funds and the institutions themselves, discourage families from keeping their handicapped children at home. For those, like us, who firmly believe there is no better place for a child with serious problems than home, this has made an already heavy load even heavier.

In our case, we were pretty highly motivated, and ended up fighting our health fund for the right to get certain services in the home, and in the quantities and at the times that met the needs of our child and our family. Frimet, Malki's and Haya's mother, wrote newspaper articles, and we went to meetings with bureaucrats which eventually produced some results. This is an ongoing battle for us. But not everyone has the background or the energy to do this. And remember: We're speaking of families already coping with the significant burden of caring for a child with special needs. Such people often have very little left to fight the system.

Addressing an unmet need

Much of the Western world is moving towards a strong preference for home-care (sometimes called family-based alternative care) over institutional care. In the past, the conventional thinking was that the best place for the handicapped child was an institution-a place that was designed to provide food and shelter, therapy, and coordinated medical care. But, too often, such places were unable to focus on quality of life for these children. Today, there's a growing realization that even the best of institutional care is less good than the loving environment of a child's own home. In most situations, the longer a child can remain in the home environment, the better for the child.

To make the most effective use of Keren Malki's resources, we are in negotiation with some very reputable Israeli organizations to provide us with logistical and administrative support for Keren Malki's work. These arrangements will enable us to outsource, at little or even no cost, the warehousing of the specialized equipment, and make it available to families in need on the most convenient possible basis. Rather than waste money on duplicating what's already out there, we will be free to completely devote our efforts to doing what is NOT available now, particularly in the Jerusalem area. To ensure that overhead expenses are as small as possible for as long as possible, all the work of Keren Malki is currently being done by family, friends and volunteers.

We are also in the process of putting together an advisory board of experts in the field. Their experience, together with ours as parents, will help us to stay focused on the real needs of families of developmentally and physically challenged children.

Making a difference

Please help us to get the work of Keren Malki off to a strong start. Frimet and I believe that with your help, we can make a difference.

There is no reason for me to gloss over what we have gone through since the awful afternoon, evening and night of August 9th, 2001. This has been a heartbreaking time for our family. Our prayer is that the work we're starting in Malki's name will help to ensure her tragic and senseless death does not become simply another statistic.

May HaShem grant us the merit of seeing much better times - quickly - for our sakes, and for our children.

Arnold Roth  (Malki's father)
Jerusalem / September 2001

Malki (at left) devoted herself to helping children with special needs. This snapshot was taken ten days before she was murdered;  she was serving as a volunteer leader at the Etgarim summer camp for teenagers with disabilities.

January 2003 Update: The Keren Malki Unit at Jerusalem's Yad Sarah Organization was officially inaugurated on 7th January. Click here to read about it.