7 more virus deaths bring toll to 72; 10 are from Beersheba elder care facility
Israel reported seven new deaths from the coronavirus Wednesday, bringing the number of fatalities in the country from COVID-19 to 72.In New York, the Distance Between Life and Death Grows Shorter
At Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, a 97-year-old man and a 96-year-old man died.
According to Hebrew media reports, the two were residents of the Mishan assisted living facility in the southern city, raising the number of people from there who died of the virus to 10.
Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv announced the death of two men, a 77 and 75-year-old.
Another victim, a 67-year-old woman, had numerous preexisting conditions, according to Rambam Medical Center. Her husband was also sick and hospitalized elsewhere, though it was unclear from reports whether he also was infected with the virus.
The other fatality was a 85-year-old man being treated at HaEmek Medical Center in the northern city of Afula.
The man, who suffered from preexisting diseases, was a resident of the Yokra assisted living facility in the northern town of Yavne’el. He was the third resident of the facility to die, the Ynet news site reported.
The seventh fatality was a 90-year-old woman who died at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center.
For the city’s Jews, community has become a source of both danger and protection. Crown Heights, Williamsburg, and Borough Park are places where everyone knows and sees everyone else. “You can look at it as one big giant family that lost so many members,” Labin says of his neighborhood. For many, daily life is organized around spending time with a group of at least 10 people three times a day. The coronavirus preys on such tightknit places, and yet cohesion is also a line of defense. In Crown Heights, an organization of local Jewish medical professionals set up a help line early in the crisis and has now conducted an extensive survey tracking the virus’ impact among the area’s Chabad Hasidim.Morocco’s Tiny Jewish Community Hit Hard by Coronavirus, With 11 Dead
March and April are the giving season in religious communities—charitable fundraising drives are often built around the upcoming Passover holiday. In every neighborhood, there are existing volunteer and charitable organizations, many of which are now under intense strain. The economic crisis means that former donors are now recipients. In a normal year everyone would give something if they could, as Alex Rapaport, director of the Masbia soup kitchen explained. Rapaport mentioned a neighbor of his who installs kitchen equipment for a living and is usually busy in the runup to Passover. The coronavirus has effectively put him out of work. “Last year he gave to the Pesach campaigns. This year he’s on line at the soup kitchens.” Rapaport says that demand for Masbia’s services is at roughly five times its normal levels and that the organization is distributing $100,000 worth of food every day, much of it to people who aren’t Jewish. “We’re actually giving matzo to people in seven different languages. There are lots of immigrants on line from many different countries of the world, and they can have matzo for the first time.”
Masbia will halt distributions over Passover. By then, Rapaport says, “There isn’t going to be a single piece of food in our facility.”
Supply isn’t Rapaport’s biggest problem, though—it’s labor. People are getting sick at a time when additional assistance is required to scale up operations. A shrinking pool of workers and volunteers is an issue throughout Jewish charitable organizations. The need is increasing while capacity rapidly contracts.
“Right now, our volunteers are at a very low number,” says Goldie Deutsch, coordinator for the Satmar Bikur Cholim of Borough Park. In normal times, Bikur Cholim maintains stockpiles of free kosher food and other such supplies in New York-area hospitals. Now that hospitals are closed to visitors, Deutsch and her volunteers have mostly been delivering food to coronavirus patients and their families. They are struggling to keep up. “We get a lot of phone calls for shiva houses,” says Deutsch. “People are sitting shiva and they need food. People are overwhelmed, but we have to use a thousand-times bigger word than overwhelmed ... We feel helpless. And in our organization we were taught from our cradle: Never say no. No matter where we are financially, we can never say no. “
One organization that has seen an especially wrenching jump in need is Links, which assists children in the Orthodox community who have lost a parent. Last week, Sarah Rivkah Kohn, the organization’s Borough Park-based founder and director, explained that 21 new families had approached her group in the previous 10 days, which is the number it would see during a typical four-to-five-month period. Since the crisis began, Kohn has conducted Zoom video sessions with preschool-age kids and received phone calls from children who got her number second- or third-hand.
“This kind of grieving is a very different kind of grieving,” Kohn explained. There’s the enormity of the disaster, suddenness of the disease, and the cruel impossibility of a normal shiva and funeral. “There is a sense that this just spun out of control so quickly, so fast. My father or my mother were just here, and now they're not.” Kohn anticipates that her organization’s budgeting for therapy will have to dramatically increase, although the impact of the crisis is too vast to measure right now. “It’s a very unique and different kind of loss ... It’s just something where we don’t have the answers yet.”
Morocco’s tiny Jewish community has taken a major hit from the coronavirus pandemic, with 11 members from the community of less than 2,000 people dying of the disease so far.
Most of Morocco’s once-thriving Jewish population fled the country beginning in 1948, moving largely to Israel and France.
The Israeli news site N12 reported on Wednesday that the latest community member to be taken was Yemin Peretz, 74, who passed away on Tuesday at a hospital in Casablanca, a week after his wife Simone and son Ari died of the virus. Ari’s wife Pascal Peretz is also in serious condition and is on a respirator at a hospital.
The four victims are relatives of Israel’s Labor party leader Amir Peretz.
“The blows fall on us one after the other,” a member of the Casablanca Jewish community said. “Almost every day there is a funeral for someone from the community who died from corona.”
“We have not yet recovered from the death of Ari and Simone, and yesterday the father Yemin also passed away,” he added. “They were the mainstays of the community, contributed greatly and helped a multitude of people. We pray that Pascal will survive.”
“We’re also such a very small community,” he said.
It is believed that the heavy toll is the result of a large Purim party attended by hundreds of people who had also been at a wedding a few days before with a person infected with the coronavirus.
The president of the Jewish community sent a letter to all members telling them not to leave their homes during the Passover holiday.