Press

Read about the prestigious Bonei Zion prize awarded to our founder and director, Micha Odenheimer

Read about Tevel’s efforts to help rebuild in Nepal following the devastating earthquake of 2015.

Using ingenuity to overcome its serious water challenges, Israel has become the go-to expert for a world facing an impending water crisis. This year’s WATEC expo and conference, to be held in September in Tel Aviv, is expected to attract 10,000 stakeholders from 90 countries seeking Israeli solutions for water issues.

Even before the earthquake hit last April, destroying 700,000 homes in the hill country of Central Nepal, these villages were in crisis. For a complex of reasons, these villagers – like villagers all over the “two-thirds world” in Asia, Africa and South America – are mostly unable to feed their families with what they have been able to produce on their small plots of land.

Ever since a catastrophic earthquake hit Nepal in April 2015, the entire Tamang family has been living in a “cottage.” A local engineer determined that their original house, built 60 years ago Manegau village 15 miles east of Kathmandu, was in danger of collapse if another earthquake hit.

Micha Odenheimer is sitting in a restaurant in the Mahaneh Yehudah market in Jerusalem, having a last good meal before taking off for Nepal the following morning. He’d been in Kathmandu barely two weeks earlier, just before the earthquake.

KATHMANDU, Nepal – Shira Langer was heading into a lazy day. Typically, Saturday’s find the 31-year-old senior staffer in the Israeli organization Tevel b’Tzedek’s Nepal office heading over to the Thamel tourist zone, to give in laundry and maybe take a vinyasa class at a favorite yoga studio.

This Rosh Hashanah will mark the beginning of a Shmita or Sabbatical year. According to the Torah – as featured in this week’s Torah reading, Behar – every seven years the land must be allowed to rest “a Sabbath for YHVH.” Working the land is forbidden; so is harvesting more than what you immediately need.

Over the past eight years, Tevel b’Tzedek has been working in Nepal, a very beautiful, very poor country snuggled-or thrust-between India and Tibet. Founded to create a Jewish platform to connect Israelis and Jews to the challenges of extreme poverty in the global south, Tevel now works in Burundi, Africa as well-but Nepal is our home away from home.

THE Australian Jewish community has mobilised behind the victims and survivors of Nepal’s deadly earthquake, which has so far recorded a death toll of close to 5000 people, many more thousands injured, and widespread destruction.

Tevel staff and volunteers report from the field in the Manegau village, where homes have been flattened by the recent earthquake.