The Fellowship helps Israel's Youth at Risk through ELEM Van program

ELEM GALA TOUTS ITS SUCCESS IN RESCUING ISRAEL’S YOUTH AT RISK
JULY 24, 2009

By Masha Leon


“Who could believe this happened in Israel?!” ELEM/America president Ann Bialkin said at the organization’s June 17 gala, held at the Jewish Museum. “When ELEM — Youth In Distress in Israel started 27 years ago in America, its founders… could not believe the number of young people who were in court because of criminal acts! At least 300,000 Israeli youth [15% of Israel’s population] is at risk — alienated; vulnerable; victims of drugs, dysfunctional families.”

She credited ELEM’s multifaceted outreach programs with “linking them back to family, community and country.” Bialkin noted: “Despite the severe economic crisis, we have raised over $450,000 tonight and heard from Israel that we will receive $1 million for next year from The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews for our van program, which travels all over Israel every night of the week.” Asaf Shariv, Israel’s consul general, offered welcoming greetings. Michael Corriero, executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York, and Bialkin’s husband, Ken Bialkin, a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP , presented awards to the gala’s honorees: the Honorable Judith Kaye (retired), chief judge of the State of New York, and Phyllis Korff, a Skadden, Arps partner.

Hosted by NBC News’ legal analyst, Dan Abrams, CEO of Abrams Research, the dinner’s three co-chairs were Abrams’s father, Floyd Abrams, of Cahill, Gordon & Reindel LLP, whom late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “the most significant First Amendment lawyer of our age”; Joseph Flom, senior partner at Skadden, Arps, and Bernard Nussbaum, senior litigation partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. From 1993 to 1994, Nussbaum served as counsel to the president of the United States. A supervisor at an ELEM center in Rehovot, Dana Kohn, described the case of one of its clients, “a 15-year-old girl [who fled her home], ended up living with a 60-year-old man with whom she had to sleep.” Then the man “brought more men to sleep with her….The girl called the police and was rescued. Since then, she has undergone treatment, was involved in computer studies but,” Kohn stressed,” the most effective therapeutic Bialkin also alluded to Israel’s historic convulsions as contributing factors to the juvenile distress that ELEM encounters.

“When we began to work with the larger problem of alienated youth, dysfunctional families, drugs, incest, school dropouts, living on the street, we began to realize that Israeli youth were not only struggling to mature into proper adulthood, but [that] Israeli children were living in a constant state of siege. Since the moment of its birth and ever since, [Israel] has been subjected to war, vicious acts of hostility and aggression…exploding bombs, shrapnel-filled vests bombs and mortar shells. These were not only maiming, killing and destroying homes, but causing less visible damage — a [ripple effect] impacting on the developing minds of Israeli youth. So many young people in Israel feel powerless, helpless, frightened. They have lost trust in the ability of adults to protect them, and with that loss of trust comes the abandonment of hope and denial of aspirations…. And so ELEM will continue, as it has in the past, to reach out to troubled youth, one by one.”