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Reuth and Israel are celebrating jointly this year. Israel turns 60 while Reuth turns 70. Very few organizations active in Israel today can claim to have started their activities before the establishment of the State! But when Israel was born in 1948, Reuth was already a veteran organization celebrating its first decade of activity for the welfare of the local community. Being 10 years older, Reuth has always been a kind of “big sister” to the country: responsible, caring, concerned, helping out wherever necessary….
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At the very start, in the 1930s and 1940s, Reuth helped prepare the ground for the creation of the State. Thousands of immigrants and refugees, Israel’s future citizens, would have found it very hard to survive those harsh years of absorption, without assistance from Reuth – or as it was known then – “Women’s Social Service”.
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Founder Paula Barth and her colleagues, themselves recent immigrants from Germany, saw how hard it was for the newer immigrants. Many of these were “Yekkes” like themselves, who, narrowly escaping the Nazi regime, had had to leave everything they owned behind. Here, in their new home under the scorching sun, so different from the one they had fled, no immigrant housing or other benefits awaited them. Here to greet them was only Women’s Social Service, which had just set up its first enterprise: “A Kitchen for the Middle Class” on Frishman St. in Tel Aviv. Here, for a nominal sum, or sometimes even free of charge, immigrants got a hot kosher meal on properly laid tables, complete with tablecloths and flowers.
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