Description

A protest event in Lod in April, where residents called for a mixed community center to reopen. Photo by Nir Keidar


Jewish and Arab residents of a neighborhood in the central Israeli city of Lod have declared victory in their joint battle to bring the organization that runs most of the country's community centers back to their area.

By Jack Khoury for Haaretz

Jewish and Arab residents of a neighborhood in the central Israeli city of Lod have declared victory in their joint battle to bring the organization that runs most of the country's community centers back to their area. Lod city officials have confirmed the signing earlier this week of an agreement with the Israel Association of Community Centers. The organization will resume operations in the city in January.

The IACC ceased operations in Lod in 2003, at the height of a municipal financial crisis. The city's community centers remained closed for about a year, after which they were reopened in a joint venture between the municipality and a garin torani, a group of young Jewish religious activists who move to a disadvantaged area and conduct community activities there. But this solution did little to help the Eshkol neighborhood: Though most of its residents are Arab, most of the new community centers' activities targeted Eshkol's Ethiopian Jewish community.

Two weeks ago Haaretz reported on a group of Jewish and Arab residents who had formed a committee to lobby for IACC's return to the city. Committee members argued that Lod's community centers should offer activities for all city residents, Jewish and Arab alike, and that the association's return would ensure this.

The municipality noted that a 2010 cabinet resolution laying out a financial rehabilitation plan for the city called for IACC to resume operations in Lod and expand its activities to additional neighborhoods. This provision was never implemented, but Lod's financial situation has improved: Municipal treasurer Zion Hadar said yesterday that from 2013 the city will double its annual contribution to the community centers, to NIS 2 million, making it possible to expand IACC's activities there.

The Association of Community Centers has appointed Yaki Harlap to head up the organization's renewed operations in Lod. Harlap has spent the last 20 years running networks of community centers in Petah Tikva, Herzliya and Eilat. The IACC said it hoped his vast experience would facilitate a smooth handover of the centers' operations from the municipality to the association. The city announced that as part of the planned expansion of the centers' operations, the Eshkol neighborhood's Chicago community center, which has been shuttered for several years, will reopen with a full schedule of activities for both Jewish and Arab residents.

The association said it would begin some activities in Lod very soon and was preparing a more extensive program of activities for all the city's community centers that would be implemented starting in 2013.

The Eshkol neighborhood action committee welcomed the agreement. "Our struggle succeeded," said Samah Salima-Agbaria, one of its leaders. "As social activists, women and children, Arabs and Jews from both within the neighborhood and outside it, we believed in the rightness of our path, in the possibility of correcting a delusional situation of injustice and irrationality that the Lod municipality had conducted for years in the social sphere and in other spheres."