Mr. Lupolianski, everyone knows the Mayor and the founder of Yad Sarah. As mayor, you are so busy with the daily running of Jerusalem. Do you have time to promote Yad Sarah? How are you still connected to Yad Sarah?
As you rightly said, I am extremely busy with Jerusalem matters. This is a unique city, the mosaic of its residents, its size and the challenges of the capital city, the eternal capital of the Jewish People. Nevertheless, when children get married, they are still their parents’ children, and that’s how I feel about Yad Sarah. Yad Sarah has an excellent executive director and a superb staff. I come to Yad Sarah House some evenings and some Fridays. Sadly, I no longer know every volunteer by name, but I am most definitely involved in what is going on, in the development of new services and new branches, since the demand for Yad Sarah’s services is growing. I am happy to take part in the periodic gatherings of volunteers. I always served Yad Sarah as a volunteer and please G-d with continue to do so. Through Yad Sarah, too, I am still serving the residents of Jerusalem.
Why did you decide to move from the NGO sector to the public sector?
I don’t see this precisely as you put it. I see my work in City Hall as a public service exactly in the same sense as my work in Yad Sarah. Yad Sarah’s thousands of volunteers also work for the welfare of the capital’s citizens. They have their areas of action and their individual ways of contributing. You can’t deny the fact that there are differences between the volunteer sector and the work in City Hall, but in the end we are all there to help and to serve.
Yad Sarah was founded in memory of your late grandmother, your father’s mother, who perished in the Holocaust. Tell us about her and your family.
I never knew my grandmother Sarah z”l. She was killed in the Holocaust and Yad Sarah, as you said, is named after her. My late father told me many times that she was a paragon on hesed and used to help people in her neighborhood. They say I look like her.
I was born in Haifa in 1951. I served as a medic in the IDF, studied public administration and worked as a teacher for some years. As a young man I entertained the idea of being an actor, and even signed up for theater studies. When I married I moved to Jerusalem, to the Ezrat Torah quarter, where Yad Sarah started in our own apartment in 1976. Our flat kept a supply of vaporizers and inhalators to help neighbors whose children had breathing problems.
The great success of this little “center” propelled my late father, Jacob, to donate the money he had received for the sale of his small shoe store to expand the Gema”ch I had founded. We called it Yad Sarah in memory of my grandmother. With time, the stock of equipment grew to include wheelchairs, crutches, walkers, blood pressure meters, baby scales and more.
In 1978 we moved to Sanhedria where we still live. The little lending center moved with us, and still operates in our apartment. I was elected to the City Council in 1989, served as Deputy Mayor and Chairman of the Planning and Building Committee, and was elected Mayor in 2003.
When you opened Yad Sarah in your apartment, did you imagine it would grow into this size? How do you explain the enormous growth in its scope? What do you see as the most meaningful achievement of Yad Sarah?
Of course I didn’t know and never imagined the Yad Sarah would grow into the huge proportions of today. Maybe if I had known, I would have been put off. It grew little by little, branch by branch, service by service.
Today Yad Sarah has more than 100 branches all over Israel, 11 of them located within hospitals. Yad Sarah has become a synonym for mutual social responsibility and the giving of hesed. Travel agents know they can refer tourists to us if they need medical equipment while visiting Israel, or special transportation in a wheelchair-carrying van. People come from all over the world to learn about Yad Sarah and to copy our model in their home countries. We are goodwill ambassadors for Israel around the world. The U.N. Secretary General even visited Yad Sarah and was impressed by what the volunteers do.
The most meaningful achievement of Yad Sarah, in my opinion, is our ability to connect with people who need help, to listen to their distress and to find real solutions. I believe that every new project or service has to come from the heart. When you are committed and give your all to the goal, you succeed. And that is how Yad Sarah succeeded. The numbers are truly impressive: every second family in Israel has been helped by Yad Sarah. Nearly 400,000 people were helped in the past year.
Yad Sarah is built on volunteers. By the way, the volunteers come from every sector of the population, including many English speakers, and that is a blessing in itself. But one of the advantages of volunteers is their desire, their passion to be attentive, inviting, understanding, and really trying with all their might to give a full solution to every person who needs help. Our goal is to keep improving. That’s the only way we can continue deserving the great love and confidence that the public gives us today.
What do you see as Jerusalem’s main challenge today?
When I began the job as Mayor, I set myself the goal to improving the service given to citizens. I set up the Center for Quality Service in the municipality to increase the service and minimize the municipal bureaucracy.
From the start of my term we prepared a multi-year strategic plan for Jerusalem with the goal of strengthening the city’s economic and civil status. The plan included drastic cuts in personnel and in the municipal apparatus, and instead the city invested large budgets in restoration and building of parks, giving the city a facelift especially downtown, and raising the level of service to the residents. We improved the absorption division with the aim of helping thousands of new arrivals from the United States to fit in quickly into the social and economic fabric of the city.
What does the City of Jerusalem do to encourage aliya and to blend the English speaking olim into the city’s life?
In the past year, 3,011 of the country’s 20,955 new immigrants came to Jerusalem – about 14.5 percent. Most of the immigrants from the U.S. and Canada belong to the middle and upper socio-economic levels. The olim in Jerusalem live in all parts of the city – Har Nof, Bayit Vegan, Ramot, Arnona, Katamon, Baka, Homat Shmuel and more.
The English speaking population contributes a great deal to Jerusalem in many areas. This is a quality population, a population that leads the way and has already become part of the city’s fabric. They fit in smoothly in the areas of culture, tourism, and business and I hope we will see many more of them in our city.
Jerusalem is waiting for you with open arms. The municipal Klitah Authority is working hard for the new olim. They receive support and assistance every step of the way, personally and professionally. Some of them are part of the community aliyah project and others receive other forms of help.
What message would you like to bring to the English speaking community and to the many who make the traditional pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Pesach?
I am happy that so many guests come to Jerusalem for Pesach. Jerusalem is not only the capital of Israel, it is the capital of the entire Jewish People, and I hope every person visiting Jerusalem feels that way. I invite them all to visit every part of the city, to enjoy the holy places, the museums, the historic sites, the culture and the beauty of this city. I also recommend that the visitors meet and talk with Jerusalemites. You will enjoy the warmth and love that they have to give….
