African Refugees in Tel Aviv

Almost 20,000 refugees and asylum seekers have arrived in Israel in recent years, fleeing war and chaos in their homelands in Africa. Although they come from a number of different countries, the largest communities hail from Eritrea, Ethiopia and various parts of Sudan, including Darfur. Many of them initially fled to Egypt, but the harsh response of the authorities in that country prodded them to continue north to Israel in search of asylum.

The Israeli government’s official policy is to keep refugees out of the country by catching them at the Egyptian border and immediately returning them to the Egyptian side, where they face imprisonment and possible expulsion back to their home countries. Those who manage to enter Israel are eventually picked up by the military and sent to detention facilities in the south of the country. After being released (sometimes after several months), most make their way to Tel Aviv, where they stay in a number of refugee shelters in the south of the city and begin to pick up the pieces and rebuild their lives.

In the absence of any significant government aid programs for the refugees, volunteer organizations have stepped in to fill the void.

Our Mission

Fugee Fridays is a volunteer humanitarian initiative, founded in early 2008 in response to the acute distress of a growing community of African asylum seekers living in Tel Aviv. Our purpose is to help address this community’s immediate needs while nurturing their independence, raising awareness of their plight, fostering positive cultural exchange between Israelis and Africans living in Israel and empowering both the refugee community and our volunteers.

We have organized a number of projects for the benefit of the African community, including food collection from the Carmel Market, language classes, children’s activities and a growing list of community development projects. Everything we do is guided by our belief in simple, elegant problem-solving which connects urgent needs with available and sustainable solutions. We hope that, by setting a personal example, we can inspire others to create similar social action projects that benefit their communities.

Food Collection

Around the time African refugees began arriving in Tel Aviv, we discovered a great source of wasted food at the Carmel Market, a short distance away from the refugees’ shelters. Every Friday, significant quantities of fresh fruits, vegetables, bread and other goods were simply being thrown out. By collecting it at the end of the week from the market’s merchants, we made sure that good food got to hungry people who needed it, instead of ending up a landfill.

We collected food this way every week between early 2008 and mid 2009, delivering food to three different shelters: a shelter housing around 100 Darfuri men on Neve Sha’anan street, a small apartment housing pregnant women and new mothers near the New Central Bus Station and a shelter housing around a dozen families in the Shapira neighborhood. Over time, we also began delivering boxes of food to a dozen or so Israeli families living in the neighborhood.

Updates

Today, the African community in Tel Aviv has managed to improve its living conditions significantly. As such, we decided not to renew our food project, choosing instead to focus on organizing activities for the children of the community, in cooperation with the African Refugee Development Center (ARDC).

Several articles have been published about our work in the media, our volunteers have contributed to a blog on Haaretz.com’s Jewish World page, and we helped write and publicize an open letter to Israel by one of the leaders of the Darfuri community.

For more info, check out our blog and Facebook page, where we post updates about our activities and links to news items about the refugee community.

If you are interested in volunteering or donating, please contact us at jessefox82 (at) gmail (dot) com.