Times have never been this bad for Israel's
periphery, where the sense of misery has
ignited feelings of rage and oppression.
Municipal workers, striking for salaries that
haven't been paid for months, feel the
government has abandoned them to their fate.
For several weeks now, Shalom Saban has been
waking up to empty mornings, with a sense
that his life has hit rock bottom. As a social
worker in Kiryat Malachi, he has encountered
numerous victims of distress, and has tried to
help them as best he could.
Nearly half the immigrants who came to the
city during the past decade have registered at
the municipal welfare office. In a single
decade, 7,500 immigrants came to this town,
most of them from Uzbekistan and Ethiopia.
They were all sent, as if in a single bloc, to a
wounded city of immigrants that found it hard
to stand on its feet. Fifty years after its
establishment, Kiryat Malachi was one of the
poorest locales in Israel.
Saban, 55, was there when the immigrant camp
became a town. He came to Israel from Tunis
with his parents in 1951, when he was 3 years
old. From an early age, he had to work in the
cotton fields of the kibbutzim and the
moshavim in the area in order to help his
parents and 10 siblings. Eventually he went
back to school and acquired a profession that
had interested him even as a child: social work.
"I have always wanted to help others," he said
this week. "I also came from a background of
distress and poverty, and therefore I saw the
profession as a mission."
Haaretz
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