On the first day of the war, Jewish Agency Chair Ze'ev Bielski telephoned Howard Rieger, President and Chief Executive Officer of the United Jewish Communities, and appealed urgently for $1 million to begin evacuating children from the north. Within an hour, Rieger reported that the money had been obtained. Over the next four weeks, the UJC gave the agency $15 million for camps that hosted some 40,000 children from northern Israel.
Initially, the agency thought the camps would run for a week, but the war continued, and so did the camps. The children were dispersed among various organizations: The Working and Studying Youth Movement took 15,000 kids; the Scouts hosted several thousand; Rabbi Yitzhak Grossman of Migdal Ha?emek took more than 5,000 kids, some with their parents; and so on. About a quarter of the children were from Arab communities.
The camps, like most efforts to remove northern residents from the fighting zone, were an ad hoc initiative born of necessity, not orderly planning. The only orderly evacuation - i.e. that was defined as an evacuation and implemented according to existing plans - was of exhausted elderly people, chronic-care patients and people with disabilities. In the first and second weeks of the war, the Social Affairs and Health Ministries, together with voluntary organizations, evacuated some 4,000 people from the north to facilities in central Israel.
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"Everything else was improvisation, and the improvisation became policy," said Elie Elalouf, director of the Sacta-Rashi Foundation, which at the beginning of the war organized the evacuation of thousands of northerners to the south of the country for varying durations. "The problem was that the entire system was in a state of emergency without a state of emergency having been declared. There was a dreadful mess. People began evacuating on their own, including local authority workers."
Since there was no declaration of war, merely of "a special situation on the home front," it was unclear which entity was supposed make decisions about evacuating civilians who are not under the care of the welfare authorities, and it was also not clear who was supposed to carry out those decisions.
"There needs to be an orderly evacuation policy at the state level," said the deputy director general of the Social Affairs Ministry, Motti Winter. "There needs to be a decision on when to evacuate the population universally and to where, and on when to evacuate selectively and who. That is one of the important lessons of the war."
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