Uri Yanay

Networking emergency teams in Jerusalem.

With the recent upsurge in terrorism, more and more attention is being directed at examining the effectiveness and efficiency of emergency teams. These teams tend to focus on their areas of expertise without necessarily communicating, cooperating or coordinating their operations. Research suggests that improved interpersonal communication and coordination enhances the overall work of each emergency team, and that their combined effort is far in excess of the sum of their individual endeavours. This paper outlines attempts made in Jerusalem to improve the performance of emergency teams and to help the helpers by holding training workshops, setting up a forum of co-workers and encouraging dialogue among various emergency teams in the city. A planned intervention programme was designed to enable informal networking between team leaders. The programme had an impact on team workers and resulted in a more coordinated and effective service delivery during emergencies.

Reactions to Domain Overlap

In 1968 the Israeli government began to develop a local, publicly directed, autonomous network of community service centers (Matnas) parallel to the traditional, statutory welfare bureaus. Similar claims made by both organizations overpopulation, needs, and services to be implemented caused a domain overlap. This article is based on a long-term observation of such overlap. It describes the case and analyzes the different reactions that evolved. In some places these two organizations managed or were made to coexist. In other settlements domain overlap created a conflict. Reactions to such conflict varied from competition to cooperation, influenced by organizational environments in each settlement. The community and its representatives, local politicians, clients, and professional and lay staff played a critical role in entering such domain overlap and determining the nature and intensity of reactions to it.

Co-opting Vigilantism: Government Response to Community Action for Personal Safety

Securing the personal safety of citizens has traditionally been a state monopoly. However, increased fear of crime and victimization has produced individual and community actions to secure personal safety. This paper discusses the emergence and development of the community-initiated ‘Civil Guard’ in Israel, a sweeping movement which emerged in 1974 from a growing fear of terrorism. This grass roots initiative has raised governments concern over its ability to monitor, inspect and control the volunteers. The national police has co-opted the entire movement in three phases. In the first, a spontaneous emergence of self-help initiatives covered the country. Next, the movement was transformed into a national body of volunteers with a clear legal status, albeit under the complicated and joint auspices of the national police and local government. Finally the national police force co-opted the ‘Civil Guard’ into auxiliary units. What began as a neighborhood-based, self-help initiative was molded into a quasi-governmental, police-oriented voluntary organization.

From a court orientation to a victim orientation: The paradigm shift in Israel’s Juvenile Probation Service

During the course of the last decade, Israel’s Juvenile Probation Service (JPS) added Victim Offender Mediation (VOM), an important example of restorative justice, to its repertoire of diagnostic, therapeutic and caring practices for young offenders. The introduction of VOM represented a major shift from its traditional service orientation. When first established by the British Mandate over Palestine in the 1930s, the primary beneficiaries of the probation services were His Majesty’s Courts and their British judges. Later, after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the JPS specialized in assessing and supervising young offenders. The introduction of VOM meant the acknowledgement by the JPS of the victims of its young clientele. This acknowledgement blurred the boundaries of the JPS’s traditional mission, operations and clientele. This paper describes how this new orientation in the work of the JPS came about. In doing so it draws on some of the findings of a qualitative research study, findings that serve to highlight some of the main issues that arose along the way.

Ordering urban communities according to their socio-economic characteristics

Defining the needs of a community and ranking communities according to their level of distress presents both conceptual and empirical difficulties. In this study, the needs of 51 communities are defined by five selected socio-economic characteristics. The scores of these communities in each of the characteristics were arranged by Partial Order, allowing for a Multi rather than a Uni-Dimensional Scaling. This Multi-Dimensional Scaling maintains that the scores of a given community may be high in one characteristics and low in another. Arranging these communities by Partial Order Scalogram Analysis (POSA) allows the differentiation between communities according to their Level of Distress (The Joint Direction) and the Type of Distress (The Lateral Direction). This analysis can help in forming a policty for intervention by selecting communities or settlements either by the level or by the type of their distress or by relating to both of these measures.

Changes in the israeli income support system

Abstract The new ‘Income Support Benefits Act’ which came into effect in January 1982, constitutes a major change in social policy and service administration in Israel. It created a functional and organisational separation between the cash and social care service benefits. The findings of this study indicate that the new policy improved the circumstances of the needy population groups as measured by three positive outcomes. First, a significant number of needy ceased receiving welfare and availed themselves of their rights to benefit from other contributory national insurance programmes. Second, more uniform and slightly higher benefits were provided after separation. Third, the new income support benefits allowed for longer periods of assistance and were paid in a more regular manner, automatically adjusted to changes in the level of prices and wages. All this contributed to the enhancement of the expressed satisfaction of the target group. The findings also show some significant change in the client groups.