Dignity before publicity
We publish no photographs of recipients, no names, no case studies that could identify a household. Vouchers are indistinguishable from ordinary store credit and deliveries are made after dark.
Nearly twenty years of quiet work in one small city
Partners was started in 2007 by a handful of Beitar Illit residents who were already paying for their neighbours’ groceries out of their own pockets, and realised the problem was larger than their own means.
The city we serve
Fourteen and a half thousand families on one ridge
Beitar Illit is a Haredi city of large young families, twenty minutes south of Jerusalem. It is also, by Israel's own measure, among the poorest municipalities in the country.
14,500Families live in the city
1 / 10Socioeconomic cluster — the lowest band in Israel
1,400Families the fund supports
550Of them are single-parent families
The city was built in the 1990s on a ridge in the Judean hills, and it grew quickly because housing here costs a fraction of what it costs in Jerusalem. Families with six, seven and eight children could afford an apartment. What they could not bring with them was work: there is almost no industry inside the city, and a second earner has to commute.
The result is a city ranked in cluster 1 of 10 on Israel's official socioeconomic index — the lowest band there is. Roughly half of the families here live beneath the poverty line, and the average family has about six people in it.
Partners supports 1,400 of those families — roughly one household in ten in the entire city. Eight hundred and fifty are on our standing lists for food, medical help and utilities.
550 of them are single-parent families — almost four in every ten households we help. In a community where a woman raising children alone is rarely spoken about, these are the families least likely to ask and most likely to go without, and we look for them rather than waiting to be approached.
Our story
It began with a grocery ledger
Legal identity. We operate in the United States as Partners Charity Fund For Israel, a nonprofit corporation exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3), EIN 20-5550560. In Israel our distribution work is carried out under the name קופת הצדקה הכללית ביתר עילית — the General Charity Fund of Beitar Illit.
In the winter of 2007, the owner of a small grocery on Rechov Rabbi Akiva was carrying more than forty families on credit. Some of the accounts were two years old. He had no intention of collecting them and no way of absorbing them, and he said so to a few people in shul.
Within a month those few people had put together a fund, agreed on a rule that no family would ever be named, and settled the ledger. The rule has not changed since. Everything else has.
Nearly twenty years later Partners supports around one thousand four hundred families every month across every district of Beitar Illit, through six standing programmes and an emergency response line. The work is still run out of a small office by a mostly volunteer team, and the fund still pays suppliers directly wherever it can, because a family should be able to accept help without having to hold it in their hands in public.
We decided at the very beginning that we would rather lose a donor than expose a family. In all those years we have never had to make that trade — but the order of priorities has never been in question.From the founding minutes, 2007
What we are not
We are not a national organisation and we have no plans to become one. Partners works in one city, where the committee members know the streets, the schools and the shopkeepers. That local knowledge is the whole basis of our verification process; it does not transfer, and we would rather do one city properly than ten badly.
What we hold to
Four commitments that govern everything else
Local verification
Every application is checked by people who live in the same city. Income, debt, household size and existing support are documented before a shekel moves.
Two signatures, always
No individual — director, committee member or founder — can approve or release funds alone. Emergency releases are reviewed retrospectively at the next monthly meeting.
Numbers in the open
Annual allocations are published on this site. Our IRS determination letter and most recent Form 990 are sent to any donor who asks, without conditions.
Milestones
How the fund grew
Slowly, and mostly in response to something going wrong that we had not planned for.
2007
Founded and incorporated in the United States
A grocery ledger is settled for forty families, and an informal committee of seven residents agrees to keep going. Partners Charity Fund For Israel is incorporated in the United States and recognised as tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3), with a small office in Brooklyn to handle American giving and receipting.
2013
Vouchers replace cash
After three years of debate the committee moves to a prepaid voucher system with four partner groceries. Anonymity improves immediately, and so does the proportion of aid spent on food rather than debt.
2016
Medical relief becomes a standing programme
A survey of two hundred households finds prescription co-payments to be the single most common unmet need. Medical relief is separated out of the general fund and given its own budget line.
2020
Emergency response
Caseload roughly doubles in eleven weeks as the pandemic closes the informal economy the city depends on. The 72-hour emergency track is created and never wound down.
2023
Governance formalised
Quarterly household review, the two-signature rule and a written conflict-of-interest policy are adopted in their current form.
2025
One thousand four hundred families
$1.04 million distributed in direct assistance across six programmes, with 92 cents of every dollar spent reaching families.
Who runs it
A small team, a standing committee, and rabbinical oversight
Partners is directed by a volunteer board of three and has no employees at all. Everyone involved in distribution inside Beitar Illit is a volunteer, and the last filed return shows not one dollar of salary.
- Board of Directors
- Three unpaid directors, all independent, who approve the annual budget and hold sole authority to change programme policy. No director receives compensation of any kind — the fund reported no salaries, wages or officer compensation of any amount on its last return.
- Review Committee
- Six volunteers living in Beitar Illit who assess applications against written criteria. Cases are identified by file number only.
- Rabbinical guidance
- The fund operates under the direction of the rabbinical authorities of Beitar Illit, who resolve questions of halachic priority when demand exceeds available funds — which it does, most months.
- U.S. administration
- The fund employs nobody. Donor receipting, IRS compliance and the transfer of funds to Israel are handled by the directors themselves, with an outside accountant engaged for the filings. Six volunteers carry the work in Beitar Illit.
- Conflicts of interest
- A written policy requires any director or committee member to recuse themselves entirely from a case involving a relative, employee, tenant or business associate. Recusals are minuted.
Director names and the full board roster are provided on request to donors, grant-makers and regulators. We do not publish them, for the same reason we do not publish recipient names: in a city this size, the two lists overlap.
Together in times of need
Every week begins with the same question.
Whether there is enough in the fund to cover the families already on the list. Your gift is the answer.