Paamonim:The long, shorter way to get out of debt

Paamonim is an organization, operating mainly in the national religious community, that helps middle class families manage their budgets and pay off debts. In Friday's alon Matzav Haruach, Rachel Klein wrote about Paamonim and spoke with its director, Uriel Lederberg.

"Dina," a single mother of three, covered her overdraft by taking out new loans. She contacted Paamonim when her debt reached NIS 45,000. Moti, a financial counselor trained by the organization, came to the house and helped her plan the family's budget.

Dina reports, "In the first stage, we fired the ozeret (housecleaner, at NIS 800/month). The children cooperated and took on the various chores. We also restricted chugim (afterschool activities) to one per child. We stopped ordering prepared foods and pizza. We gave up on entertainment and restaurants. There were no more weekeends in hotels. Instead of the pool, we went to the beach. We discovered parks. . . I learned that NIS 70 face cream works as well as cream costing NIS 300. . . ."

(Our dermatologist friend recommends buying the cheapest face cream because glycerin, the most effective ingredient, costs the least.)

Dina began to have her clothes and shoes repaired instead of buying new ones, took a second job in the evening, blow-dried her own wig (saving NIS 70), and her daughter began babysitting to pay for her clothes. After two years she has paid off most of her loan and the bank account is balanced. She says, "Yes, I have a masters degree, and I work in a senior position. But I earned my true doctorate for life with Paamonim."

Director Lederberg explains how Paamonim is different from most other charity organizations. The others look for an immediate solution for a needy family, providing a basket of food, a financial grant, or a school backpack. In another week or two, or a month, the family needs more help. One child needs dental work, the bank is calling about the overdraft, and the school trip is coming up.

Judging by recent phone requests, those kinds of organizations are popping up like snails after the rain. I just heard from one that provides hot lunches to schoolchildren. Charity organizations will always be necessary to help the truly needy, while Paamonim focuses on families that should be able to stand on its feet but aren't. But everyone can benefit from Paamonim's techniques.

Lederberg got the idea after helping to raise funds for a family whose utilities were being cut off, only to find the family in the same situation a few months later. When he spoke to the bank manager about lowering the interest rate on the family's account and allowing an easier payment schedule, the manager asked Lederberg if he could refer other families to him.

Lederberg and his friends developed two parallel paths to financial solvency. First, they check all possible sources of income like national insurance, disability grants, and discounts. They negotiate with the banks for better terms, but never ask for debts to be cancelled. In the second, more intensive level of assistance, Paamonim examines the family's budget, helping them track their income and expenses and become wise and frugal consumers. Paamonim has experts who advise the counselors on getting low rates for various goods and services.

Lederberg, like most of the thousand-strong staff, is a volunteer himself.

When a financial counselor is available to help, he or she asks the family to prepare its financial documents. At this point many families get cold feet, so Paamonim waits until the family reinitiates contact. The process is painful and requires full cooperation. The volunteer doesn't instruct the family on which items to cut, but helps it prepare a balanced budget leaving NIS500-1000 per month to repay debts.

On Paamonim's website, you can download budget spreadsheets, read articles about saving money, and learn how to train as a volunteer. (A friend who inquired said you need to attend a five-session course.) Unfortunately the English part of the site is not as rich (so to speak).

Just don't go to the wrong site--paamonim.co.il advertises a fancy vacation getaway.

Using cloth diapers in Israel

This post can now be found at AMotherinIsrael.com

Things I might be posting about, if I felt like blogging

Our cooperative summer camp adventure continues. Based on past experience (read: lots of fighting), we split the boys and girls. We have five boys aged 5-8, with two 12- and 13-year-olds serving as counselors. I hosted them last Friday while my 12-year-old A ran the whole program. The girls' group consists of 4 preschoolers and 7 elementary-school-age girls. They exempted me from hosting the girls, since my 14-year-old (DiI) helps out several days a week. The other two days she has a regular babysitting job for two little boys who adore her. I have been getting positive feedback from the mothers about my kids. I needed it.

Some of the camp mothers live about a mile away, but my four-year-old walks back and forth with a minimum of complaint. When we met to make up a schedule, we asked not to give out junk food. Some mothers complained, "What will we give them if not Bamba?" We suggested melon. The children bring sandwiches; surely that's enough food for four hours. The junk-food rule hasn't been strictly enforced, but who can say what would have happened otherwise.

A disadvantage of segregating by sex is that activities tend to fall along gender lines. Yesterday the boys made models of an army camp and the girls baked cookies with red jelly. Today both groups went to the zoo and my junior counselors stayed up till all hours preparing games and crafts.

We are leaving on our annual trip to the US next week; camp may or may not be active when we return. My 4yo loved our visit last year, but now she doesn't want to miss camp. She said I should go without her and bring back special (flavored) yogurt, a treat we rarely buy. I'm taking her, DiI, and my 7-year-old.

Last night we went to a memorial service for a convert to Judaism who had made aliyah and died eight months later after collapsing in the street from a blood clot. The body sat for a month while her fate was decided; eventually her mother insisted on a Christian burial in the US. I had only spoken to her once on the phone, but we wanted to show support, and we met a family from Maale Adumim who had been exceptionally close to her. The family described how every Shabbat between her death and burial, mysterious things happened in their house: Crockery fell off shelves, and candles fell down, for no apparent reason.

I met with two bloggers in one day. I sat with RivkA for a Coffee and Chemo date, and while in Jerusalem I hopped over to Leora's hotel to say hello. We have several mutual friends and I am sure I have met her, but it was my first time seeing her adorable children. By then I was already anxious to get home, because the bus in the morning had taken me three hours. When we were renting our first apartment in Israel, I asked my husband how far we would be from the bus to Jerusalem and he said five minutes. He must have misheard me. It's a twenty-minute ride, and the inter-city bus took forever to arrive. It was too crowded so I waited a short time for the next one. Then we ran into traffic, and the bus to the hospital also took ages. Then I ran around the hospital looking for RivkA, because the oncology ward told me she was in the ER. I eventually found her back in oncology. Even though she was having a long, hard day she was in good spirits and we had fun catching up. She even came up with some shidduch suggestions.

Speaking of sponja: One evening I noticed a puddle, which turned out to be coming from under my neighbors' door. The neighbors are out of the country and their army-aged son was in Jerusalem, but a neighbor had a key so after turning off the water and closing off the source of the leak, we used several squeejees to sweep all of the water into the shower drain--in our apartment. It was a family effort. Their water purifier had cracked open, but the neighbor was still sure it must be the ozeret's fault. The son told me that the only damage was to their rug. If this had happened in the middle of the night, we might have been the ones with the serious damage.

We are going to a bar mitzvah for Shabbat, and staying in my single brother-in-law's apartment. When I heard his voicemail message asking to tell him some good news, I informed him of our upcoming visit. He took it in stride, or at least he had recovered by the time he called us back. Two of the kids chose not to go, but my oldest son feels close enough to the family to drag himself away from yeshiva for two weeks in a row.

My seven-year-old inserted our rechargeable camera battery backwards. It slid in easily, but wouldn't come out. The repairman removed it without taking the whole thing apart, after giving me a lecture about letting my kid play with it. I didn't tell him about the movie that could only have been filmed from a few inches outside of my sixth-story window; my seven-year-old was three or four at the time. Instead I told him that it wasn't nice to lecture customers. He didn't charge and even advised me on how to fix a different problem with the camera.

Navigating an Israeli Supermarket

I once read a blog post by an American on an extended visit to Israel, raving about how much easier it is to keep kosher in Israel than in the US. True, a variety of kosher food is available just about everywhere in Israel. But keeping kosher in Israel is far from simple.

Lately we have been shopping at Aleph, one of the haredi chains. They tend to focus more on basic items and family-sized packages. The disadvantage is that meat and dairy products with a mehadrin/haredi supervision are much more expensive. But a few years ago Aleph added a selection of meat and dairy products under the supervision of the Israeli rabbinate.

Another issue with products under haredi supervision is that they often contain more fillers and sugars than those with the standard supervision, in order to make the price attractive to haredi families with less disposable income. Examples include "Danuba" mehadrin yogurt, which contains added starch, and Telma Shefa Cornflakes, which contain more sugar than Telma Cornflakes. It pays to read labels.

The brakes on our car began acting up during Pesach, and we are awaiting a replacement part by airmail. My husband takes the bus to work and I avoid carpool arrangements on principle, but shopping is a hassle. Last week I took the bus to one store only to discover, at the checkout, that they don't deliver. Fortunately I ran into a neighbor who gave me a ride home. The other day I put out an SOS to some friends and E. replied that she was planning to go shopping and would be happy to take me along.

Since E. once referred to me as someone who "writes a blog for new olim (immigrants)," I guess it's appropriate to use our trip to share some examples of unusual things a kosher consumer might find in an Israeli supermarket.

E. took me to a large chain store that I used to visit regularly. Because some items were much cheaper than at Aleph, I used to alternate between the stores every few weeks to stock up on cheaper items. But at one point I stopped because the price on those items came down in Aleph. I see now that that was a mistake; canned goods, for example, are significantly cheaper at the store we visited this week.

Since I was last there, the store, along with most of the city's supermarkets, lost its rabbinic supervision. The local rabbinate, known for its zealousness (it refuses to certify restaurants for Passover if they serve legumes), withdrew supervision for any store selling a popular brand of meat. The rabbinate claimed to have found serious irregularities in the factory. This has since been resolved, but the rabbinate also refuses to certify stores that rely on the heter mechirah during this sabbatical year. Some of the fresh food counters did have a kashrut certificate, and most products come in packages sealed by the manufacturer. But there are still issues.

Take this package of chicken wings. It looks like the frozen pieces were taken out of a box, placed on a tray, and wrapped in plastic. The Tnuva sticker was almost certainly slapped on by a store worker. And without supervision on the store itself, I have no assurance that the chicken came from where the label says it does.
Here's another concern for the kosher shopper. Note this sign on the freezer display:

The animal from which this cut of meat was taken has been slaughtered properly according to Jewish law, but not "kashered." Kashering meat involves soaking, salting and rinsing the meat in order to remove the blood. Hardly anyone soaks and salts meat at home; I've never done it, because the kosher butchers and meat-packers take care of it. Presumably the people buying it here prefer it because it's cheaper than kashered meat, and they don't keep kosher anyway.

This pitfall has nothing to do with kashrut:

The label reads "GROUND CHICKEN: From superior ground chicken meat." The smaller letters read, "With the addition of vegetable protein." If you want to know what percentage is meat, forget it. The label won't help you here. Instead, a notice warns consumers to eat the product only when fully cooked; I saw this on other products as well. I'm guessing this is a new well-meaning law on the books, like the one requiring every product containing gluten to be labelled as such. That law backfired, because companies afraid of lawsuits by the gluten-sensitive public began putting the labels on everything.

Then I went to look at the frozen vegetables. My husband still doesn't like me to buy "heter mechirah" produce (sigh) so I had to read the fine print here too:


The one on the left says it is kosher "according to heter mechirah" and the one on the left says that it's "yevul shishit," meaning that it comes from the produce of the sixth year. (It also has an extra "Badatz" kashrut symbol.) I once noticed a similar sign on a can of tomato paste several years after shmittah. it must have been the second or third year of the sabbatical cyle, so I thought the product was a few years old. Later realized that I wasn't meant to take the mention of the sixth year literally; it simply indicated that the produce was not from the problematical seventh year of the sabbatical cycle.

At that point E. reminded me that we needed to check that the store had sold its chametz. One may not eat leavened foods that were in the possession of a Jew over the Passover holiday. There are some products I generally buy in the shuk (open-air market), such as burgul (bulgur) wheat, but not immediately after Pesach; I only buy burgul, flour, pasta, and oats in a store that has sold its chametz. So while E. finished up her shopping I located the following sign:

This assures the customers that the chametz was properly sold. However, the mashgiach (kashrut supervisor) emphasizes that he cannot vouch for the kashrut of the store or any of its products, either on Pesach or year-round.

I half-expected a store worker to ask me why I was taking pictures. After all, this store used to have a sign at the entrance warning customers against writing down prices. But no one seemed to care.

I've only touched superficially on some of the kashrut issues and I hope that my less knowledgeable readers were able to follow.

Many thanks to E. for shlepping me and my groceries, and for vicariously contributing to this post. And join me in wishing her mazal tov on marrying off her oldest son.

Our English Story Hour

My town doesn't attract a large number of new English-speaking olim, having been eclipsed by Raanana, distant Beit Shemesh and Modiin. But we now have a new attraction--an English story hour.

Our group consists of six or seven families. Some I knew before, and the rest met through our community's email list. Each week a different family hosts, chooses a book and plans a related activity. I was impressed with J, the most recent hostess. Despite having only one child, she managed to welcome the crowd and make us all feel comfortable. When I had only one or two small children I couldn't imagine inviting over one large family, much less a few small ones (most parents bring one or two children).

Today's story, The Gruffalo, is a cleverly written rhyme about a mouse who avoids getting eaten by the other forest animals and J provided materials for making a forest collage. I don't know where J got the idea, but the internet is full of activity ideas for popular children's books so non-crafty parents like myself don't have to scramble. When we hosted we read Pancakes by Eric Carle, and made pancakes. (No, I didn't have to search the internet for that idea.)

My kids (age 4 and 6) look forward to the story hour all week, and until I realized that my older children all end late that day I thought I would send them to supervise. But like all successful cooperative ventures, the story hour turned out to be as much fun for me as for the kids. I've even made some new friends, which doesn't happen often at my stage of life ("virtual" present company excluded).

We had something similar a few years ago but I never dreamed of finding enough parents to start it up again. So now all we have to do is await the influx of English speakers to our fair town. (Even though my location is an open secret, I hope you'll forgive me for being annoyingly circumspect.)

Basic skills for children

Over at Conversations in Klal, ProfK writes about whether children (read girls) should be taught basic homemaking skills. In The Fine Art of Being a Balabusta Part I, she concludes that there's no point teaching girls to sew because the women she knows sew do so mainly for pleasure. Working mothers don't have time to sew, and even if they did, it doesn't pay when you factor in time.

She may be right, but I'm still not convinced that teaching children basic sewing and other neglected homemaking skills is a waste of time. By basic I mean two or three types of hand stitches, hemming, mending, and using a sewing machine well enough to make a simple item like a skirt or a pair of pajamas. This only takes a few lessons--probably 10-15 hours total. That's much less time than it takes to become proficient at a musical instrument. Now there's a useless skill--but the last time I checked it hasn't gone out of style.

In colonial times girls began sewing at four years old. Making clothes and linens took up a large chunk of the family's time and everyone's help was needed. I'm sure there were a few girls who were hopeless at it. Some people are hopeless at math, but we still teach it to everyone. I'm not saying we should devote the time to sewing that we devote to math, but sewing belongs in the category of things that most people can pick up easily.

The same applies to a wide variety of skills including sports, making home repairs, languages, gardening, financial management, and using computers. If you start early enough, most people will be able to master those skills with a reasonable level of proficiency. But if they aren't exposed, there's a good chance that they will never learn. Not because they can't (they can) but because they see it as something removed from their experience. It's a question of exposure.

I would bet that 90% of the sewers in ProfK's community learned to sew either at home or in a high school home-economics class, like I did. I stopped for while, but after I had a few kids I decided I wanted to sew nursing clothes. I already had a sewing machine so I asked a visitor to bring me a good sewing book and some bright, printed fabric, as there wasn't much selection in my town. (Unfortunately the saleswoman convinced my visitor that solid gray, which looks terrible on me, was best for a beginner.) While reviewing techniques I remembered tips that my mother had taught me about sewing. They weren't in the book, either. I sewed several outfits for myself and my daughter, and made myself a skirt less than a year ago. I don't have a good eye and will never be a great seamstress, but I can follow instructions and most of the time that's enough for excellent results. And a surprising number of my friends sew frequently, especially the ones with daughters.

We don't know where our daughters and sons will be twenty or thirty years from now. We may think we are preparing them for life by sending them to a computer chug (afterschool activity) instead of a sewing one, but we can't predict the future of the job market. The skills we teach them as children may serve as an enjoyable hobby during high school. I can think of a few ways that sewing will be useful. Maybe our children will live in an isolated community where it is hard to get clothes. Their financial situation may indeed make sewing economical, or they will turn it into a part-time business. Possibly, like the women I posted about here, they will prefer to wear unique styles. Or they will enjoy sewing so much that they become seamstresses, fashion designers, or quilters (quilting has become a serious art form). Even if they never pick up a needle again, they have had the satisfaction of wearing something they made themselves.

In our world it's unrealistic to expect all children to learn to sew--I only bring it up as an example. But we should be providing our children with a variety of practical skills even if not every one will turn out to be useful later in life.

In which all is revealed. . .

Well, not really. But check out Frugal Journey's interview with yours truly.

Interview: A Mother in Israel

Is homemade food worth the effort?

Reading the ingredients on purchased food spoils my appetite. Even canned tomato paste now contains fructose, making it taste like catsup. (Luckily I can still find the "pure" variety.) And I don't like to think about what's in food from restaurants, bakeries, and caterers. When I see borekas I just think "transfat."

I also don't enjoy paying for extras like starches, sugars, artificial colors, preservatives, and more.

That's why I avoid a slew of Israeli staples, including soup mixes, catsup, breakfast cereals, soy shnitzel, soup nuts, soft drinks, flavored yogurts, puddings, and snack foods (yes, you can entertain without serving Bisli). Mayonnaise used to be on the list, until I gave in to one of my children who prefers the jarred stuff. I won't share the ingredients of this item, which does have that stand-up-by-itself texture mine lacks.

Some commenters mentioned that they find it cheaper to buy applesauce than to make it. I haven't priced store-bought applesauce in a while, since we don't eat it regularly. But five or ten extra shekel for a homemade Chanukah treat is worth it for me.

A lot of things I make from scratch may not be more economical, gram per gram. I use canola instead of cheaper soy or corn oil. Whole-grain flour is a lot more expensive than the subsidized pasty white stuff. But savings on whole grains, fruits and vegetables, all very cheap in Israel (when it's not shmitta), make up for those costs. Also, what's not "worth it" for a small family can make a significant difference for a large one.

What about the cost of my time? Well, I consider money saved by cooking from scratch as part of my income, tax- and childcare-free. And cooking healthy food doesn't have to mean hours and hours in the kitchen, as I mentioned in an earlier post. In fact, a recent study compared meal-prep times between two groups of two-career couples: those cooking from scratch and those relying on convenience foods.The ones who bought prepared foods didn't save time because they tended to make more elaborate meals.

One family made a simple meal of sandwiches and edamame, using bread, cheese, greens and salmon and tomatoes. That meal took about a half-hour to prepare. Another family had a six-dish convenience-food meal of microwave barbecued ribs, macaroni and cheese, prebagged salad, bagged dinner rolls and a cookies and ice cream dessert. That meal also took a half-hour.

I had to look up edemame, but not in my Webster's. (It's amazing how many ethnic food items, like quesadillas, have become mainstream in the seventeen years since I left the US.) It won't be on my table anytime soon. Then I read this bizarre statement:

The study authors noted that the biggest time savings of convenience foods may be at the grocery store, where it's faster to grab a frozen entree than to collect six separate ingredients to make the same dish from scratch.

Well, that might be true if you're shopping for only one meal at a time. It didn't occur to the clueless study authors that four or five of the six ingredients would be used for several meals. I imagine that those who rely on convenience foods make more trips to the store because (a) they don't have room to store all those bulky packages for more than a few days and (b) they are unable to improvise when they run out of a particular item.

I have another question about this study, which says that Americans spend 22 minutes on a grocery-shopping trip. Are American stores really so efficient? Twenty-two minutes doesn't leave much time for reading ingredients and comparing prices, either.

Some convenience foods don't save any time, like matza balls from a mix. I tease one of my friends about using it because matzah balls only contain eggs, matzah meal, salt and maybe a little oil--once you are getting the bowl dirty there's no advantage to the mix. Of course the mix contains all kinds of things that make the matzah balls fluffy.

Even so the mix is probably healthier than Robin's recipe containing six tablespoons of margarine. Try her recipe for ribollita, the ultimate winter stew, instead.

I can relax a bit now that our annual family Chanukah party is over. We used Carolyn's idea for Chanukah magnets, impressing my guests.

New blog posts can be found at A Mother in Israel.

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What's there to eat? Saving time in the kitchen

I recently gave a talk to young mothers entitled, "Is there anything to eat in this house?" We all want to open our refrigerators and find delicious healthy food, but it won't get there by itself. I spoke generally, trying to break down the different cooking tasks -- those things that experienced homemakers hardly think about. Through awareness of what exactly makes cooking time-consuming and difficult, struggling cooks can develop useful strategies for kitchen management.

Most people figure out how to manage in the kitchen eventually. But I also meet some who are floundering under meal preparations, and rely on prepared foods or take-out more than they would like. Even many experienced homemakers never learned how to store food properly, operate appliances efficiently, or use up leftovers. It's just one more example of how the art of homemaking has been lost.

During the talk I touched on a few ways to save time in each of five categories (with a lot of overlap).

1. Planning. Making menus (often the most difficult part), preparing shopping lists, locating recipes, and checking that ingredients and utensils are available. More time planning means less time working. Menus take into consideration what we already have on hand, our personal preferences and food philosophy, time of year, quantities (use a cookbook for estimates), budget, needs and abilities of children, time, and storage space. Don't forget to plan what you will do with leftovers.
   
2. Physical preparations. Peeling, washing, chopping, checking for bugs (because they're not kosher), soaking beans, marinating, defrosting. With planning we can make these steps painless. Chicken can be prepared in advance and frozen or refrigerated, ready to pop into the oven or pan. Onions can be peeled, sliced, and frozen. Wash fruits and vegetables in quantity so they are ready to go. Most foods and food combinations can be cooked in quantities and frozen in small portions. When I make tuna casserole, I double (or triple) everything but the noodles, and store the extra for a quick meal next time. It takes less space than an entire casserole, but that also works.
   
3. Cooking. Combining ingredients, boiling, mixing, frying, stirring, checking doneness, making individual portions (like hamburgers), cooling (when necessary for the next step), heating. Avoid time-consuming chores like forming meatballs; make meatloaf unless you have older children available. Use a crock-pot or microwave instead of the stove-top--the food won't scorch. Any sauce that needs stirring works well in the microwave, and it won't matter if you get interrupted. Plan the tasks in a logical order--put up water to boil before making salads.
   
4. Distractions and mistakes. This includes miscalculations (of quantities, time, utensils, and ingredients), interruptions, spills, and burns (of both people and food). An ER pediatrician said that "100% of accidents are preventable." Causes include rushing, using too small utensils, doing kid-unfriendly tasks when they are "helping," transporting open ingredients across the floor, and using cluttered workspaces.
   
5. Clean-up. We won't enjoy our food if the kitchen is a mess. Wear an apron and spread old newspaper on your workspace before starting. Fill a big bowl or sink with soapy water for dirty utensils. Have a sprayer and rag handy for spills and to wipe the stove, appliances and counters when you are done.
   

Shabbat shalom and happy cooking.