History
Yad Sarah started as a gemach (free-loan service) in the home of Rabbi Uri Lupolianski, who served as mayor of Jerusalem from 2003 to 2008. In the 1970s Lupolianski was a high school teacher with a young family. One of his children needed a vaporizer during the winter, and his wife borrowed one from a neighbor. Upon hearing that such short-term-use items were hard to obtain, Lupolianski decided to start his own gemach by buying a few vaporizers to lend to others. People who heard about his gemach began dropping off other items which are also used for a short time, such as crutches, walkers and wheelchairs. With seed money from his father, Yaakov Lupolianski, and guidance from Kalman Mann, retired director of Hadassah Medical Organization, Lupolianski incorporated his gemach into a nationwide non-profit in 1976. Lupolianski named the organization Yad Sarah (Hebrew for "Memorial to Sarah") in memory of his grandmother, Sarah, who had died in the Holocaust.Yad Sarah raises 92% of its operating budget from donations. The organization does not receive any government assistance.Yad Sarah has helped establish equipment-lending centers and repair workshops in Angola, Cameroon, El Salvador, Russia, South Africa, and Jordan.
Read more about this topic: Yad Sarah
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“They are a sort of post-house,where the Fates
Change horses, making history change its tune,
Then spur away o’er empires and o’er states,
Leaving at last not much besides chronology,
Excepting the post-obits of theology.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)