A builder of Israel by way of Teaneck
Shari Mendes wins the Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion Prize
When Shari and David Mendes and their four children made the big move to Israel from Teaneck in 2003, Ms. Mendes intentionally kept her goals modest: “If I can just get my kids acclimated, learn the language a bit, and learn how to turn on the oven, that will be good enough,” she recalls thinking.
She accomplished much more than she could have imagined.
On December 2, Ms. Mendes was one of 12 awardees at the 10th annual Sylvan Adams Nefesh B’Nefesh Bonei Zion Prize ceremony honoring English-speaking immigrants who have made exceptional contributions to Israeli society. (“Bonei Zion” means “Builders of Zion.”)
Ms. Mendes won in the community and nonprofit category for her contribution as founder and director of the Israel Lemonade Fund, which provides direct emergency relief funds for breast cancer patients of any religion or ethnicity and referred by social workers in the first year following diagnosis.
It was her own breast cancer diagnosis in July 2010, a few months before her 50th birthday, that opened her eyes to the need.
While emphasizing that Israel’s nationalized health system provides excellent care and coverage of medical expenses, she says she was shocked to learn how costly a serious illness can be.
For a family already in financial straits, new out-of-pocket expenses for childcare, household help, transportation to and from treatment, and other related expenses, as well as loss of income, can lead to bankruptcy within six months of diagnosis.
“It’s a very invisible thing, and I didn’t see it until I was sitting in a hospital waiting room myself,” she said.
She wondered how many of the approximately 5,000 Israelis per year diagnosed with breast cancer — many of them young working mothers, due to the prevalence of genetically linked breast cancer among Ashkenazi Jews — could manage the extra expenses while often unable to continue working.
“In my broken Hebrew,” Ms. Mendes recalled, she talked to other women and to hospital social workers. She learned that while organizations existed in other countries to provide emergency financial aid for this population, there was nothing similar in Israel.
So she raised 50,000 shekels from private donors — that’s about $14,000 at today’s exchange rate — and established the Israel Lemonade Fund, a year after the mammogram that set her own medical journey in motion.
“I received the news that I had breast cancer on the Ninth of Av, one of the saddest days of the Jewish year,” she said. “It seemed fitting to do something positive on the one-year anniversary of diagnosis, specifically on a day that addresses ways to heal after destruction.”
One of her main mentors has been Joseph Gitler, who grew up in Teaneck and was her neighbor in Ra’anana, where the Mendes family lived until 2019. Mr. Gitler started the Leket Israel national food-rescue network; he won a Bonei Zion prize for that work in 2014.
“Immigrants are in some ways the perfect people to do inspirational initiatives because they’re risk-takers by definition,” Ms. Mendes said. “People who take apart their good lives in wonderful Jewish communities for an ideological dream are exactly the people who can accomplish incredible things.
“Potential immigrants should know they can really do anything — more than learning how to turn on the oven! I wasn’t going to let the fact that my Hebrew wasn’t perfect stop me, because this was needed.”
To keep the overhead low, she and her crew run the organization from her home, which is now in Jerusalem. Ms. Mendes uses a point system to categorize levels of need before awarding grants ranging from 900 to 4,000 shekels — in American dollars, that’s from about $250 to $1,100. For example, a single parent or someone experiencing business difficulties will receive more.
“It’s a fluid, in-depth way to tailor the grant to the applicant and use the money more wisely,” Ms. Mendes said. “We don’t give blanket grants because I want donors to know their money is used exactly and efficiently.”
One of the earliest grants went to an Ethiopian woman with three young children who’d fled from an abusive husband to her sister’s home, she said. The five of them scraped by on her minimal income, earned by stocking supermarket shelves. When she felt a lump in her breast, she ignored it because she had to keep providing for her family. But eventually she became gravely ill and sought care.
“Her social worker sent an application to the Lemonade Fund, and we awarded her a grant, but the check we sent got returned,” Ms. Mendes said. “We called her sister, and she told us the woman had died.
“At that point, I decided we had to expand to every hospital and become so well known that everybody knows there is a safety net and they won’t be afraid to get checked. The biggest worry is often not the disease but how they will pay their bills, and that worry directly impacts healing.”
Today, the Lemonade Fund works with virtually every Israeli hospital, all four of the country’s health maintenance organizations, and municipal welfare departments.
Ms. Mendes hopes there will be increased awareness thanks to the publicity around the Bonei Zion prize, which she accepted while her daughter-in-law was in a nearby hospital in labor with the couple’s second grandchild.
The needs are greater than ever.
“Applications went up 27 percent in the last year and a half,” she said. “Especially since the war, many people have lost their sources of income, or are displaced, and at the same time food prices have risen and interest rates for mortgages went up, which also affects rent rates. Many people cannot manage these increasing costs. Some even became homeless while in chemo, getting evicted for being in arrears in rent.”
In response, Ms. Mendes started a separate, parallel fund to help breast cancer patients with housing costs for up to four months.
The Lemonade Fund also instituted one-time war grants of 1,800 shekels. One recipient was a displaced woman who discovered a lump during the week of shiva for her sister, a victim of the October 7 terror attacks. It was a perfect storm of tragic occurrences.
“She felt frantic because her family was evacuated from their home,” Ms. Mendes said. “Her social worker said, ‘Don’t worry, the Lemonade Fund will help you.’
“For the war grants, we made an abbreviated application that social workers sign off on. It’s the first money recipients got before grants from the government or Bituach Leumi” — Israel’s equivalent of Social Security.
Sometimes requests are unusual and must be weighed carefully.
“One family told their social worker that the mother was dying, and one of the sisters was getting married. The mother lost a lot of weight during her illness, and the dress she’d bought for the wedding was now too big. The family wrote, ‘It would mean so much to her to get a new dress and we can’t afford it.’ I thought, is that really what our purpose is? What will our donors think? But we never tell recipients how to use the money,” Ms. Mendes relates.
“We issued a grant, and a few months later we got a letter with a picture of the mother in the dress she bought. She died soon after the wedding, but this had made her so happy.”
The Bonei Zion prize committee also acknowledged another tremendous form of giving that Ms. Mendes suddenly found on her plate after the war began.
In 2010, she’d volunteered to help identify fallen female soldiers, should the need arise. These volunteers later became the nucleus of a special IDF reserve unit started by the army rabbinate. But the need didn’t arise until October 7.
On October 8, she was called to the IDF’s central morgue to help process scores of female soldiers sadistically brutalized and butchered by Hamas.
“Nothing could have prepared me for the scene I came into,” she said. “It was unimaginable in terms of sheer numbers, body bags piled to the ceiling and refrigerator trucks lined up as far as you could see. The smells and sights were indescribable. We worked there around the clock for two weeks dealing with victim after victim after victim. We were stunned by the brutality and violence of what we saw perpetrated on these women’s bodies,” she said in a podcast conversation with Dan Senor.
After Ms. Mendes and her team prepared each woman for burial in a special room for female soldiers only, they would silently pay homage to the victim.
“We wanted to give them the love and honor they were not shown by the barbarians before their death. We would take a moment and pause and just hold them in our hearts.”
She later testified at the United Nations, once in Geneva on Zoom and once in New York, about the sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists. She appears in Sheryl Sandberg’s “Screams before Silence” film and has spoken publicly many times in the past year about what she witnessed.
She kept this activity completely separate from her Lemonade Fund responsibilities, which also have increased during the war.
This extraordinary woman was taken by “total surprise” when she got a phone call from aliyah facilitation organization Nefesh B’Nefesh in early November, telling her she’d won a Bonei Zion award, she said. She doesn’t know who nominated her.
“There are other immigrants I know who have won it, people I look up to, so it was a huge honor,” Ms. Mendes said. “This has always been a grassroots organization, started in my backyard with a great group of women. I never thought it would get such wonderful recognition. We were just single-minded about getting things done.”
Nefesh B’Nefesh cofounder and executive director Rabbi Yehoshua Fass said the Bonei Zion prizewinners “inspire future generations of immigrants to continue shaping our homeland.”
Ofir Sofer, Israel’s minister of aliyah and integration, said the recipients “embody the spirit of Zionism and demonstrate that making aliyah is not just a personal act, but an immense contribution to the resilience and future of the State of Israel.
“After the atrocities committed against the Jewish people on October 7th and the multi-front war that followed, it is crucial that we take a moment to recognize and celebrate the incredible individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to Israeli society. These immigrants, who have become an integral part of our nation, have helped shape our national success and strengthen our resilience.”
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