According to the official government statistics, there are
around1.5 million
people living in poverty in Israel. Among them around
652,000
hungry children.
People below the poverty line in
Israel are defined as having an income of less than 1,763 NIS(approximately
410 dollars) for a single person and 2,777 NIS (650 dollars) for a couple.
In these areas there are poor people in
Israel
Most of us live in comfort and security, but over
one-fifth
of the world’s population
lives in poverty.
What is poverty?
Work with a friend and explain what poverty is in
your opinion.
Now, find out if you were right. Click
here and here
to read
about poverty.
Write what poverty is in the
Poverty in Israel
Watch a video of an incredible woman called the
Chicken Lady.
Click here.
1. How old is this woman?
95
92
97
2. How does she know what hunger is?
She was in prison
She was in a poor neighborhood
A person told her he is hungry
3. How many children does she feed every week?
800
900
1000
4. She saw poor people buying bones at the butcher
True
False
5. She donates every week 1,200 USD.
True
False
6.What is the old woman's main message? We should work and not
ask for help
We
should help others
We
should make money and not need to get help
In 2000,
305,400 families which are 17.6% of the families in Israel
were below the
poverty line.
In 2000,
18.8% of the people in Israel were poor.
In 2000,
25.2% of the children were poor in Israel.
There
were1,088,100 poor people in Israel in 2000.
In the following chart you can see the
number of people whogot
unemploymentbenefit in Israel.
According to the table
below, has the number of unemployed people
increased in recent years?
The minimum wage in Israel is 17.50
shekels an hour. The law
states that after working for 6 months, the employer
has to
start paying benefits for the employee.
Sometimes, just before the six
months are up, the worker is
fired, and told he/she can be rehired after 3
months.
Without six months of employment on record, a worker doesn’t
qualify
for unemployment insurance! At 17.50 shekels
an hour
for an 8 hour day, six days a week, the monthly income is
NIS 3,360
($800), well below the poverty line for a family of 4.
In the following link you will be able to click on
the map and
learn about the famine in Africa country by country. Click
here.
Choose a country and prepare to report on it to
your class.
Thoughts from Poor People from
Around the
World
The following is what poor people from around the world
said about poverty:
"Poverty is like living in jail, living under bondage, waiting to
be free" - Jamaica
"Poverty is lack of freedom, enslaved by crushing daily burden, by
depression and fear of what the future will bring." -
Georgia
"If you want to do something and have no power to do it, it is
talauchi (poverty)." - Nigeria
"Lack of work worries me. My children were hungry and I told them
the rice is cooking, until they fell asleep from hunger." - an older
man from Bedsa, Egypt.
"A better life for me is to be healthy, peaceful and live in love
without hunger. Love is more than anything. Money has no value in the absence
of love." - a poor older woman in Ethiopia
"When one is poor, she has no say in public, she feels inferior.
She has no food, so there is famine in her house; no clothing, and no progress
in her family." - a woman from Uganda
"For a poor person everything is terrible - illness, humiliation,
shame. We are cripples; we are afraid of everything; we depend on everyone. No
one needs us. We are like garbage that everyone wants to get rid of."
- a blind woman from Tiraspol, Moldova
"I repeat that we need water as badly as we need air." - a
woman from Tash-Bulak, The Kyrgyz Republic
"The waste brings some bugs; here we have cockroaches, spiders and
even snakes and scorpions." - Nova California, Brazil
Choose
one quote that especially touched you and explain
how you felt when you read
it.
Send to the
Myths and Facts on Poverty
Myth 1
Most poor people do not work.
The fact is that most
poor people live in families where someone is already working. In 1998, 7
out of every 10 of the able-bodied employable poor people worked, at least
part-time.
Myth
2 There are plenty of jobs out
there for those who want to work.
The fact is that there
are few jobs that the low-skilled poor actually have a chance to get.
Myth
3 Unemployment is at a very low
level and few people actually need jobs.
The fact is that
unemployment is often twice as high as people think.
Myth
4 If people would just work, even
at minimum wage, they would not be poor.
The fact is that
full-time minimum wage work has not been enough to lift most families
over the poverty line in years.
Myth
5 Minimum wage is not important
because hardly anyone but teenagers earn minimum
wage.
The fact is that many
people earn minimum wage - not only teenagers.
Myth
6 There are really not that many poor
people out there.
The fact is that there
were between thirty and forty million people living below the poverty line
during the last ten years in the USA.
Myth
7 Apart from the poor, most people in
the USA are doing pretty well.
The fact is that over 1
in every 4 workers in the USA is
poor.
People in different countries earn differently.
The average income of a person in Africa is different from
the average income of
a person in the United States.
So, how can we measure poverty? Click
here to learn.
In general there are two different ways of
measuring
poverty. what are they?
A person is considered poor if
Explain what is poverty line:
What is the Purchasing Power Parity used for?
Starfish Story(Advanced
Level)
While
walking down the beach, a man saw someone in the
distance leaning down, picking
something up and throwing
it in the ocean.
As he came closer, he saw thousands of starfish the tide
had thrown onto the beach. Unable to return to the ocean
during low tide, the
starfish were dying.
He observed a young boy picking up the starfish one by
one
and throwing them back into the ocean.
After watching the seemingly futile effort, the observer
said, "There must be thousands of starfish on this beach.
It would be
impossible for you to save all of them.
There are simply too many. You can't
possibly save enough
to make a difference.
The young boy smiled as he picked up another starfish
and
tossed it back into the ocean.
"It made a difference to that one," he replied.
Group Discussion
What is the moral of this
story?
What is the connection of this story
to poverty?
Hunger & Soup Kitchen
Every 3.8 seconds someone dies of
hunger.
Three-fourths of the deaths are children under age 5.
There are over 1,100,000 people living
in poverty in Israel including over 500,000 starving children!
Food is a basic necessity but over 840
million people
around the world go hungry every day.
Click on the
button on this site The
Hunger Site to make a free
donation of food to hungry people around the world. The site's sponsors pay
for your donation, which you can make once a day.
Study: 30,000 children slipped below poverty line in 2007,
Haaretz, 14.02.08 
Country by country 
