The British Shalom-Salaam Trust is seeking new trustees

Published 17 Feb 2023 by Richard Kuper

JVL Introduction

The British Shalom-Salaam Trust is seeking two new Trustees. It’s valuable work is described below and we urge all our readers to support it with either a one-off or a regular donation.

We also post Sam Stein’s story – someone BSST has helped in his activity of giving the children of Masafer Yatta a proper wrestling mat and techniques to burn their stress is a small way of fighting the occupation.

WHO WE ARE
BSST is the only British Jewish grant-giving charity established specifically to work across Israel-Palestine-Golan, the land comprising Israel since 1948 and that occupied by Israel since 1967. Set up in 2004 as a volunteer-run charity, we are looking for two enthusiastic trustees to join our Board.

WHAT WE DO
BSST seeks to challenge oppression and bring a little justice and much hope via the small grants it gives to grassroots organisations. We focus on small groups that seek creative and practical solutions to the needs of their communities or to the wider society where they live. BSST sees these groups as essential to the eventual achievement of a just, democratic and sustainable peace based on equality, human rights and mutual respect between all communities within Israel-Palestine-Golan.

Most BSST grants go to Palestinian, Jewish and joint organisations, but we also support a Syrian group in Golan, and projects working with African asylum seekers and migrant workers from around the world who now live in Israel. We are specially willing to help groups tackling difficult and contentious issues and those overlooked by major funders.

HOW WE WORK
At the core of BSST’s work is evaluating grant requests from thirty to forty organisations a year. This means researching the groups and their activities and then monitoring our grants’ effectiveness. Every four to six weeks, our Board meets in central London for coffee, cake and decision-making on all aspects of running the charity, including whether and how to disburse funds.

While all trustees are responsible for the charity’s governance and evaluating grant requests, individual trustees also fundraise, manage our IT, maintain our social media, organise our annual Liberation Seder and do our own writing and design. If anyone interested in becoming a new trustee could also offer any of those additional skills, that would be very welcome.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED, the best introduction to our work, and to see how we have grown and developed, is reading some of our annual reports at bsst.org.uk/annual–reports.

AND IF YOU THINK YOU MIGHT LIKE TO BE CONSIDERED AS A TRUSTEE, but are unsure if you are right for us or we are right for you, please drop us a line at bsst@bsst.org.uk. Tell us when would be a good time to talk and we will set up a phone or Zoom call with you. If you don’t feel able to take on a trustee role, but could help with any of our other skills needs, do also get in touch.

For this yeshiva graduate teaching Palestinian kids to wrestle is a political act

BSST made a small grant to facilitate this activity

Sam Stein, Plus 61, February 7, 2023

Sam Stein was born and raised in Lawrence, New York. He moved to Tel Aviv in late 2019 and then Jerusalem in 2020 to become an anti-occupation activist.

For more, follow him on Instagram and Twitter @sam_avraham.

For SAM STEIN, giving the children of Masafer Yatta a proper wrestling mat and techniques to burn their stress is a small way of fighting the occupation.

When someone first sees me, “wrestler” is probably just about the last word that pops into their head. At about 175 centimetres, I’m roughly average height, but my skinny frame seems to make people surprised that I can pick up household objects, let alone engage in a sport as physical as wrestling.

But since I took up the sport at the age of 15, wrestling has been the only physical activity I’ve really enjoyed. I get bored with basketball, football or baseball after 10 minutes. But I can wrestle for hours and want to keep going long after I’ve hit the point of exhaustion.

After more than a decade, it’s become more than a hobby. Wrestling has helped me learn to focus, gain confidence, and work towards a goal. It’s been a source of personal growth and is a part of my identity.

Before leaving New York, I coached high school wrestling at my alma mater, DRS Yeshiva High School. It was an incredibly fulfilling experience that gave me the opportunity to introduce growing young boys to the sport that’s given me so much. We did well, too: everyone on the team earned a top-six finish in their weight class. Winning definitely made things more fun.

So, when I moved to Israel-Palestine in 2019, I knew I wanted to continue coaching wrestling,

As I became involved in Palestinian solidarity activism, I realised I had a great opportunity to mix my activism and my passion for wrestling.

I had formed deep relationships with the Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills, also known as Masafer Yatta, an area of the West Bank that faces rampant settler violence, discriminatory infrastructure, and regular home demolitions.

I mentioned to a friend there that I was interested in starting a wrestling club for the children in the village. He mentioned the idea to the kids, and while I didn’t understand their responses in Arabic, their tone of voice, and the fact that they all started trying to tackle me, gave me the impression that they were very enthusiastic about the club. The Masafer Yatta Wrestling Club was born.

Sam Stein on the wrestling mat with a Palestinian student

The first step was to buy a wrestling mat but wrestling mats cost thousands of dollars, even for a relatively cheap option. I crowdsourced funds via Twitter, obtained a grant from the British Shalom Salaam Trust, and – as the mat was shipped from Germany – wrangled customs.

Many friends asked me why I didn’t take a cheaper (and easier) route such as using puzzle pads or yoga mats. To me, the answer was simple: these children deserved the same mats as everybody else.

Living in Area C of the West Bank under full Israeli military control, they are deprived of so many of their basic rights. Their village doesn’t have access to running water or a proper electric grid, and their homes are at constant risk of demolition. The least I could give them was a real wrestling mat. Wrestling clubs in Area A — the portion of the West Bank under the control of the Palestinian Authority — or in Israel don’t use modified yoga mats.

For almost a year, I’ve been driving from my Nachlaot apartment to Masafer Yatta every Wednesday to coach children as young as five and as old as 16. The highlight of my week is when I reach Masafer Yatta and am greeted by children yelling my name and asking “musarah?” (Arabic for “wrestling,” musarah is one of my many new vocabulary words since starting the Masafer Yatta Wrestling Club.) It fills me with pride when the younger children rush to help roll the mats out on the village basketball court, and it’s amazing to see the progress the kids have made, from not knowing a single rule of the sport to being able to properly execute techniques.

The Masafer Yatta Wrestling Club is more than a deepening of the relationships I’ve made through my activism. It’s a form of activism itself. For me, wrestling offered a way to build confidence, improve my physical fitness, and develop a better relationship with my body. The children of Masafer Yatta don’t need those things. Many of them help their parents with shepherding and physical labor such as farming and construction. I’m constantly amazed at how strong and athletic they are for their age and size.

What these children need is an outlet for the stress they constantly deal with living under occupation, a kind of stress that nobody, least of all children, should have to deal with.

Even within the context of Palestinian life under occupation, the children in Masafer Yatta live under harsh conditions and have far less access to leisure activities. The Palestinian national wrestling team trains in Hebron, there is a Palestinian-owned Taekwondo gym in East Jerusalem and Ramallah boasts multiple Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gyms. But, as far as I can tell, the Masafer Yatta Wrestling Club is the only combat sport facility in the entire Area C. I love coaching the children of Masafer Yatta. If the occupation ended tomorrow, I’d continue running the club. But in the face of the occupation, I hope it can be more than a fun distraction. When one of the goals of the occupation is to make Palestinian life in Area C so miserable that they leave, I hope that embracing the sport of wrestling can be an act of defiance for the children of Masafer Yatta.