Dear Friends and Contributors of Netivyah.    Thank you for your generosity and willingness to stand together with God's people and for your support of the Lord's work in Jerusalem.

   Last month all of Israel celebrated the High Holiday Season. This is usually season of joy and fellowship. The High Holidays begins with the Feast of Trumpets, when according to the Bible the Lord begins his judgment over the Earth. The following ten days are traditionally spent in prayer and repentance, concluded by the Fast of the Day of Atonement - Yom Kippur. After the end of fasting, begins the joyful celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles. Prophet Isaiah said that in the future, people from all nations will be gathered in Jerusalem to glorify the merciful Creator, God of Israel. Decorated booths (Succot) are built all over Israel and for the entire week families are having their meals in these Tabernacles. Succot is the only biblical holiday in which it is commanded in the bible to be joyful and this year, our joy was doubled by the release of kidnapped Israeli Soldier Gilead Shalit. Gilead was captured by Hamas terrorists five years ago while serving on Gaza strip border. It was a very hard decision for our government to make, as Israel had to release over one thousand terrorists, responsible for countless bombings and terror attacks, which have taken many innocent lives. Although many were opposed to such a disproportional agreement, on the day of his release, all of Israel rejoiced as one with Gilead’s family, looking at this very pale and thin young man finally returning home.

   After the holiday season, life slowly returns to its normal course and we need to take care of all the issues postponed during the holidays. Two new workers have joined our team this month. Both of these wonderful young men, who were basically raised in our congregation, are to help with radio, administration and food distribution. Please pray for their swift and easy adjustment.



   One of the new projects that these two young men are going to focus on is converting the old teachings from audio tapes to a digital format, so that we can upload them to our website. It is the long term project, as there are hundreds of old teachings of Joseph Shulam and others in our archives, some of them need work done to improve the quality of their sound. We hope that in the near future you will be able to listen to more teachings and lessons on our web page.

   The Food Distribution Center work goes on, every day we get phone calls and new requests from needy people in hard situations begging for help, we are able to provide for many. As you know, we work with the municipal welfare department, they assigns to us families in need. At the moment we are providing for around 150 families (many of them are single mothers or families blessed with many children).
It is very important for us that we maintain a high standard of service, so last week Judah conducted an internal survey to get feedback from the people we help. It was an anonymous survey with the following 5 questions scoring between 0 and 10.
   1. Is the distribution center clean & orderly? Average score: 9.9
   2. Are the Center employees polite & helpful? Average score: 9.8
   3. Rate the quality of the products? Average score: 9.7
   4. Rate the quantity received? Average score: 9.1
   5. Overall satisfaction with our Food Distribution Center? Average score: 9.8
The average was 9.66 out of 10 which is an amazingly high score considering it was lowered greatly due to the 9.1 average on question #4 relating to the amount of food given, which despite being a very large quantity - twelve kg each week (3kg of each type of food [dry goods, frozen foods, fruits, vegetables]) per family – is not enough to satisfy some people.
In addition some people added notes to the form giving some extra thanks, comments and suggestions. Two of them read as follows “It must be noted that without them [Netivyah Center] many families would not have a Shabbat [meal]. Good job, I appreciate you” and “fabulous people, wonderful service, I want to thank you from the depth of my heart, may the lord bless you with ALL his blessings.” These are just two of the many comments people wrote.



    Joseph is traveling in the Far East. He was teaching in Hong Kong and China for the last 10 days and it is crystal clear that god is doing amazing things there, for example in the city of Tong Chung the number of churches has grown in just a few years from one large one and a few small ones to eighty churches and eighty thousand Christians! On Tuesday he flew to Korea for the series of lectures and from there to Japan, to take part in the Second Asian Forum.