I remember a phone call I received somewhere at the end of February: ‘The first confirmed case in Israel is yours.’ On that day the virus began to run our lives. It happened in one of the toy stores in the city, on the busy costume buying days leading up to the Purim holiday. The first confirmed case was located there, in Or Yehuda, and from there it developed throughout the country. That’s how Or Yehuda became the first town in the country with corona.
I was on the phone with the highest echelons of the Ministry of Health. I began the conversation with one person, and slowly they put more and more people on the call. I immediately understood the significance of the event. They were considering what the guidelines said, who had to go into quarantine, how do we report, how do we assure. Pandemonium.
That was the moment I understood how great my responsibility is. In a period like this, in which the government authorities don’t really have more knowledge than anyone else, the residents need someone they can rely on. Us.
Very quickly we found ourselves doing things we had not imagined one month prior, and establishing a citywide headquarters for coping with the coronavirus – who really knows what that means? An almost daily routine began: At 8 pm a press conference with the Prime Minister is broadcast, and in the morning the residents call the city headquarters: Do the guidelines apply to me? Am I permitted to go to work?
On one of the mornings, the facilitator from MAOZ called me and asked, “How can we help you?” This question made me stop. I repeated the question out loud: “How can you help me?” We agreed to meet the next day.
We met. On screen of course. We mapped the challenges of corona as they appear in Or Yehuda. Our central problem was how to enforce the guidelines. I found myself in daily conversations with the police, the Home Front Command, the urban policing department – looking for the authority that would make the residents obey. But how many supervisors can we recruit and how many tickets can we write?
In one the meetings with the MAOZ staff, a simple idea was raised. Maybe instead of police officers and supervisors, we can call up residents. We decided to establish a volunteer patrol, give them green vests, like the police wear, and send them to speak with their neighbors. And it works. It’s amazing what a green vest can do. When a resident takes off her mask, and someone in a green vest admonishes her, it doesn’t matter that they don’t have official authority. She obeys”.