Yad Eliezer

Yad Eliezer (Hebrew: אגודת יד אליעזר‎‎, "Yad Eliezer Association") is a Jewish poverty-relief organization in Israel. It is best known for its monthly distribution of thousands of family food packages, baby formula and baby food packages. It also provides a range of financial and rehabilitative support services, including the mentoring of boys from single-parent families and free or low-cost weddings at its wedding complex in Givat Shaul, Jerusalem. Founded as a small, neighborhood chesed organization, it is now one of the largest poverty-relief organizations in Israel, with over 12,000 volunteers. Led by Orthodox Jewish management, it provides services for both religious and secular families in Israel.

Yad Eliezer was founded in 1980 by Rabbi Yaakov and Hadassah Weisel, both elementary schoolteachers, and named in memory of her father, Rabbi Eliezer Lipa Benzman. The seeds of the organization were planted when Hadassah, a resident of Jerusalem's Kiryat Sanz neighborhood, found out that her neighbor's family was suffering from malnutrition, and sent her daughters door to door to collect food for them every week. As word got around, other families requested the same assistance, and she was soon sending all her daughters' classmates out to collect food, then filling colorful plastic shopping baskets for the weekly delivery. Other classes and other schools got involved, and Weisel's two-and-a-half room apartment became the collection point and packing area for monthly food boxes for 360 needy families – a figure that mushroomed to 1,800 needy families by 1995. After operating Yad Eliezer out of her apartment for 20 years, Weisel began soliciting overseas donations through the newly formed American Friends of Yad Eliezer to further expand the operation. Yad Eliezer is now headquartered in the Shmuel HaNavi neighborhood of Jerusalem under the directorship of the Weisels' son, Dov.

Yad Eliezer provides monthly food packages, comprising basic necessities such as "eggs, oil, flour, sugar, and canned goods" and fresh produce to 6,000 families throughout Israel. It also distributes hundreds of Shabbat food packages consisting of "challah, fish, salads, chicken, and cake" to needy families and poor elderly, and holiday food packages in advance of Passover and Rosh Hashana. In response to government welfare budget cuts, Yad Eliezer distributed 9,000 Passover food packages in 2004, up 5,000 from the previous year.