Advocacy and Support

Our Advocacy and Support Center provides aid to individuals and families who came to Israel seeking asylum, and now find themselves in highly complex social situations. The center is managed by a coordinator, and is operated by a team of volunteers from different backgrounds, as well as by mediators from the asylum seeker community. The center serves as a hub of orientation and humanitarian aid for hundreds of asylum seekers each month, and distributes important and relevant information to thousands more.

We hold reception hours twice a week, on Sundays and Tuesdays, and provide information and guidance in matters of welfare, healthcare, women’s rights, education, status, dealing with the authorities, and other issues.

The volunteers, alongside the community mediators, work with the seekers who come to reception hours in order to provide answers and detect solutions to their problems and needs. These solutions can be found within the framework of ASSAF’s aid projects, as well as in other partner organizations. Issues that cannot be solved within the center’s reception hours are followed up by a team of volunteers who handle the complicated cases until they are resolved.

In addition to supporting and aiding asylum-seekers directly, the Advocacy and Support Center plays a central role in ASSAF’s public advocacy department’s work for promoting the rights and well-being of asylum-seekers in Israel. The many individual applications that are received at the center, and the issues that arise while of handling them, constitute the basis of the organization’s work towards a better public policy on asylum seekers in Israel.