Conversations with Amoun: The Domari Society

Hello and welcome to the second installment from my conversations with Amoun Sleem from the Domari Society in Jerusalem. 

In today’s topic, we hear about the Domari Society: the beginning, the programs offered, as well as some of Amoun’s hopes for the center. 

Conversations with Amoun: The Domari Society (click to open link).  This is compiled from two separate conversations I had with Amoun on different days.

The Dom people, more often than not, must be their own advocates. Support from outside the
community is rather limited, and Amoun noticed this. In her book, A Gypsy Dreaming in Jerusalem, Amoun mentioned that when she was starting the center and sharing her vision, people didn’t even know that there were Dom Gypsies in Jerusalem. Through various connections and volunteers from different places, Amoun was able to begin helping the Dom community even before having established the society. As Amoun stated in the video, when the nonprofit was started in 1999, the main focus was women and children. We saw in the last video that to this day that is still the focus even through the COVID-19 response.

As shown from the pictures in the video, the work started just out of Amoun’s home. The programs continued for four years out of Amoun’s home along with support from the DRC to close in the veranda and create an office and classroom space. Eventually they were able to move onto a bigger location and then now to their current location that functions well with their needs.

In the book Amoun wrote, “…I wanted a place that would be surrounded by positive thoughts about Gypsy culture…”. I really do believe that Amoun has achieved that through the Domari Society. 

Thank you for joining us for this video, I hope you learned something new! See you for the next video!

Jaya, Summer Intern

Jaya, one of our Student.Go interns, is working with the Dom Research Center. She has created a series of Blogposts for them based on interviews with Amoun Sleem, founder of the Domari Society in Jerusalem. We are pleased to share her video and written posts with you here.

Conversations with Amoun: COVID-19 and the Dom People (click to view video).

Hello and welcome to the first of a series of interviews with Amoun Sleem, director of the Domari Society in Jerusalem. I hope this interview series helps you to learn more and inspire you as it did for me! We are starting off the series by discussing the impact of COVID-19 on the Dom people. For people all over the world, COVID-19 and the resulting pandemic wreaked havoc on our lives. This has also been the case for the Dom people. Amoun shared with me that many of the Dom people work as day laborers and rely on that work as their source of income. Jobs that may have been abundant before the pandemic became scarce. In an effort to provide some relief from the dire circumstances, Amoun and the Domari Society worked tirelessly around the clock. She reached out to other organizations to provide aid such as food to families in need. Children were also impacted due to school shifting from in the classroom to online. With less access to technological tools such as WIFI or a computer, as well as losing the interaction and assistance often found in the school setting, many students fell behind. Also, many women lost their sources of income during this time. The Domari Society serves as a safe haven for the people of the Dom community. The Domari Society did not close, rather shifted focus to providing humanitarian aid. Amoun shared her hopes in the coming times for acquiring funding to have other options of programs for women. As we saw during this time, many businesses and establishments had to close their doors in an effort to take safe precautions. Events and some work could still take place on a smaller scale with less people. Because of this, Amoun hopes to equip women with skills that they can do one-on-one as a service. She hopes to offer classes such as hairdressing, catering, sewing, etc. Thank you for checking out this first part of the interview. Please share your thoughts! Hope you join us for the next post in the series! Jaya, Summer Intern

I'm not a pushy person, but apparently blogs like this one benefit from a "push." Sofia Hines, the Student.Go intern who helped us this past spring, set up a way for people to get notifications from this blog. And then, just before her term ended, we discovered that that service would also end, in July. So Sofia found this service which will send web push notifications. 

I've tried it out. It works. And the company which provides the service also provides this handy notification which we are supposed to share with you all. 

The rainbow is a different kind of notification all together. Our Creator provides lots of free services like that.*  

Web push notifications:

We provide news and updates on our site via web push notifications.
To benefit from this free service, operated with our push provider WonderPush (https://www.wonderpush.com/), you must first subscribe by clicking on an authorization request controlled by your browser and your device when you visit our blog.
The navigation data that is needed to operate this service and send you relevant messages is anonymized and kept on WonderPush servers for a maximum of 90 days and never shared to third parties. We do not store any recognizable data, neither IP address about you or your device in connection with the push notification service.
You can stop receiving our web push notifications at any time by unsubscribing.
Here is how to manage your web push subscription and to delete associated data.
(https://docs.wonderpush.com/docs/manage-your-data-and-unsubscribe-from-web-push-notifications)

* Photo taken outside Nisporeni, Moldova.