Responsible Storytelling - Marc Belzberg speaks about OneFamily - video Dailymotion

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00:00I want to thank, obviously, Variety, first and foremost, for putting on this great evening tonight.

00:05It's absolutely fabulous, way beyond our expectations.

00:08And I want to thank all of you who have come here to be with us tonight.

00:12And most of the credit goes not to me, but to my wife, so we can talk about that afterwards.

00:17Ladies and gents, we, most of the people in the room here, are descendants of Abraham,

00:23which means we're all related, we're all part of one family.

00:27And it was that instinct that causes each of us to feel a sense of responsibility, one for the other,

00:33like you would for a brother or a sister.

00:35When one is in distress, we rise to their aid.

00:38We don't wait to be called, we rise to their aid.

00:42I also want to celebrate the Jewish principle that we are taught,

00:45that unity and equality of all the peoples of the earth is extremely important.

00:50And therefore, based on that principle, one family provides equal treatment to every single victim of terror in Israel,

00:58no matter what the race or religion, whether they're Arabs, whether they're foreign workers, whether they're Christians,

01:08whatever it happens to be, one family is non-denominational.

01:11It's important to know.

01:14On August 9th, taking back a little moment in history, on August 9th, in 2021,

01:20which is the beginning of the Second Intifada, which most of you here are of an age to remember,

01:24my daughter was to be bat mitzvahed.

01:26But instead, a suicide bomber walked into the Sbarro pizza store at the main intersection in Jerusalem,

01:34carrying a guitar case that then exploded, and he killed 16 people, mostly kids, and 150 were wounded.

01:43At the time, that was the worst terror attack that Israel had seen.

01:47Of course, unfortunately, there have been much worse since then.

01:51Anyway, nothing happens by accident.

01:53Those two dates, both the bat mitzvah and this horrible event, happened at the same time.

01:58That day, my wife and I looked at each other and said, let's just take this on as a family project.

02:04For how long, we don't know.

02:06For how many, we don't know.

02:08But let's just say we're going to take care of every victim of terror.

02:10And we didn't even know what that meant, what taking care of them means.

02:13But that was a commitment we made to each other, and we are keeping to that commitment until this day.

02:26One family has become a beacon of hope to countless individuals affected by terror,

02:31embracing victims, widows, orphans, and their families to a comprehensive range of programs.

02:37One family provides crucial financial, emotional, psychological, legal,

02:43and every other form that's needed, university stipends,

02:47in order to support and nurture a sense of belonging and fostering resilience.

02:53And we stand, one family has revolutionized the way we approach healing the bereaved to the traumatized.

03:00This is the unique part of one family over every other institution that you've ever heard about

03:04that is dealing with trauma victims and PTSD and trauma and terror.

03:09It's very, very different.

03:11One family isn't a clinic that you come to, that you make an appointment to get to,

03:17that you sit for an hour with once a week and you talk to your psychologist or your psychiatrist.

03:21That's not about anything that one family does.

03:24Rather, what we do do is something, actually, that I would have to give credit to my wife

03:29for having the unique female sensitivity and intuition.

03:34No man could have figured this out for sure.

03:38And that's why everyone else is going to see a psychiatrist.

03:42My wife, on the very, very first day, there was like at the time there was a thousand people

03:47when we first started, already were victims of terror, families and kids.

03:50She took over a hotel in Eilat, sorry, at Dead Sea,

03:53and we threw a three-day weekend for this whole group of people, for a thousand people.

03:57And I looked at her and I said, who else aside from us would want to spend money on this kind of a project?

04:02Who wants to send guys to a hotel?

04:04And then she informed me of something that became really the motto of one family,

04:09and that is people of like experiences who share a common extreme experience

04:15have a bond with each other that they have with no one else,

04:18even their best friend or even their wife.

04:21And therefore, what we decided to do was, what my wife said I had to do,

04:24was to create events that facilitate victims of terror of the same kind of event that happened to them,

04:30of the same kind of age, to be together at various programs that we do all over the country

04:35and for every different member of the family.

04:38And during that event, they meet each other.

04:41They are drawn to certain people kind of automatically or instinctively.

04:46And those groupings that happen at that event are forever.

04:50They become best friends and they heal each other.

04:53The essence of it is peer-to-peer treatment, let's call it, right?

04:57Peer-to-peer health, becoming healthy.

05:00And they phone each other at any time at any hour of the night to talk about their problems.

05:04They can lean on each other at any time they want because they understand each other.

05:07They're in a safe environment when they're talking to people who went through what they went through,

05:10and no one else in the world understands what it's really about.

05:14I'll just end with one statistic.

05:17As you know, one family, as you don't know, one family has spent $80 million over the last 23 years.

05:23We've raised and spent and donated to enable the possibility of doing what we've been doing.

05:30And the problem is that over the whole 23 years of our existence, 1,600 people were killed.

05:39Whereas in one day, 1,200 people were killed on October the 7th,

05:44and another 600 people have been killed as soldiers.

05:47And one family does not distinguish between soldiers and civilians.

05:50If you're killed by a terrorist, you fall into our lap.

05:55And so the amount of money that we're going to have to have in the future in order to meet the demand,

06:00to use the word demand, but to meet the need, has significantly grown.

06:05And that's what one family is doing.

06:07It's doing for the first time in its life some marketing.

06:10As someone says, as one of the big philanthropists that went to see, I won't tell you who it is, he said,

06:16OK, it sounds like you guys are doing a great job at what you're doing, and you're doing a lousy job at marketing.

06:21I said, you're right. Thank you very much.

06:23Anyways, I want to thank Variety again for hosting, and I want to express my deepest gratitude to each and every one of you

06:30for coming here tonight to learn more about the important work of one family amongst the thousands of victims of terror in Israel.

06:36Together, we can make a profound difference in the lives of who needs it most.

06:41Thank you very much.

Responsible Storytelling - Marc Belzberg speaks about OneFamily

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