WASHINGTON — Elisheva Policastro scouts around for dilapidated houses crumbling buildings with their windows broken out, their facades peeling and their floors buckling. The Washington, D.C., resident travels to Beersheva, Israel, to buy these properties, with their trash-strewn lawns, and transform them into choice, affordable housing for low-income tenants.
Policastro is the founder and international director of Operation Restoration, a little-known, American nonprofit organization that quietly raises funds from family foundations and individual donors and spends the money in Israel. In addition, rental fees at about 25 percent below market rate are channeled back into the organization for upkeep and renovations of other units. The homes in Beersheva are for new immigrants living on meager stipends or wages.
Since the organization got off the ground in 1992, Operation Restoration has fixed up between three and six apartments each year at a cost of $30,000 to $40,000 per unit, says Policastro, who works as a freelance “motivational speaker” and gives keynote addresses at conferences on such topics as setting and attaining goals.
The 41-year-old Policastro traveled to Israel last month to oversee the completion of six newly renovated rental homes.
She says Operation Restoration is “the only all-volunteer, nonprofit entirely devoted to rebuilding Israel’s broken-down properties into updated Jewish refugee rentals.” Policastro does not draw a salary and journeys to Israel up to four times a year using her frequent flier miles. All the funds collected, she says, go directly to purchasing run-down properties and paying contractors in Israel for the repairs and expansions.
Policastro, who grew up in Beltsville, Md., and graduated from the University of Maryland with a bachelor’s degree in Jewish history, says she came up with the idea while living in Israel on a “study sabbatical” in 1991. While attending an ulpan (intensive Hebrew language course), she befriended many new immigrants and learned of their dire living conditions once their subsidies had tapered off and they found themselves underemployed and earning subsistence wages.
“There are no widespread rentals in Israel. Generally we Westerners really don’t understand that,” says Policastro, who met her American-born husband, Frank, in Israel in 1977, when both were working in archaeology. Until new immigrants “gain a full grasp of Hebrew and get settled in a job, they really can’t afford decent housing,” she adds. “I saw families renting one apartment, but maybe there were several families together.”
Often, Operation Restoration creates refurbished apartments by subdividing a larger home or building into smaller units. While Israeli contractors carry out most of the construction, annual teams of volunteers travel to Israel to landscape, paint and clean the latest batch of new homes.
News of Operation Restoration’s available apartments generally spreads by word of mouth, she says.
“We try to rent to the neediest, those who are earning under 50 percent of the average wage” or maybe only $10,000 a year.
Policastro acknowledges her organization is not audited independently and lacks prevailing accountability standards that would make it eligible to receive funding from mainstream Jewish organizations.
Asked about operating revenues and expenditures, she says, “We have no budget. We are not professional fund-raisers. As soon as money comes in we use it. We don’t start out the year saying, ‘We need X amount of money, and we’re going to build X amount of housing.’ We do not know how much will come in; we’re all volunteers, and we’re all giving our spare time to do this.”
Contributors are sent photographs and explanations about the work done. “We’re not like a United Way with all kinds of money coming in,” she says.
The organization’s lawyer in Jerusalem, Barry Ernstoff, who handles the group’s property acquisition and payments to contractors, praised Operation Restoration’s efforts. “I’ve been working with them [almost] 10 years, and I’m very impressed with what they’ve done in creating new homes out of old abandoned buildings,” says Ernstoff, who made aliyah 16 years ago from Seattle.