Responsible Storytelling - Marc Belzberg speaks about OneFamily
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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.