Help Traumatized Palestinian Children

We serve on the Boards of the Spafford Children’s Center (SCC) and the American Friends of the Spafford Children's Center (AFSCC), and we have seen the value of SCC’s work firsthand. Simply put, the Center is changing lives in Jerusalem, ensuring that, each year, hundreds of the city’s most vulnerable children are given every opportunity to succeed through specialized trauma therapy and individual educational tutoring. SCC does this on a lean budget and with tremendous joy.

Wendy is a great granddaughter of Horatio and Anna Spafford and John and Mary Whiting, Christian pilgrims who arrived in Jerusalem in 1881. They and their children provided services in SCC’s historic building that sits alongside the Jerusalem Old City walls. As Matt, an Episcopal priest, knows well, the SCC is not far from the main street that passes from north to south; where Jesus would have played as a child and where, as an adult, he would carry a cross.

Today’s children of Jerusalem’s Old City and surrounding neighborhoods carry both that same joy and the crushing weight of poverty, societal violence, and cramped living conditions. In many cases, children experience all three of these circumstances. And yet, once they pass through the gates of the Spafford Children's Center, there is only laughter and hope for better days.

You have the opportunity, through your donations, to contribute to that good work, ensuring that the children of Jerusalem have access to the world outside those old stone walls. Please remember the American Friends of the Spafford Children's Center as part of your year-end giving: https://goto.gg/31839.  AFSCC is an all-volunteer organization so your donations go to support the educational, therapeutic, and recreational services for Palestinian children, youth, and families.

We’d like to share with you pictures from the SCC’s history. Formed as an organization in 1925, the Spafford Children's Center is almost 100 years old and has survived and thrived through regional and world wars, natural disasters, and geo-political changes to provide a haven of hope and healing for the children of Jerusalem.

With holiday greetings to all,

Matt and Wendy