When newborn babies are born in the Menashe district in Northern Israel, they receive a hand-crocheted basket, filled with knitted toys, rattles, and baby hats.
The baskets don’t come from far away. Just down the road, in the same part of Southern Haifa, Taube Panigel meets with 12 other women once a week to knit. “Whatever we make we give away,” she tells me, rattling off a list of their recent work: hats for homeless people and dialysis patients, blankets, and most recently, “a unicorn with lots of curls and a miniature rabbit doll,” which sit on her desk.
Panigel, who gave up knitting 50 years ago, explains how excited she was to unspool the yarn she had kept in her attic.
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An Israeli knitting group
Her group is one of over 120 across Israel, who meet “in every city, in every neighbourhood, village and rural area,” according to the founder of the Knit a Community project, Aviv Wasserman.
He works for the local council in the Hefer Valley and began the project primarily to combat loneliness in the community. “I thought that knitting together, and gathering people together, can really empower women,” he says. He was right and the idea spread across Israel. “It’s a social event for the women,” Panigel tells me. “They help each other if they’re having problems”.
Pnina Cohen, who runs her group in Tel Aviv, agrees. “It’s very good for senior citizens to talk to people,” she says. “It’s nice — we make coffee, we have cake”. She tells me she feels “blessed” to be organising the group. “My husband tells me every time he picks me up my face is smiling,” she beams. “I’m very happy. I take some wool and I sit here. I love doing this”.
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Cohen’s group is currently making flowers — she shows me a mantelpiece lined with the crocheted bunches. They’re presents for people in care homes, and the municipality delivers them with a card from the group. Those who can’t crochet knit blankets, which are sent to foster children who need them for winter. They also make yamulkes for a local kibbutz. “The best part is the feeling that you’re doing something for someone else,” Panigel explains.
Wasserman owes his idea for Knit a Community to a Brit, Dame Hilary Blume, who had previously set up Knit For Peace in Rwanda. She noticed that knitting together “broke down feelings of conflict” between Hutu and Tutsi women after the genocide. “It provides somewhere you can meet people,” she tells me, “and see that, really, they’re quite jolly”.
The project took off, spreading first to India, then Bangladesh, then Afganistan. When Wasserman imported Blume’s charity work to Israel, he mirrored more than just its structure – the philosophy carried over.
Copy of Baskets for newborns (Photo Taube Panigel)
Baskets for newborns (Taube Panigel)
“It’s not that hard,” Blume says, “to make people’s lives better. Loving people — how hard is it? When I go to the bank, I try to remember to get change so that if anyone asks for money, I can give them money. Because what difference does it make to me?”.
She has always felt this way. At seven, she put on shows to raise money— something she self-deprecatingly refers to as “excruciating” for the audience involved.
She knows not everyone is so naturally virtuous — “if someone showed me a film of myself,” she says, “I’d think oh God, what a nutcase” — but maintains that most people are intrinsically charitable.
This belief goes back to her faith. Blume was raised in a Jewish household, and “from a child upwards, [she] always had a sense of God’s presence”. Her charity work is deeply grounded in her faith, and she tells me that “if you do good, you feel God’s pleasure”.
Like Enoch, in the Torah, she aims to “walk with God”. Put into practice, that means she tithes 10% — at the very least. As she puts it, “I love making money. I just don’t like having it. You can’t wear two coats”.
Wasserman agrees. “I remember,” he says, after a while, “someone asked Rabbi Hillel almost 2000 years ago: ‘What is Judaism?’. And he said: ‘Love, love, love. Love the other the way you love yourself’”.
His charity work may have Jewish roots, but it’s grown into a much more diverse community. “The majority of knitters are Jewish,” he says, “but it attracts other people as well.” Knit a Community’s next national gathering will be in a Jewish-Arab city in the Galilee, and there are groups in the Druze and Arab villages across the country.
Lots of knitting groups are also cross-cultural. Wasserman has a simple – but unique – ethos for this. “Don’t talk about it”. “The lesson I learned,” he says, “is don’t talk about the differences. Don’t call it peace, don’t call it collaboration and cooperation. Just do it together”.
He explains that if you start by just “sitting and knitting together…the rest comes naturally”. Talk flows from knitting patterns, to your family, and your history — “your past and present and your future.” “People just want the same thing, a basic, simple relationship with people who share the same passion,” he says.
His approach to charity is pragmatic — and so is Cohen and Panigel’s. That’s why it’s been such a success, Panigel explains. “Everyone is hearing about it,” she says, “and everyone wants to open their own centre”.
“We make it simple,” explains Wasserman. “If you offer people the chance to do good for others in a very simple way that touches the thing they are passionate about, it will work. It will work and spread”.
Blume agrees. “Look at the numbers of children who raise money for others,” she says. “It’s just about giving people the chance”.
Knit A Community is certainly giving Israelis the chance. Wasserman aims to have “thousands of groups in every neighbourhood”.
“Community is more than physical meetings,” Wasserman explains. And if anything physical can represent that community, it might just be a crocheted unicorn.
