Yisrael Almasy’s volunteer fleet changes tires and bridges barriers

Photos: Elchanan Kotler

The app announces that there’s an incident, the SUV leaps forward, and as the Coca-Cola plant and chassidim flash by, it feels like Hatzolah meets Grand Theft Auto, Bnei Brak edition.

Behind the wheel, Yisrael Almasy — business executive-cum-founder of Yedidim, a nonprofit that’s the Uber of Israeli roadside assistance — glances at the app developed by IDF intelligence veterans. “The responder’s name is Yosef,” he says, “he’s already on the scene, and he’s changed multiple tires today. We have about four minutes to catch him.”

Five minutes later, we arrive, but it’s all over. The Toyota with a flat tire is gone, and there’s no trace of the volunteer. But a few seconds later, there’s another alert. A few streets away there’s a new incident, and the mysterious Yosef — clearly bike or moped-borne — has claimed it again. Almasy spins the wheel and an incongruous tension mounts in the car as we set off into the warren of backstreets on this mid-Elul afternoon, on the trail of Bnei Brak’s champion tire changer.

Outside Maayanei Hayeshua — the Torah city’s hospital — the improbable car chase ends.

From underneath a GM truck with its hood up, protrudes a pair of legs — Yosef’s. Blinking in the sunlight and dusting off his Day-Glo vest, out comes the unlikely hero of the hour. The man who’s helping the gray-bearded Belzer chassid jumpstart his truck, is actually a 15-year-old boy. “It’s my seventh call today,” he says, blushing.

Getting back into the car, a typical Bnei Brak avreich hails him — “Yisrael hayakar! You make a big kiddush Hashem.” As he drives, Almasy explains what sets Yedidim apart in a world of Jewish volunteer organizations. Founded in 2012 to help stranded motorists, the group has burst out of Bnei Brak to embrace volunteers from secular Tel Avivians to Bedouins from the Negev. The 25,000 Yedidim vest-wearers, 40 percent of whom are secular or Arabs, do everything from jumpstarting cars to rescuing people from elevators. And in an unintended side effect, joining the organization’s ranks has given meaning to many struggling teens, on the verge of dropping out.

But now in the coronavirus era, Yedidim has become an Israeli phenomenon.

“At the height of Israel’s Pesach lockdown, the IDF Home Front Command turned to us to help the thousands of old people who were too vulnerable to go even to the grocery,” says Almasy. The army of volunteers stepped in where the government fell short, shopping and doing errands for vulnerable people. Nearly half a million non-auto calls later, Yedidim’s contribution was recognized, with Almasy honored with lighting a torch at the country’s Independence Day ceremony. And with the country now in a second nationwide lockdown, Yedidim volunteers travel freely as “essential workers.”

As he discusses the giant that his baby of an organization has become, Yisrael Almasy is firm about its real achievement. At a time of great religious-secular tension in the country, he says, the more than 25,000 volunteers are doing something far bigger than changing tires.

“The fact that secular and religious people are meeting purely for chesed,” he says, “that’s a kiddush Hashem.”