Brief History

Saint Nicholas Home Charitable Society for the Elderly

جمعية بيت القديس نيقولاوس الخيرية للمسنين

Brief History

A BRIEF HISTORY

Saint Nicolas Home is a charitable, non-governmental and non-profit organization founded in 1976 by native Palestinians. Our Home for the elderly is located in Beit-Jala, near Biblical Bethlehem. Early 1970’s our community understood the need to pay specific attention to our senior citizens, several of which have no legal representatives or surviving family members to cater for them. For answering this need, we founded the ‘Saint Nicolas Home’.

This building -originally a house- was donated in 1991 by Nicolas Lolas to Beit-Jala Benevolent Association. In 1976, Mr. Issa Najjar decided to turn this ordinary building into a retirement home for the elderly. He raised funds across the globe to make this house a suitable Home for the elderly.

Until 1987, when the First Intifada took place (=Israel started war in our territories) St. Nicolas Home functioned in peace and prosperity. Once the Intifada broke out, we had to run our facility on a minimum survival budget. Our determination kept this place going and improving. As things were finally settling in the 1990's, we continued working on a steady rhythm. Unfortunately, in 2000 the Second Intifada broke out, and we were in the same difficulties as before. We continued running with a minimum budget, excluding the possibility of upgrading and renovating our facility. In 2001, we were able to raise enough funds to renovate the entire facility. Our current goal is to expand our facility, so as to host and serve more Senior citizens.

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RENOVATION WORK

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Following a long fund-raising campaign and with the aid of private and public donors, we began renovating our Home. We primarily:

	Renovated the entire building
	We built interior partition walls, in order to augment our bedrooms to 9 and we installed private bathrooms for our residents
	We modified our facilities so that they may be accessible by handicapped residents. We equally designed two rooms for residents with special needs.
	We created a garden which is an area of recreation for all residents, staff and visitors. Furthermore, we added comestible and non-comestible trees and vegetables.
	All the electrical wiring was redone, we repainted all the walls, and we added insulation so as to bring down our heating costs. Furthermore, we renovated our kitchen.
	We refurnished all the rooms and the living room, with safer and more comfortable furniture.
	Our greatest success was the installation of a hydraulic elevator between stories. The result was that we were able to house people on the renovated second floor, equally making it wheel-chair accessible.

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Last modified: 06/12/06