Dovid Fine is the founder and CEO of Recharge: Vacation Relief Fund in Toronto, Canada
Essentially, what we do is provide low-income families with the opportunity to take a brief getaway for free. Vacation or taking a physical and mental break from life’s everyday stresses is vital to a healthy lifestyle and to maintaining healthy family units. While we aren’t flying people around the world, we do send them for short getaways, three days or so, within driving distance. It’s game-changing for the family with a child suffering from brain cancer, or families where there’s a degenerative disease, people with mental and physical health issues, kollel families, widows, rabbanim, single parents, people struggling with fertility, and more.
In 2020, when no one could really go anywhere because of tough Covid restrictions, I noticed that the only people who went away were those who had cottages — I’m Canadian, that’s what we call bungalows. Everyone else was stuck inside with kids bouncing off the walls. I remember thinking about the wellbeing of those families, spending the summer stuck inside. There’s this story about Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach ztz”l giving envelopes to his gabbai to deliver to poor families before Yom Tov. Along with money, Rav Shlomo Zalman sent tickets to the zoo. He understood that these families couldn’t afford to take their kids on Chol Hamoed trips, and he didn’t want the children to feel bad when they went back to school and heard about everyone else’s trips and didn’t have anything to contribute. This is gadlus! Now, I don’t have money, I don’t own a cottage, but I realized we have to think about people who are struggling with this new no-vacation reality. With that in mind, I began to raise a little money to send away a couple of families that could use the break.
Since we began in 2020, we’ve sent well over 100 families — that’s 500 people. Wow! It’s crazy for me to even process that. The summer is the busiest time of year — 90 percent of our clients take vacations during the two or three weeks after Tishah B’Av, bein hazmanim. We did a Chanukah run last year, and we’re looking to add some winter vacations during the yeshivah break in February, too.
We work with all types of frum Jews here: Litvish, Sephardic, Chabad, Bobov, Modern Orthodox. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lack of clients — we have a waiting list because there’s lots of need. And not just Toronto, we’ve had people calling from other parts of Canada, the States, even Israel! Right now, we’re focusing on Toronto, but we do hope to expand in the future.
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