Found the right click

Linda Mosek has no regrets about the fateful step she took 29 years ago, coming alone to Israel.

By GLORIA DEUTSCH
Linda Mosek, 54. From Melbourne 521 (photo credit: Gloria Deutsch )
Linda Mosek, 54. From Melbourne 521
(photo credit: Gloria Deutsch )
Linda Mosek loves the fact that she can leave her Hod Hasharon house and start her workday a five-minute drive away, at the offices of Click, the organization she has been running for 16 years now.
Arriving here as a single immigrant back in 1984 with a degree in social work from Monash University, she left her home in Melbourne and settled in Israel, holding a variety of jobs until she arrived at Click in 1997. She had her baptism of fire in Lod, starting work with the smattering of Hebrew she had acquired in the five-month ulpan and fortified by the idealism that brought her here in the first place.
“If you can survive Lod, you know you are going to make it,” she says, looking back at her two and a half years of working with other immigrants in a tough Jewish neighborhood known for a record number of suicides.
“I had some of the worst cases in social work,” she recalls now, “but I also met amazing people who inspired me to stay here.”
After a year here, she was invited to an Independence Day party, and there she met a young medical student, Amnon Mosek, today a senior neurologist at Sourasky Medical Center’s Ichilov Hospital. They married in 1988, living in Tel Aviv, but she carried on working in Lod. She was then asked by the Australian Jewish community to work as the controller of social projects for Project Renewal in Rishon Lezion, and commuted there from her home in Tel Aviv.
Mosek began her work at Click in 1996, taking 12 months off to spend what she calls “an incredible year” in Minnesota accompanying Amnon, who was attending at the Mayo Clinic. They finally moved to Hod Hasharon in 1997.
So what is Click? Click is the not entirely accurate acronym for Community Leadership and Innovation of Centers for the Elderly, and was founded in 1983 with the express purpose of improving the quality of life of the old people living in Hod Hasharon – by providing them with vocational activities, and even the possibility of making a small amount of money. It is supported by the municipality and generous donations mainly from Australia, but is also self-supporting. Click is an example of an NGO that raises a significant amount of its own funds through the sale of the products created by the elderly people who come there – not to make a living, but to do something productive.
“Basically, it’s a merging of social and business sectors,” says Mosek, who in 2008 earned a PhD in social entrepreneurship, making her the ideal person to run the project. Click is not just a place for old people to pass the time, but a serious business enterprise with a marketing manager, a well-run shop selling the handmade gifts and creative kits assembled by the pensioners who work here.
The bright, airy workshop was donated by the municipality, with the shelving, work tables and machinery all donated by people abroad.
“We create gifts for the festivals so that large companies can present something with social value to their workers,” says Mosek. “At Purim we put together mishloah manot people can buy, knowing they are contributing to a good cause.”
They are also very big on recycling, turning old plastic bottles into tissue dispensers, T-shirts into bags, and doing amazing things with used cottage-cheese containers. Huge sacks of confetti and tiny pieces of foam lie around, waiting to be turned into something attractive.
“We never throw anything away,” says the director.
Once the workday is over, Mosek comes home and turns to her passion – clay sculpture, which she studied 20 years ago at a studio in Neveh Tzedek.
“I’m in love with it, and still study once a week for three hours with a teacher in Hod Hasharon,” she says.
Her life-size clay figures stand around her cozy, cluttered home and decorate the wild garden, and are impossible to miss. She also loves to paint, and finds that being an artist is definitely a help in doing her job at Click.
One of the best things about living in Hod Hasharon, near her work, is that Mosek finds she can recruit friends and neighbors to help out when necessary.
“Click is a community organization and it has a family spirit to it,” she says.
Mosek and her husband have two daughters, today aged 22 and 23, who both did army service in the Israel Air Force. One daughter followed her mother into social work, the other studied biology.
“I love Israel. Yes, it’s a bit crazy, but I love the temperament,” she says. “I still miss my family in Australia, and try to go back as often as possible – but I so enjoy the spirit and the high energy of the pace of life here.”