I met Abudaqa earlier this month in Los Angeles, where we both were honored as “trailblazers” by a group called NewGround: a Muslim-Jewish Partnership for Change. She wore a sundress with traditional Palestinian embroidery and electrified the crowd at the Skirball Center with her story.
There’s something about Clean Shelter’s scrappy, straightforward approach — deliver water, build toilets — that feels particularly inspiring and reassuring in this chaotic moment of apocalyptic-seeming challenges. Abudaqa and Kellner are not trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They’re trying to make sure women have a clean, private place to pee.
They embody that oft-quoted Talmudic principle from Pirkei Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers”): Ours is not to finish the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.
“You can think of what we’re doing as just a drop in a sea of suffering that really doesn’t make much of a difference,” Kellner noted, “but you can also think of it more from the ground-up perspective, where you say, ‘OK, helping a couple of thousand families, that’s not insignificant.’”
Abudaqa, who said she has more than 100 relatives and acquaintances who have been killed in the war — including 15 distant cousins after Israel resumed airstrikes last week — put it a little more colorfully. “Sometimes I feel I want to have four hands and five heads and do everything,” she said. “But I’m tired, sometimes. I cannot do everything I wanted to do, so I have to believe I’m just human.”
They are an interesting pair. Both 42, both expats, both feminists. Abudaqa grew up in Abasan al-Kabira, a village in Gaza’s southeast, the oldest of five siblings. She first left Gaza in 2001 to attend college in the West Bank, where she moved in 2006. She left for Egypt in 2011 and then Germany in 2022, and has worked for international aid groups like the Norwegian Refugee Council and World Central Kitchen.
Kellner, whose first name is Hebrew for “innocence,” was born in Haifa and grew up in a yishuv kehilati, or community settlement. She has a Ph.D. in comparative literature and left Israel in 2015 with her husband and the first of their two children for a job at Germany’s Open University. “We were looking for a way out,” Kellner said.
The two women met, poetically, on Oct. 8, 2023. It was the first meeting of a coexistence dialogue group for expats, organized by Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, the Jewish-Arab cooperative village in Israel, and scheduled long before the terror attack. Seventeen Israelis and Palestinians from around the world were on the Zoom screen that day, each in their own state of shock.
“People tried to be very nice, super polite, good listeners, very patient with one another,” Kellner recalled. “People didn’t want to rock the boat. People also were careful with expressing too much of their position.”
The group reconvened two weeks later, but Abudaqa quickly realized it was not the right thing for her at the time. “I was too emotional and I couldn’t be patient to listen,” she explained. “I just left, I told them, listen, this is not going to go anywhere, I have a lot of work to be done.”
She was already scrambling to send whatever help she could to relatives and friends in Gaza. Kellner sent what Abudaqa described as a “solidarity email,” and then a WhatsApp message saying she wanted to donate some money to Gazans.
“I was working with a friend — I collect donations and he distributes them around there in Gaza,” Abudaqa recalled. “Like, little money, like 50 shekels, 50 shekels means like $20 — ”
“Like $10,” Kellner corrected.
“We start at 50 shekels, some families we give 100 shekels, just to buy food for some days,” Abudaqa continued. “I know that many run away, escaped, without taking anything with them. We just wanted to give them something to start with or something to recover for few days.”
But, Kellner recalled, as the weeks passed, this seemed a little too scrappy for some donors.
“People are really afraid; there are a lot of scams,” she explained. “How do I know the money is going to the right place? How do I know it’s not going to Hamas? How do I know it’s not going to be stolen? When you give cash, it’s hard to explain your decision process. Why this family and not that one. We wanted something that could benefit more people.”
Abudaqa, meanwhile, was texting and talking with her mother, siblings, cousins and friends in Gaza about the situation on the ground. The big aid organizations were flooding the strip with tents. But there were not enough bathrooms and showers.
“It was very clear, really quite fast, that toilets are a huge issue,” Kellner said. “This is a women’s problem. Men can pee all over the place. Women can’t. Women need to take care of the elderly, women need to take care of the kids. So the whole toilet thing is a women’s issue. This fit Seba and me very well.”
It was also, she noted, “very straightforward.”
“I mean, you give a person the money, they pour concrete, put around some sort of fabric — it was very, very primitive at first, it was kind of like a do-it-yourself thing,” Kellner continued. “But it was very easy to do; it’s easy to document, it’s easy to show people photos of what was done with their donation. So we felt it’s a great way to start.
“We literally said, you know, we’re just going to build a couple of toilets in Rafah, and that will be great. And then what happened is we got so many donations that we could do much, much more than just a couple of toilets. And the more we did, the more donations we got.” | 