By Gigi Yellen-Kohn, JTNews Correspondent
While the grown-ups in our community scramble to support Israel with rallies, solidarity missions, letters to editors and dollars, our children are doing their part as well.
Children at schools and synagogues all over the community are reaching out to people in Israel. At the Stroum Jewish Community Center on Mercer Island, and at Seattle Hebrew Academy, students are sending to Israel the kinds of donations that people in preschool and elementary grades best understand. That would be kisses and pictures.
At Seattle Hebrew Academy, over 100 pounds of Hershey’s Kisses have been collected in a school-wide campaign for Israel. “The kids are pretty proud of this gift,” says kindergarten Judaics teacher Leah Jacobson, who co-organized the project with second- and fifth-grade Judaics teacher Leya Moskowitz. An IDF base and an elementary school in Seattle’s Partnership 2000 sister city of Kiryat Malachi will receive the SHA packages, which will include — in addition to the 102 pounds of chocolates — letters, drawings and photos. Some students wrote the words “Shalom” and “Yisra’el” in Hebrew.
The connection for the IDF package was SHA alumnus David Hirsch, visiting in Seattle on leave from his duties as an IDF soldier. On Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day) at SHA, Hirsch talked to the students about his army duties. In addition to singing Hatikvah, reciting tehillim (psalms), and eating birthday cupcakes, the students received army-style water bottles to help them identify with life in Israel.
At the SJCC, preschool teacher Ayelet Brown has the perfect connection between her students and Israel: her mother, who’s a kindergarten teacher in Brown’s hometown of Tel Mond, near Netanya.
When the staff at the SJCC’s Mercer Island preschool discussed how best to involve their students in support of Israel, Brown decided to place a box by the school office, into which each preschooler could deposit something he or she had personally created, to send. Brown enthusiastically describes how the idea grew from just her class to include even the youngest students’ hand-drawn pictures and letters about themselves — some dictated to teachers, some crafted in the students’ earliest efforts at lettering. In addition to the preschoolers, students in the J’s school-age afternoon program, Kidstown, also contributed letters and artwork to the Israel-support box.
The box is heading for Brown’s mother’s school, which is the same school Brown herself attended as a child. “I wanted to send it to kids who could read and respond,” says Brown, “so the kids who receive it will be a little older than most of the ones who send it.”
On Yom Ha’atzma’ut at the J, students dressed in blue and white, and gathered with their handmade flags to sing Hatikva, learn Israeli dances from preschool mom Cindy Droker, and eat birthday cake.
“When we sang Hatikvah I cried,” Brown confesses. A seven-year veteran of the J’s preschool staff, Brown made certain a yahrzeit candle was burning at the J’s receptionist desk on Yom HaZikaron, the day Israel remembers fallen soldiers. “It’s nice to see my co-workers so supportive, all asking about my family. At the end of the day on Yom Ha’atzma’ut, some friends and I made a falafel lunch for all the teachers.”