Tikkun olam is alive and well at Pardes Jewish Day School.
During the holiday season we like to sit back and reflect on our own lives and the lives of those less fortunate. As part of their first annual mitzvah project, Pardes Jewish Day School asked all the students to each take on a tikkun olam activity that works hand in hand with some kind of special celebration. At first blush, that may seem like a pretty simple task, but consider that this translates to 120 individual tikkun olam projects among the students. That’s a bit more daunting.
To make the process easier, Pardes came up with a few ideas the children and their parents could work with. They also created a parent’s program to get involved in the fun. So, what were their ideas?
The Box Tops Project
There’s a program out there named Box Tops for Education, and it works in a pretty straightforward manner. A student clips off the top of a box to a product that supports Box Tops for Education — General Mills, Hanes, Betty Crocker and Nestle are a few examples — and then submits it to the school. The school then submits the tops to the program, and for every box top sent in the school gets 10 cents. So what do they do with the money?
Vered Kogan is one of the coordinators of this year’s Box Tops program, a title she shares with Dani Agins and Alli Goozh. Kogan lays out the results as follows: “For the past seven years we’ve used the funds [collected from the Box Tops for Education program] to donate them to various charitable organizations. And over the past three or four years we’ve shifted the decision as to which organizations get our box top funding to the children.”
That’s right, the kids are the ones who go out and collect these box tops, and then, instead of using the money to fund their own school’s operations and activities, they select the best charity to support. This year, they picked Go Campaign, a group that helps orphans and vulnerable children from all over the planet by connecting with local solutions. They have lots of projects in the works, and the kids at Pardes Jewish Day School will pick which ones they want to support in the second half of the year.
What’s the tally so far? “So far this year, and there was a collection at the end of October, we’ve already collected over 3,100 box tops. For a school this size that is a phenomenal achievement,” Kogan says. “Already we’ve raised over $310 and last year it was over $1,000.” Not too shabby at all.
A Visit From a Legend
To help inspire the kids as well as teach them a little bit about history, they decided to bring in a speaker. “Vered and her husband sponsored an extraordinary 94-year-old Holocaust survivor who came from California last week and met with our parents one evening and then the next morning he presented to all of our students in grades four through eight,” says Head of School Jill Kessler. “The students have been writing this rabbi (who is the Holocaust survivor) thank-you letters, and it’s extraordinary how they were touched and how they understand that they are the last generation that will hear directly from Holocaust survivors — I mean, they’re dying out.”
The rabbi’s name is Henry Ramek, and he currently lives in Oakland, Calif. His story of survival, of being Jewish and surviving the Holocaust, is inspirational and amazing to hear. Kids at Pardes in the fourth through the eighth grades listened in awe. “Many of them put [in letters to the rabbi], ‘And now that I’ve heard this and I know this, I’m going to tell it to my children someday.’”
Counting Down from 120
Shiri Etzioni and Michele Wiltchik run the Celebration tikkun olam projects, where the goal is for children from kindergarten through the second grade to complete 120 tikkun olam projects by the end of the year. It’s a pretty lofty goal, but so far, they’re doing well.
“Their first project was that we sent over 6,000 pounds of food to Children’s First Academy, which is a school for homeless children,” Kessler says of their inaugural project’s success. “Everybody brought food, and so it was a food drive, and then the parents on this committee loaded bags and bags and bags. There was a huge caravan of cars that brought this over to the Children’s First Academy, and they weighed it in at close to 6,000 pounds of food.”
What does that mean for Children’s First Academy? “They said it would keep their pantry full for about five to six months,” Kessler says. Simply amazing.
Giving Back
The spirit of the season is alive and well at Pardes Jewish Day School, and they’ll keep it going through the end of the school year. It’s important to note the kids aren’t treating this as a chore; they’re genuinely excited about helping people in need. “There’s a lot of interest on the part of the children to really make a difference,” Kogan says.
The projects bode well for the future, and we know the kids who graduate will make a positive impact on the world at large. How? Because they already have.
