The projects bode well for the future, and we know the kids who graduate will make a positive impact on the world at large. “There’s a lot of interest on the part of the children to really make a difference,” Kogan says. It’s important to note the kids aren’t treating this as a chore they’re genuinely excited about helping people in need. 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.
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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. 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.” “Everybody brought food, and so it was a food drive, and then the parents on this committee loaded bags and bags and bags. “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. It’s a pretty lofty goal, but so far, they’re doing well. 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. “Many of them put, ‘And now that I’ve heard this and I know this, I’m going to tell it to my children someday.’” Kids at Pardes in the fourth through the eighth grades listened in awe. His story of survival, of being Jewish and surviving the Holocaust, is inspirational and amazing to hear. The rabbi’s name is Henry Ramek, and he currently lives in Oakland, Calif.
“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.” “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. To help inspire the kids as well as teach them a little bit about history, they decided to bring in a speaker. “Already we’ve raised over $310 and last year it was over $1,000.” Not too shabby at all. For a school this size that is a phenomenal achievement,” Kogan says. 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. 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. This year, they picked Go Campaign, a group that helps orphans and vulnerable children from all over the planet by connecting with local solutions. 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. 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.” Kogan lays out the results as follows: “For the past seven years we’ve used the funds to donate them to various charitable organizations. Vered Kogan is one of the coordinators of this year’s Box Tops program, a title she shares with Dani Agins and Alli Goozh. The school then submits the tops to the program, and for every box top sent in the school gets 10 cents. 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. There’s a program out there named Box Tops for Education, and it works in a pretty straightforward manner. They also created a parent’s program to get involved in the fun. To make the process easier, Pardes came up with a few ideas the children and their parents could work with.
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.
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. Tikkun olam is alive and well at Pardes Jewish Day School.ĭuring the holiday season we like to sit back and reflect on our own lives and the lives of those less fortunate.