I had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Moshe Leiba, World ORT Kadima Mada’s Chief Pedagogy and R&D Officer and the brains behind bringing traumatized Israeli teenagers to our community for respite.
"‘Moshe,’ I asked, ‘What other communities have you worked with on this project?’"
“You are only the third. We brought kids to Mexico and Los Angeles,” he replied.
I don’t think that I’ve ever been prouder of our community.
In actuality, we hosted two programs simultaneously—21 ORT kids (with four staffers) and 18 kids (with three staffers) from our partnership region of Eshkol. While we were able to combine the kids often, they were on separate tracks and had different needs.
I want to emphasize what a huge undertaking this was for our community. We’re not Los Angeles. I understand the confusion: we, of course, have the better weather 😊, but the LA Jewish community is about 25 times larger than ours.
We could not have pulled this off without the hours of staff time, scores of volunteers who opened their cars, homes, and hearts, community organizations that hosted events, and of course, our special donors. I thank everyone involved in making this a very successful trip.
I also thank our longtime partners and grant recipients, World ORT and the Jewish Agency, for thoughtfully selecting and bringing the kids to us.
You’ll be hearing more details about this amazing trip in the weeks ahead, but for now, know that we stepped up in a big way and helped many kids when they needed us.
Yasher Koach!