By Abby Minch, NFTY in Israel Participant, Bus 2
One of the lines in the Torah reads “Tzedek tzedek tirdof” which means “Justice, justice you shall pursue.” In Judaism, we are taught to help everyone and everything in the world so that we can bring them back to peace. These values are why I chose the chavaya Tikkun Olam, which translates to repairing the world. For this chavaya, we traveled around Jerusalem to five different places to help communities and people.
For our first project, we repaired the world through Birthday in a Box. With this organization, we made nine different boxes for
families who are unable to celebrate their children’s birthdays because of a lack of time, money or emotional availability.
We also visited The Lone Soldier Center, where we learned about what it means to be a lone soldier and baked them brownies. The Lone Soldier Center was created in honor of Michael Levin, who traveled to Israel all the way from Philadelphia to become a soldier in the IDF. Since he left his family and home and traveled alone to Israel, Michael was a lone soldier and had nowhere to go when he was not in the IDF. When Michael died in the second Lebanon war, his friends from the IDF created The Lone Soldier Center to honor him and create a space for other lone soldiers to go when they needed a place to call home.
The next day, for our third volunteer opportunity, we visited a nursing home to help the Israeli residents. We played catch with
balloons, sang to them and helped them bake cookies. This was such an important job because a lot of the people there did not have family to visit them, so our visit was very meaningful to them.
That afternoon after the nursing home, we continued with our fourth job in an Arab community. In the community, we cleaned around their mosque and cleaned the water system for their fields. We also became friends with the Arabs and learned to get past political differences and language barriers.
For our fifth and last chance to volunteer in Israel during this trip, we visited a school for special needs children. The students there were ages 6-21 and had mental differences, making it hard for them to talk. We helped them to blow bubbles, hit a piñata, bake and more. This was my favorite volunteer opportunity because it was amazing to see the kids smile when they became excited, and it was cool to teach them without needing words.
I think I can speak for everyone when I say that we were all inspired by the work that we did to continue to repair the world as much as we could.
