One Israel Fund celebrates the kids

The honorees for the One Israel Fund’s dinner this year are a little young; in fact, 21 of the 24 honorees aren’t able to drive and 12 of them have yet to complete fifth grade.

The One Israel Fund is a Hewlett-based humanitarian group that helps Israeli citizens living in Yehuda and Shomron and provides moral support to soldiers serving in the Israel Defense Forces. It is honoring, in no particular order, a twelve-member Girl Scout troop from the Young Israel of Hewlett, three bar mitzvah boys, one bat mitzvah girl, and a group of seventh grade girls from Yavneh Academy in Bergen County, NJ, who raised $2,000.

And it’s all part of the plan, according to One Israel Fund’s executive director, Scott Feltman.

“Why we honor the kids is two-fold: It’s an appreciation for their efforts, and we find that the stories of these kids inspire people in the room to say, ‘I have a child who can do the same on behalf of Israel,’” Feltman said.

The grassroots effort has paid off so far, and the numbers of children being honored by One Israel Fund have steadily increased from 8 the first year, to 14 the second, and now 21. On Sunday afternoon, all the young honorees gathered to be filmed for a video presentation that will be shown at the dinner.

The filming took place at the house of another honoree, Joseph Kestenbaum, who celebrated part of his bar mitzvah in Israel on an IDF base in Beit El. In honor of the occasion, the Kestenbaum family dedicated a weight room for soldiers and threw a massive BBQ for the soldiers on the base’s basketball court, which was fenced in by barbed wire.

Joseph loved being in Israel for his bar mitzvah, he said; it was important to show the soldiers that “we support them from all the way in America and we care about what they’re doing and we appreciate it.”

Joseph’s father, Jay, a vice president at a company that produces refrigerator gases, is a longtime board member of the One Israel Fund. He said he has tried to have all of his children’s celebrations in Israel.

“By a bar-mitzvah we spend so much on things that we think are so important but have no real lasting value; instead do something charitable that the kids will remember for the rest of their lives,” he explained, adding that teaching children to give charity “teaches them they have an obligation for the rest of their lives.”

For his bar mitzvah, Yoni Friedman of West Hempstead raised $4,000 from the community to purchase ‘shlukers’ — specialized, light weight water canteens that soldiers can wear in their backpacks. Yoni found out about shlukers through the One Israel Fund. They are important, he explained, because otherwise soldiers who need to move around silently would be forced to spill out the water in their canteens and go without.

“It really saves their lives,” he said.

The most novel honorees are the 4th and 5th graders of Girl Scout Troop 703 from the Young Israel of Hewlett. Under the leadership of Andrea Borah and Rina Evans, the girls, who come from local schools including Bnot Shulamith, Torah Academy for Girls, Hebrew Academy of Five Towns and Rockaway, and Hebrew Academy of Long Beach, managed to sell 250 boxes of Girl Scout cookies that will be shipped to Israel by the One Israel Fund.

“Everyone loves girl scout cookies, even Israeli soldiers,” explained Borah, the troop’s co-leader. Her daughter, Ariella, 6, is the youngest member of the troop; mid-filming she ran to her mother and buried her head in her skirt.

“Soldiers do a lot, but we do so little to help them, so we felt we should do something,” said Avigail Borah, Andrea’s other daughter.

Most of the girl scouts said it wasn’t too hard to make a cookie sale. Sara Evans said that even some of her teachers at Bnot Shulamith who only drink Cholov Yisroel bought the dairy cookies to ship to Israeli soldiers.

“We wanted to do a mitzvah for this year so the soldiers could get cookies and be happy,” Sara said.

The girls also organized classes in the elementary and middle school at Bnot Shulamith and at the Congregation Sons of Israel Hebrew School to write Purim greetings to the Israeli soldiers. Esther Fruchter, a 5th grader at Bnot Shulamith, sold 75 boxes of cookies herself. Asked whether she worried about the effects of delicious, fattening cookies on fit Israeli soldiers, she said she wasn’t too concerned.

“Not all of them are high caloried,” she explained.