Source: The Times of Israel
Students in Israel’s south have been forced to remain in bomb shelters and safe spaces for days on end during the recent Pillar of Defense Operation. Jewish students in the Diaspora have been feeling their pain and expressing their support via videos, email messages, and social media. The effort is part of the Jewish Agency’s Partnership2Gether’s School Twinning Program, which matches more than 200 schools in Israel. David Shamah writes about this impressive project in The Times of Israel. With the south under fire, day schools in the Diaspora have been running programs in solidarity with Israel, the IDF, and with students stuck in safe rooms at home. Many Diaspora schools have been requesting to send messages of support to students here in Israel, including from schools that are not members of the partnership program. The twinning program has provided a Facebook page where schools can post their videos and messages for beleaguered Israeli students.
Along with that, the Jewish Agency has worked with partnered schools to make sure that students can stay in touch, even though the Israeli kids are not in school. In perhaps the program’s most moving encounter between Israeli and Diaspora students, kids from the Chabad school in Kiryat Malachi — where the daughter of a man who was killed in last week’s missile attack studied — got together with their twinned counterparts at an Or Avner day school in Ukraine. Jewish Agency techs set up a video conference in the home of a teacher in the Kiryat Malachi school, which has been closed since Thursday when three residents of the city were killed. Those who attended said it was one of the most moving encounters they have ever participated in.
Read the entire article on the Times of Israel.