Aiming to collect $400 to buy a wheelchair for Israel’s Shaare Zedek Jerusalem Medical Center, the students made posters with big thermometers so they could mark their progress. “They were really excited when we got close to $400,” said Katy Berman, their teacher. “Then we broke it!”
Then they raised the stakes.
When the results were tallied after just a few weeks, the pot totaled $680 — enough to purchase a brand new wheelchair and an oxygen-flow meter.
Not bad for a class of 15. Their enthusiasm for the fund-raiser was so infectious that they got practically the entire student body of 105, as well as some adults, to pitch in.
It was a remarkable and unique showing for a group so small and so young, according to David Cohen, executive director of the Northwest Region, American Committee for Shaare Zedek. Though the region generates “well over $1 million a year” on average, he said, the money comes primarily from family funds, estates and individual donors — not from elementary schoolchildren.
Cohen was so impressed that he traveled across the Bay to the Modern Orthodox day school to make a presentation to the class on June 10.
“It was very important to me, and I felt for the hospital, that these kids know that what they did was a mitzvah and was greatly appreciated, and that it has a practical impact. I wanted to make it real for them.”
To accomplish that, Cohen showed a video about the hospital, including images of Jerusalem 100 years ago when Shaare Zedek was founded, and pictures of the type of wheelchair they’d purchased.
They posed for pictures, and discussed tzedakah,” he said.
The class received a framed certificate of appreciation, and Cohen read them a thank-you letter from hospital staff. He gave the class a plaque, and each student received a Magen David-shaped pin and a pencil with a large red heart on the end, symbolizing Shaare Zedek’s logo, “hospital with the heart.”
Berman said the distressing current events in Israel had motivated her class to take positive action. Students at the K-8 school had already crafted artwork and written letters for Israeli soldiers, but her class wanted to do more. “There was really just the crying need for supporting Israel,” she said, and after careful consideration, Shaare Zedek seemed like a good beneficiary.
Then the kids swung into gear, making posters and presentations to every other class on campus.
The response far exceeded anyone’s expectations. The students, from the youngest on up, dug into their own savings.
“It was mind-blowing,” said Sheela Dunovan, the school’s office manager. “The kindergarteners and first-graders came in almost every day” with donations, “then they’d go home and think about it and go back into their piggy banks.
“They’d walk in in the morning, digging money out of their pockets. There was no hesitation.”
This all happened “in maybe two weeks,” she said.
After hearing the fourth-graders’ fund-raising plea only once, she said, “they all stepped up in a way that made me very humble.”
In the end, Berman and her son, Daniel, who is in her fourth-grade class, took home all the cash and counted every last coin and bill. There was a smattering of $10 and $20 bills, but mostly there were $1s, which Berman took as an indication that the money came directly from the children.
That’s what the class intended. “We really wanted this to be from the kids,” she said. “Of course the adults wanted to contribute, and a few did, but it really was the kids’ cash, coins and dollar bills.”
She and Daniel took bag-loads of money to the nearest Safeway, where they fed the money into a machine that tabulated the money. (Berman paid the hefty machine’s commission as part of her donation.)
Ending the school year on such a high was bittersweet for Berman, who has taught at the school for five years. She will not return in the fall, but instead will be moving to the East Coast due to her husband’s job transfer.
“I was very moved by the enthusiasm, the energy of the kids for this project,” she said. “They really wanted to help — because it was Israel, and because the wheelchair was very tangible.”
Cohen is hopeful the project will “plant seeds” for future, similar fund-raisers by the students and others in the Bay Area.