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Our children are frightened.
Recently, the Israeli government issued two seemingly contradictory statements: Israeli citizens were advised to carry gas masks with them at all times, and the governments Defense Cabinet decided that schools should continue to carry on lessons as usual.
The image of young children learning history and mathematics with gas masks strapped to the backs of their chairs burns deep in the mind and remains there.
Yet despite all this, ORT Israels students and teachers are committed to the success of their country and to their schools. Students volunteer to guard younger children in the elementary schools; they tutor young pupils in computer skills.
Their will to survive and rise above these horrific circumstances sends a message of hope to the entire world.
Our ORT Israel family is suffering. How will we respond?
One of the students murdered from Hannah Senesh was a 15-year-old boy, Tom Herchko. Like many other teens around the world, Tom used to scribble messages into his friends’ notebooks and diaries. A few days after his young life was ended by terrorism, a classmate was flipping through her book during a literature class and found a message Tom had written her one hour before he was killed:
“In order to live life to the fullest, make every minute count and understand that the present will never return. Live today like it will be your last and live it as best you can.”
Tom epitomizes our ORT Israel students, living life the best that they can under the difficult circumstances of war and poverty. To live their lives to the fullest, they need our help.
Help us by contributing urgently needed dollars, and every bit as important, urgently needed hope.
Give Hope Now!
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Several weeks ago, an ORT school in Haifa, Hannah Senesh, was dealt a tragic blow. A terrorist attack on one of the city buses killed two students, two graduates, the father of a student and a brother of a graduate, shattering so many lives in a single instant.
