Chag Sameach - Happy Passover

Posted Wed, 04/08/2009 - 09:00 by Adam Stewart

We wish you a very happy Passover holiday and hope that you have an enjoyable and relaxing Seder tonight. May the meaning of freedom bring you joy and give you strength in all that you do! Drawing by a kindergarten student at Temple Chai in Long Grove as part of an activity with Gilad Shalit's "When the Shark and the Fish First Met."

These past couple of months have been busy ones here at Shorashim, as we finished up our Taglit-Birthright Israel season by bringing over 700 participants on their first trip to Israel. Although allocations are somewhat down for the summer, we enjoyed record registration for our summer groups, and look forward to bringing many more people on this amazing experience.

We were proud to partner again with the Jewish National Fund (JNF) on their fourth annual Alternative Spring Break to Israel. College students and young adults engaged in awesome and meaningful projects like "Earth's Promise" in which they helped Ethiopian immigrants in Beer Sheva build sustainable urban gardens on neglected city land. Many of the participants attended the opening of the new indoor playground in Sderot - a reinforced structure that gives children in the area a safe place to play.

You can see below that Club Israel has been active bringing new and creative Israel programs to Chicago-Area teens. The Israel Student Ambassador Fellows are just back from Washington, D.C. where they learned about how Israel's interests are conveyed in our nation's capitol. You can read about all of our programming at www.clubisrael.org.

As you set a place at your table for Elijah, also remember Gilad Shalit who is missing from his family's Passover table and has now spent over 1,000 days in Hamas captivity. I recently had a chance to meet Gilad's parents as they held a vigil outside the prime minister's home, and it made the work that we do with Gilad's book for children even more meaningful to me. Shorashim's most senior educator, Yossi Nameri, who is also deeply involved in issues regarding missing soldiers brought this book to Chicago when he visited for our Alumni reunion in March 2008. Since then, we have done programs with the story in almost every public school Hebrew class and in many synagogues

Update by request: We do have some copies of the book available (hard cover in Hebrew) for $25, just email alumni@shorashim.org. Next Year in Jerusalem!