Dear Temple Emanu-El Family and Community,

Please find information below about 2 Food Drives that Temple Emanu-El Preschool is hosting:

Some of you may know I was accepted into Early J’s Israel Cultural Jewish Ambassadorship Program for Early Childhood Educators this past summer.  As part of this program, I went to Israel where I briefly studied at Oranim college, and have continued doing online classes, workshops and seminars on Jewish Identity, Personal/Professional Identity, Teaching Torah and Bible Stories to Preschoolers, and the Pedagogy of Malka Haas. This has been a wonderful experience and opportunity for me. I am excited to share with you all that, as this program comes to a close, I am now ready to introduce  to you a project that I have been working on specifically designed for our preschool here at Temple Emanu-El.

For me, MITZVOT (acts of kindness/good deeds), Tzedakah (charitable acts) and Tikkun Olam (repairing the world) go hand in hand and are at the core of Judaism and my favorite seeds to plant when teaching and helping to grow and nurture a mensch (a person of integrity and honor). Tzedakah is one component of mizvot that can be hard for a preschooler to grasp which is one of the reasons why I chose to partner with 13th Street Cat Rescue for Temple Emanu-El Preschool’s First Annual Project Tzedakah Shake.

Project Tzedakah Shake will kick off at the beginning  of November with a Cat Food & Cat Litter Drive. We will be collecting canned and dry cat food as well as cat treats and cat litter for the entire month of November.  There will also be a new Tzedakah Box hanging next to the litter and cat food donations. I ask that you encourage your child to donate any spare change that you have as often as possible and ESPECIALLY on Shabbat. I will be collecting Tzedakah until the end of the school year with all proceeds and donations going to !3th Street Cat Rescue.

On Tuesday November 4th the children will be getting a special treat!  Joann from 13th Street Cat Rescue will be coming by with a few furry friendly felines to talk about the importance of helping/rescuing and fostering street cats. Over the course of the school year I will be sharing pictures with the children of how their acts of Tzedakah and Mizvot help feed, house and care for cats who otherwise would be left stranded and discarded on the street. It is my hope that by seeing something that they are already familiar with and can touch and see with their own eyes that the act of Tzedakah can become something more tangible and concrete. Especially when over the course of the year they can see pictures of how colonies of cats are fed from the donations we have collected. When they drop a few pennies into the Tzedakah box on Shabbat and then see pictures of some of these cats being treated at the vet it is my hope that they start to see the connection oh how their acts of Tzedakah made a difference and made something better.

I am really excited about this project and hope that you are too! I greatly appreciate any help and support that you can give to our project and can’t wait to see all the good that comes from it. I am really looking forward to seeing the pride on our kids faces when they discover how good it feels to give and to help others.

Sincerely,

Miss Kari