Nita Polay Levin, second from right, with a box of paints, shows off the Judaica gifts children at the JCC summer camp created with the help of fellow staff members, including, from left, Emily Porter, Shayna Ull, and Hope Serratelli.
Photo by Elaine Durbach
August 21, 2008
Youngsters at Camp Yachad came together to assist families around the country stricken by fires in the past year.
In addition to their regular arts and crafts sessions, children from the Megallim, Sabra, and Olim groups at the summer camp run by the JCC of Central New Jersey in Scotch Plains spent half an hour each week adorning ritual objects for victims of disasters around the country.
The recipients include 50 Jewish families in California whose homes were damaged by the wild fires there and a synagogue in Gloucester, Mass., and a religious school in Philadelphia that were also hit by fire. Gifts will also go to communities in Louisiana and Florida.
When Nita Polay Levin, who runs the Hiddur Mitzva program, lists all the items to be shipped, she starts giggling. Given the quantity involved and the breadth of distribution, she said, people might think she runs a factory rather than a kids’ mitzva program.
The term hiddur mitzva refers to beautifying religious ritual. Working collaboratively, the 300 youngsters in the program decorated — among other items — dozens of Passover plates, halla cloths and boards, mezuzas, tzedaka boxes, Torah scroll ties, Kiddush cups, prayer shawls and skull caps, wall hangings, and two huppas.
The Camp Yachad kids might be the only juvenile suppliers of such gifts in the country. “I don’t know of any other groups that are doing this,” Polay Levin said.
She started the program three years ago, during her fourth summer at Camp Yachad. In her role as coordinator of art and Jewish education and in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, she thought it would be wonderful if the children made gifts that could help fill the awful gap left when the storm devastated a number of synagogues in the region.
“What I’d heard about their losses had never left me,” she said. Making Judaica items for those who had suffered those losses was a way to teach the children about Jewish ceremony and traditions and also about the satisfaction of doing a mitzva, a good deed.
Enormously appreciative
The recipients in New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss., were enormously appreciative of the children’s gifts. This year, when Polay Levin asked if there was anything they would especially like, her contact at the New Orleans JCC wrote back, “We could use 80 tzedaka boxes. We are so grateful to everyone for all they have done for our community, but we have to remember that there are commandments [of giving tzedaka], too.”
‘We are so grateful to everyone for all they have done for our community.’
The Scotch Plains crew are also sending a big parcel of household Judaica — Shabbat candlesticks, glass Kiddush cups, menoras, and so on — to a community of 12 families in Houma, La.
Happily, finding recipients can be a challenge. “I feel like an ambulance chaser sometimes,” Polay Levin said. “I always think that we’re never going find anyone again,” but they do.
She got the idea for this year’s worthy causes through a conversation she overheard at a conference of Jewish educators. “I pricked up my ears when I heard them talking about these families,” she said. “People might think I’m a little weird, but I told them that this is what our kids do.”
In her non-summer life, Polay Levin is an educational field worker for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. She teaches Hebrew at Temple Beth-El Mekor Chayim in Cranford and leads the junior congregation at Congregation Neve Shalom, the Conservative synagogue in Metuchen where her husband, Cantor Sheldon Levin, is the director of education. Between them, they meet a lot of people.
One of the connections made this summer came through Hope Serratelli, the camp’s “Jewish adventure specialist” and a para-professional in the Metuchen school district during the year. She used to belong to one of the congregations in Massachusetts that had had a fire.
Working with them in the Hiddur Mitzva program were Shayna Ull, Emily Porter, and Allie Price. Asked if the children minded parting with their creations, all the counselors said the youngsters did so quite willingly. Some actually seemed more enthusiastic about the Hiddur Mitzva projects than those they did in art class, even though they often worked as tag teams, one child starting a project and another finishing it in a later session.
“There were some who forgot who we were doing it for, and I’d have to tell them again,” Polay Levin said, “but then they were totally fine with it.”
While the ritual objects and the art materials — like their favorite pearly tempura paint, glue, glitter, and sparkly stones — were supplied by the camp, boxing and mailing was an additional expense. Polay Levin put out an appeal for volunteers to help with the packing, for donations to cover the cost, and for ritual objects and toys that could be added to the packages. The boxes and tape cost around $80, and sending them cost more than $200 so contributions are still welcome.
--TOP--
Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
