School is closed for the day. Yet the gates are open, so I gingerly walk inside the building and "voila" another closed door behind which is a group of children sitting around three tables listening eagerly to Janet Kiesari’s explanation of what we are going to do during the next hour or so. The "we" is: Janet, Lucille, Helga and "yours truly" Naomi, all of us representing ESRA’s Rishon LeZion branch.

 As one of our branch’s projects we decided to adopt an afternoon club adjacent to Ofakim school.  So we came with masks to be decorated by the children themselves and we had them put their names and their birthday dates on fake balloons which we glued to a huge Bristol sheet of paper to hang on the wall. These children did not know what a birthday or festival party was, they had never had one!

 The children were really thrilled with the change we did in their daily curriculum. We sang Purim songs, talked about the costumes they plan to wear and played games not to mention that every child got individual attention from us!

 At the end of our stay we distributed "Mishloach Manot" which consisted of grape juice, Hamentashen, loads of goodies and special small bars of soap which can be formed into all kinds of shapes like clay!

 It was a wonderful feeling to see the kids' reactions to our small gesture of adopting their Club and to tell you the truth, we all walked out of the door elated with a huge warm smile radiating on our faces....

 We hope this will be one of many projects and we have already started planning the next ones in honor of Pesach and the children's birthdays, starting with the first one in the month of March.