Experience has shown that teenagers tend to be vastly underestimated by adults. When play therapist Rochelle Wreschner at the Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Kerem was first approached by Eliora Weiss, a local seventh-grader, with an idea for a new social initiative that seeks to collect and refurbish secondhand toys for better use in the children’s ward, she naturally inquired who the adult involved in the undertaking was.
Wreschner’s persistent attempts to uncover which parent or teacher was behind this impressive enterprise were met with the same insistent answer: It was none but Eliora herself, and her friend Yedidya Rabinowitz, who had come up with the idea and managed to recruit their classmates to make it a reality. To her utter befuddlement, no adultsized footprints were anywhere to be found.
Soon a troupe of 13-year-olds was meeting every weekend to fix up the trove of old donated toys they had managed to procure that week, often by going door-to-door and at times by spreading word through the community to bring out all their worn-out playthings to a local drop-off point. With a contagious enthusiasm normally reserved at such an age for far less noble endeavors, these kids have managed to collect and fix over 400 toys and games in the few months since they began. All of them have reached the hands of young children at the Hadassah medical center and in two nearby orphanages.
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