Israel students in Auschwitz. Important lesson
Photo: AP
The Polish mission
Young kibbutznik helps youth from troubled homes take part in school trips to concentration camps
The high costs of Israeli school trips to Poland (about NIS 5,500 per student) prevent hundreds of thousands of teenagers from visiting former Nazi concentration camps and learning an important lesson on the history of the Jewish people.
Visiting Poland
Moshe Ronen
State comptroller slams Education Ministry for underfunding school trips to Poland's death camps, neglecting to address to address Jewish life before Holocaust, failing to deal with emotional problems caused by visits
Roi Yesod, 37, of Kibbutz Ravid, a member of the social-educational Dror-Israel movement, has decided to try to ease the students' funding difficulties.
Together with his friends from Hashomer Hatzair and Hamahanot Haolim youth movements, Yesod founded Keren Hanetzach ("Eternity Fund"), which allows teenagers from disadvantaged socioeconomic populations to take part in the school trips to Poland.
"My friends and I realized that there was a need to develop a long-term tool which would allow students to go on the trips regardless of their economic situation," he explains.
The fund helps new immigrants, youth at risk and periphery residents embark on the journey as well. "Although there are several organizations helping the trips, we don't require teenagers to face committees and prove their misery to us," Yesod says.
"As the fund cannot always fully finance the trip, we have developed a unique system helping youth find work, aiming to have the teenagers themselves take responsibility and raise money for the trip.
"The journey to Poland is a discovery of the roots of the Zionist revolution and the youth movements' revolt, and our trainees bring back the emotions they accumulated there and take part in extensive educational and communal work here."
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