Retirees’ self-help in Israeli schools: ‘We all want to be relevant’
| BAT YAM, Israel
The Israeli charity Yadid Lahinuch, Hebrew for “Friend of Education,” was founded 16 years ago to meet two major needs in the young and growing country.
One is that many elementary schools in Israel, as elsewhere in the world, are failing because classrooms are too big, there aren’t enough teachers, and weaker students are being left behind. And two, people in Israel, and around the world, are living longer and healthier lives, and many retirees want to be and can be active and useful within their society.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onIn Israel, a very organized group of retirees from all walks of life is helping support failing schools. It’s good for the kids and good for the retirees, who enjoy a sense of community and purpose.
Retirees in the program, which places them in classrooms around the country, are recruited and supervised by fellow retirees and given training and backup by professional education experts. The organization, with an annual budget of $925,000, boasts that the value of its teachers’ tutoring is more than $3.5 million a year.
For volunteers, many of whom find that retirement is often a lonely experience, part of the appeal of participating is quite clear, says Nimrod Ackerman, who led the organization for 14 years. “We all want to be relevant,” he says. “When you lose your framework, you lose connection and purpose and meaning.”
Shelly Oshri, a Canada-born grandmother of eight who lives on a flower farm north of Netanya, heard about it from a stranger in front of her in line at the social security office.
Sara Levy, a secretary back in her younger years who grew up in Tel Aviv speaking Bulgarian and Ladino to her immigrant parents, stumbled upon it while surfing the internet late one night.
And Chaim Sweet, a former bank manager with six grandkids and an encyclopedic memory, was recruited to join it while at a neighborhood party. He then turned around and brought in Esther Azran, a Moroccan immigrant who speaks seven languages and used to run the international private clients department at his bank branch.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onIn Israel, a very organized group of retirees from all walks of life is helping support failing schools. It’s good for the kids and good for the retirees, who enjoy a sense of community and purpose.
The four are among some 3,000 and counting Israelis – retired nurses, lawyers, bankers, carpenters, teachers, CEOs, and secretaries (the list goes on) – who heard about “it” and joined up for the mission.
It feels like a secret society, except it isn’t – there’s just no budget for advertising. It also sounds like a team of superheroes – and this it sort of is, if all superheroes were pensioners who used their powers to help grade schoolers improve their spelling and practice their multiplication tables.
“It” is the Yadid Lahinuch charity, Hebrew for “Friend of Education” – the brainchild of a visionary group of philanthropists, educators, and diplomats – founded 16 years ago to meet two major needs in this young and growing country:
One, that many elementary schools in Israel, as elsewhere in the world, are failing because classrooms are too big, there aren’t enough teachers, and weaker students are being left behind. And two, that people in Israel, and around the world, are living longer and healthier lives, and that many retirees want to be and can be active and useful in society.
The retirees in the program, recruited and supervised by fellow retiree volunteer coordinators, go through a thorough intake process and are given training and backup by a bevy of professional education experts. Then, working in coordination with school principals, teachers, and municipalities around the country, they enter classrooms and other school spaces as, typically, teachers’ assistants or counselors in areas where help is needed and they can offer added value.
A retired lawyer might be put to work practicing reading and spelling with third graders. A religious woman might help with the fifth grade Friday afternoon Bible class. A bookworm might become the assistant librarian. A retired electrician could be stationed in the shop room, and a landscape architect in the school garden, or they may be asked to start a mural project. Each volunteer commits to being in the school once a week, for at least four hours, but in practice, many do double and triple shifts. The organization boasts that the value of its teachers’ tutoring exceeds $3.5 million a year.
Doing good for themselves, and others
“It is clearly a win-win-win sort of program,” says Uri Pereg, the new director of Yadid Lahinuch, who, like many of the organization’s nine staffers, is a retiree himself.
A 25-year veteran of the Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the FBI, Mr. Pereg, a colonel, ended his security service career at the helm of one of the organization’s special units investigating Jewish terrorism, where he led a team tasked with recruiting new agents.
“There are real similarities between that job and the one I took on here,” is not the line one might expect next. But that’s a quote.
“In the Shabak [Shin Bet] you are in touch with lots of different kinds of people and similarly need to figure out how to best recruit and motivate them and get them to perform tasks that – without your guiding – they would not have done.
“Here at Yadid Lahinuch we want a person to do good things for themselves and for others,” says Mr. Pereg. “But it still requires skill to get them going.”
At its height, right before the pandemic’s perfect storm of disruption, with schools closed and the elderly told to stay home, Yadid Lahinuch had an army of more than 4,000 volunteers, spread out across the county, working in over 600 schools and injecting an extra 430,000 teaching hours into the system every year.
The $925,000 annual budget for the program, which comes from the Ministry of Education, municipalities, and several private sources, goes toward paying the few staff salaries, running frequent training sessions, and covering travel expenses and insurance for the volunteers.
During two years of COVID-19 lockdowns, organizers worked to keep the program going by bringing many volunteers online and into digital classrooms and also setting up a student-volunteer buddy system. A new program, with Arab-Israeli students from schools in Arab towns matched with volunteers who could teach and practice Hebrew with them, was launched during this time. Today, the overall number of volunteers is rising again, and all are back in classrooms.
For volunteers, part of the appeal of participating is quite clear. The truth, says Nimrod Ackerman, who led the organization for the first 14 years of its existence, is that retirement is more often than not a lonely experience: Suddenly you get fewer calls. Fewer people ask your opinion. Everyone starts telling you to go relax or play with your grandchildren.
“We all want to be relevant,” he says. “People want a reason to wake up in the morning. When you lose your framework, you lose connection and purpose and meaning.”
What Yadid Lahinuch did was to take the common wisdom that “old people” were a weak community in need of volunteers to help them – and turned it on its head. Yes, these retirees had time on their hands and wanted to feel more vital, but instead of having young people come entertain and boost them, the idea was to send them out to help young people.
“And there is no doubt we need the help,” says Eti Gez, an energetic first grade teacher at the Rishonim (Bnot Sheffa) school in Bat Yam, a coastal town south of Jaffa, who moonlights as the school’s liaison with its 10 Yadid Lahinuch volunteers.
“Kids behave better”
A full third of the 540 students in the Rishonim school are new immigrants, many of them from Russia and former Soviet republics. More often than not, Ms. Gez explains, the students’ parents do not speak Hebrew well, or at all, and usually work long hours, leaving them unable to help their children with any homework. Single-parent households are common. The volunteers, Ms. Gez says, are a lifeline: academically, but also beyond that.
“Studies show that kids behave better when there is an elderly person around. It makes them calmer,” says Mr. Ackerman. “Their presence becomes important to school. Kids really want their wisdom, it turns out.”
Varda Keshales is a Romanian-born immigrant and musician who once conducted a children’s orchestra in Ramle east of Tel Aviv. She then taught generations of youngsters at the music conservatory in next-door Lod how to play the piano, accordion, and synthesizer. When she retired after close to 40 years, she decided to go into selling Tupperware. That did not last long.
“I wanted to try and do some business – not to climb the walls from boredom,” says the mother of four and grandmother of nine. “But I didn’t make any money, and it was not that fun. I’m not a businesswoman.”
And it turns out, she will admit, that she missed the messy and beautiful combination of children and music.
So, she returned, in a volunteer capacity, bringing her organ with her to the Rishonim school. There, she reigns supreme in a small music room that the school set up just for her – as first- and second-graders jockey for the chance to snag a private session with the 80-year-old.
Her next mission is to recruit her husband, a retired engineer, to join her. He would be good at, say, fifth grade math, she suggests. “We need him here,” she says, and then shoos everyone away so she can focus on her next student.
