Today I had the pleasure of being among the “opponents” of the defense advocates of the Metsuda Jewish youth leadership projects implemented by the Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) in cooperation with the Hillel International Jewish Student Organization. This is a project of socially active and caring young people who are trying to do something useful in the Jewish community, in Ukrainian society. Here there is work with children from the “risk group”, and the study and popularization of the history of Jews in Ukraine, and co-working and so on (Pavlo Hetmaniuk, Maria Rosenfield, Lera Maksymova and others). All this – using IT-technologies and, most importantly, - on the basis of awareness of modern youth’s real needs. By the way, Arkadii Kesselman’s project (Odesa) to attract adolescents to, so to speak, “modern craftsmanship” was interesting, because each hand must grow from the right place in order to be able to fix a door lock or siphon in the wash basin (the services of the participants in this project are popular among both the poor and the elderly).
Of course, not everything is so smooth in these projects; not everything was built “by the rules”. And in young leaders’ speeches there were “lapsus” because of the excitement and little experience. Among the “pearls” were, for example: “Thousands of people make ideas”; “Teenagers are sitting on all the Internets”; “The site will answer all questions”… Here I quietly asked: “What is the sense of life? What is love? What to do? Who is guilty? What to do with who is to blame?..”
However, seriously, it is important that active young people seek answers to exciting questions, try to do something themselves; and it is very good that there were organizations that support this.
And I invited the Metsuda participants to participate in the “Tkuma” Institute and Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” youth projects. It will be interesting to everyone)