About a year and a half ago, Rabbi David A. Cohen, founder of the Sephardic Renaissance, happened to pass by Hadaf Hayomi.
During the trip, Cohen met a 20-year-old man who confessed that he lacked purpose to his life.
When asked by Rabbi Cohen if there were other young men like him, he said there were at least 50 more.
Two days later Cohen met with some of these young men and offered them a program of work and study with a modest stipend as an incentive.
A young local rabbi was hired to teach eight young men Gemara for just one hour a day and to encourage them to prepare and study for various vocational professions.
Almost immediately these men changed from being idle with no purpose in their day-to-day activities into constructive and active volunteers with better attitudes towards life. They began helping the community. Some of their acts of hesed found expression in building sukkot for the elderly and helping families in the neighborhood to acquire lulav and etrog.
The amazing influence of learning Gemara for just one hour a night was that they truly developed an appreciation for it and on their own extended their lesson session to a few hours a night. At the same time, they also started working on a daily basis with the encouragement of their local rabbi/mentor.
For the first time in years, perhaps even since their bar mitzvahs, these eight young men visited the community synagogue on Rosh Hasahana to the great surprise of the congregation. Once the congregants saw the sincerity of the young men’s prayers, tears of gratitude came streaming down their faces.
Soon the incredible news of this group that had so transformed itself in a such a positive manner spread like a wild fire throughout the whole Hadaf Hayomi neighborhood. The appreciative mothers offered to volunteer for the new organization established by the Sephardic Renaissance and which was called Hithadshut. They started by preparing and offering hot meals to the more than 50 children who attended the various programs.
Shortly thereafter, Hithadshut received a request from the parents in Hadaf Hayomi to organize a similar program to benefit the young ladies. One young lady was hired to create a program for the young girls in the community. She brought along 22 other girls to volunteer.
Immediately after the creation of the girls program, it was discovered that there was a real need to form a similar program for young boys to have study programs in the afternoon.
Rabbi Cohen originally thought that this was just going to be a limited local project. He was ready to devote a limited amount of money to fund the initial project for the young men. However, he soon found himself overwhelmed with requests to duplicate programs for different parts of the family in that community.
While he was flattered by the success of the initial project, he had no idea how the Sephardic Renaissance could cope with the growing expenses. Cohen started appealing to his old friends in the community who had for years supported his organization’s projects in Brooklyn.
To his joy, the response to his calls for partners has met with great success, even though past projects were donated on a yearly basis and the new Israeli project needed $6,000 to be raised each month.
Cohen told IMAGE Magazine that his supporters in America were able to sustain for the past year the incredible and well-documented work of Hithadshut. From this experience, it was realized that this successful project had an impact on entire families living in that neighborhood, returning the children to their families, including the girls who were feared to be in great danger of spiritual risk and becoming lost, G-d forbid, to the Jewish nation.
The success of Hithadshut soon spread outside Hadaf Hayomi. For example, the group soon received a letter from Uri Elya of Beer Sheva, a concerned parent who wrote to Rabbi Cohen, inviting his group to create a similar program in Beer Sheva where there is a dire need to save Jewish girls from assimilation.
The Hithadshut program has received the blessings and recognition of many prominent rabbis in Israel and in the United States such as Hacham Ovadia Yosef and Rabbi Chaim Kanievski.
The program has also been recognized by Professor Ephraim Hazan of Bar Ilan University, who noted that the project answers a real need to take care of all the levels of the family.
Nirit Toshav Eichner, a researcher and doctoral candidate at Hebrew University, wrote about the program that this can bring well needed young men to the work force.
Professor Sarah Taieb-Carlen from York University Division of Social Science in Toronto complimented the success of the pilot project of Hithadshut, declaring that it can successfully answer the needs of entire families and might be the solution to the many neighborhoods throughout Israel and elsewhere that are in the same situation.
Rabbi Cohen remarked that this project has offered a valuable solution to the pressing problem of our Jewish girls who leave their families only to fall prey to abusive foreign hands who initially welcome them by bestowing attention and lavish gifts. After these girls marry, their husbands show their true selves by their harsh and cruel behavior, treating them literally like slaves.
The project, which began with the purpose of helping eight troubled boys, has become a full-fledged community pilot project that has succeeded in transforming a troubled neighborhood into a loving community. This project may open the road to similar vital programs in other parts of Israel that will restore the lost authority of the parents and result in the return of children to their families.
This project had an input on the entire community of Hadaf Hayomi and the 120 families living there. The effort has succeeded in encouraging the families to take the lead in solving their own problems and being responsible for their own destiny and it restored the notion of the traditional kehila (community) where through inner organizations of hesed the kehila served the needs of its members.
For more information about the activities of the Sephardic Renaissance in Israel, please call (718) 434-1757, email davidcohensr@gmail.com, or write to 829 East 15th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11230.
