Pictures By Kelly Levy -Toronto

Two groups of thirty young adults from Montreal's Jewish Federation CJA- members of the ATID and KEFIADA delegations- participated in a special Art Project in Beer-Sheva from July 15 to July 17.
Merridy Kotler, an art educator from Montreal, together with Shani Ora, a trustee from the Beer-Sheva Youth Futures program-joined forces to lead this wonderful doll workshop.

After hundreds of e-mails, phone calls and extremely careful planning, the gym in Oryan Elementary school in Beer-Sheva opened its doors to 45 Youth Futures children between the ages of nine to eleven. Each member from the Montreal group along with ten trustees were assigned one YF student to work with.

"We went to do an amazing doll project under the brilliant guidance of Merridy Kotler. Each of us was paired with a child, instructed how to trace their body onto a piece of paper, then cut it out to create a pattern of the child. We then pinned the pattern to material, cut around the pattern to create the body, after which we glued the two pieces of material together based on the paper tracing, turned it inside out and voila we had a life-size doll, a replicate of each child! While this may sound easy, I assure you it was a difficult task with many of us failing to make our dolls as perfect as we had hoped.

Despite that, we began stuffing the dolls with large wads of polyfil until they were full. The next step was for the children to dress the dolls in their clothes from home following which they decorated the dolls faces and attached wool used for hair that matched their own color."

At the end of this unique, intensive project, the Dolls festival came to its end- with a group photo of 45 dolls and 45 students.

According to Merridy Kotler this project was a major success on so many levels:
"First for Ran Sagee suggestion to her to create the art workshop and all the help and support he offered so that this project would be successful.

This project truly reflected that art has no bounds. From across the ocean young adults from Montreal worked with children and Israeli trustees, and even though only a handful spoke Hebrew they were able to communicate and reach out to the children. The children in turn participated happily aside their assigned partner strengthening the bounds between them.

To see the children with excited smiling faces at the end of the project, holding on to their dolls proudly to take home and share their experience with their family and friends was truly worth all the hard work by the ten trustees who did the setup and Ruthie Sheinfeld Reut Atuan and Shani Ora for all the YF arrangements.

What a truly rewarding experience this was for all those involved!
Kol Hakavod!"