P2G is The Jewish Agency’s strategic initiative that connects the Jewish people by creating enduring relationships between Israel and Jewish communities of the Diaspora. These personal and professional friendships have established the bedrock of a global community. The program has connected hundreds of Jewish and Israeli communities and organizations around the world in 46 partnerships.
One of P2G’s partnership regions connected Israel’s Western Galilee with a consortium of 14 Jewish Federation communities in the United States, Budapest and Hungary. It was this partnership that took up the calling to solve the problem facing these unfortunate children. Led by Efrat Srebro, a facilitator of the Western Galilee partnership, they have been recruiting young Israelis to work on a solution.
The P2G Peoplehood Platform facilitated the work with the support of the Jewish state’s renowned defense contractor Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Together they developed the Life Seat, a system to prevent forgetting children in cars.
Rafael Advanced Defense Systems provided volunteers for the Israeli-Hungarian team to create Life Seat. The technology involves placing a chip under the padding of a booster seat that measures a child’s weight as they sit down. The chip transmits a signal through a wireless keychain if a child screams or goes more than 10 minutes alone in the car.
Life Seat is just one of the innovations emanating from Israel’s world-famous “start-up nation” culture, and it's a unique manifestation of Israel-Diaspora connectedness.“We understood that this was an issue of tikkun olam,” Efrat said, using the Hebrew term for “repairing the world.”
“The experience of sharing, repairing the world from a uniquely Jewish sense of mission, and enabling the young Hungarians to connect with Israel were our motivations for creating this project,” said Efrat.
