Children from the Gaza envelope will be eligible to receive a new scholarship for summer camps around Israel.
600 children from all over Israel will receive scholarships for summer camps from the Israel Summer Camp Forum, with a particular focus on children from the Gaza Envelope.
The Israel Summer Camp Forum announced that after the end of Operation Shield and Arrow it would subsidize summer camp participation for around 600 children and youth.
The scholarships are designed to help children in need of extra educational assistance in the summer in order to make up for the lost days of education due to fighting.
Children will be able to choose to participate in summer camps all over the country and in particular to the area of their residence.
Connecting different sectors
The Israel Summer Camp Forum runs around 40 summer camps across Israel, one of which focuses on integrating special needs children and at risk youth. Another camp connects secular and religious youth through volunteering and collaborative activities.
The camps give boys and girls from all the communities, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and more the opportunity for a meaningful and enriching shared experience, volunteering and meeting new friends from communities they have never met before.
All the summer camps last for 10 days include accommodation and disconnecting from their mobile phones. The disconnecting, according to research by the forum, allows children to have a deeper experience and to connect with other children, whose opinions may be different from their own. It also helps to raise their self-esteem and connect them to different communities.
Shawna Goodman Sone, founder of the Summer Camps Israel forum, said “The participation of all the youth in Israel in summer camps should be a national strategic ambition. The summer months are a tremendous potential for personal and social growth for hundreds of thousands of young people, and today it is not sufficiently utilized.”