Most children like making art, but they aren’t usually compensated for their work.
However, posters created by 8-year-old Amarya Levy-Mazie, of Brooklyn, 9-year-old Sophia Trigub of Fairlawn, N.J. and 10 other children around the country, were rewarded with new iPads.
In a contest celebrating the Harold Grinspoon Foundation’s new “Voices & Visions” program, which brings together Jewish thinkers and artwork, children created their own version of posters inspired by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s quote: “If you see something that is broken, fix it.”
In an e-mail interview, Trigub said she loves arts and crafts and that she learned about the contest through the PJ Library, another Grinspoon Foundation project.
“I have been getting PJ Library books since I was a little kid, and now my little brother gets them,” she said. “I always liked these books and my parents used to read them to me until I learned how to read the stories myself.”
Trigub’s poster involved gluing different colored papers that show the world and the continents “breaking apart because people across the world are too different and are not always very nice to each other.”
“I think that all the trouble in the world can be fixed if we all try to accept each other more, so I glued different color words — trust, respect, peace, fairness, caring, and responsibility — because that is how all people should treat each other,” she explained.
Levy-Mazie, a Hebrew school student at Park Slope Jewish Center, said her piece was inspired by a visit to a nursing home this summer, while she was at Camp Young Judaea Sprout Lake in upstate New York. “My poster shows an elderly woman smiling when someone takes her out to a beautiful garden,” she said.
Voices & Visions is a $1.1 million philanthropic initiative. The foundation is creating and distributing high-quality posters to numerous Jewish organizations, PJ Library partners, and others. The first series of 18 posters highlights the “Voice” — quote — from a famous Jewish thinker paired with the “Vision” — or artwork — from a Jewish graphic designer.
Meanwhile, a children’s art contest sponsored by Storage-Mart recently brought $500 (for use in the classroom) and a storage bin full of school supplies to a Jewish teacher and her public school. Daphna Gutman, a third-grade teacher at Brooklyn’s P.S. 172, was the inspiration for the winning ‘Draw My Favorite Teacher’ entry produced by student Kayla Torres: submissions were made in the form of drawings made by students of their favorite teacher along with a short explanation of what makes their chosen teacher special.
“She has patience when she teaches us. She also is a teacher who doesn’t like to scream,” Torres wrote, of Gutman, a former New York City Teaching Fellow.
The other winners in the Voices & Visions contest are Stella Feldman-Abe, 7, Westchester, Calif.; Jordan Carey, 12, Oakland, Calif.; Avery Feldman, 10, Scottsdale, Ariz; Haidee Clauer, 12, Kansas City, Mo.; Eliana Bertman, 7, Colorado Springs, Colo; Sara Fajnland, 8, and Chaya Mushka Fajnland, 9, Herndon, Va; Nathaniel Coben, 10, Dedham, Mass.; Nina Katz, 11, Longmeadow, Mass; Marissa Eisen, 8, Salem, Mass.
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To see all winning entries, click here.
Julie.inthemix@gmail.com, @Julie_Wiener
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