Bala Cynwyd Teen Spends Winter Break Helping LA’s Needy

Bala Cynwyd Teen Spends Winter Break Helping LA’s Needy
 
 
The holiday spirit is all about giving – and Bala Cynwyd’s Rebecca Tauber wore the mantle of this age-old adage by volunteering her Winter Break to travel to Los Angeles to help those less fortunate than herself.
 
Tauber, a15-year-old Lower Merion High School sophomore, is one of nearly 60 high school students from across North America visiting LA from Dec. 22-27 as part of the Alternative Winter Break (AWB) program. AWB is conducted by Young Judaea, a Zionist youth movement, and is designed to open young adult’s eyes to social issues by conducting hands-on volunteerism in unfamiliar settings – in this instance shelters and food banks in Los Angeles.
 
“I wanted to come to AWB because when you think of LA and other cities and how big and glamorous they are, you don’t actually see the bad parts,” Tauber stated. “(In a visit to a) Food Bank, we learned about how much food we were throwing way.  But, I was also thinking about the food that we were keeping and how some of it was actually expired and how we wouldn’t keep that in our own traditional stores or homes.  The whole experience so far has been educational and just brings to light how much work there still is to be done,”
 
On Christmas Day the AWB team hosted a holiday party at a homeless shelter in Hollywood where the AWB volunteers gave out toys to kids. At this party Rebecca met and made a connection with a homeless 10-year-old girl named Kyliex.
“We didn’t talk about her (being homeless).  We talked about the things we had in common… …about books and our families. She told me ‘I always wanted to have a friend like you’,” said Tauber.
 
She added that she has been taking lots of picture and recording her experience in her journal.
 
“It’s really important to see lots of volunteers helping, even if just for short periods of time, because you see how it makes a big difference,” Tauber said. “You see the effect (volunteering has) on not only others but on the volunteers too.  The more you do the more you discover the passion within yourself to help others, and then you become inspired to do more.”
 
“We thought that (the AWB experience) was within our value set,” Said Jaime Maxner, an organizer with Young Judaea who oversaw the LA group and also envisioned the program and helped get it off the ground in 2007. “It allows for great civic experiences where they serve others through activism (and) allows them to take on leadership roles among their peers.”
 
She added that the AWB experience is not just about helping communities, but also self-exploration - discovering what it is like to be an active contributing citizen and how that is inspiring to others. She also informed Patch that this year's AWB LA trip leader, Alex Zaremba (24, now a resident of Los Angeles), also originally hails from Bala Cynwyd and attended Lower Merion when he was a teenager.
 
“This is an experience that they’ll remember for the rest of their lives,” Andrew Fretwell, Young Judaea’s Alternative Winter Break Program Manager, wrote in a press release encapsulating the experience for the volunteers.  “By living and working in communities where the effects of their efforts can be felt, these teens will learn firsthand about the issues affecting those who live in recovering and struggling areas.  Alternative Winter Break ensures that participants develop a sense of building community, get the chance to further explore their Jewish identity and ultimately go home more committed and better equipped to offer service where it is most needed.”

Find out more about Young Judaea by clicking here.