The American kids have a Jewish identity in a different way than the Israeli students. When they began to coordinate, despite goodwill and common interests, there were many kinks to be worked out. Shawn's Moriah, a Zionist yeshiva, is paired with the School for the Arts in Tel Aviv. Next year the number of Israeli schools will jump to 30, bringing the total number of participating schools to 60. There is a short waiting list of other schools that want to participate.
Some schools get priority for admission into the program because of local circumstances.
One is in suburban Chicago where a local teacher, who had taken a seminar in Holocaust education, contacted Beit Lohamei Hageta'ot. We immediately took him because it is an important message that he is trying to send. Yad Layeled has also invited high schools to join the project, using the writings of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. Twenty-five pupils from Haifa came to the US earlier this year to spend a few days with the partner class at a Jewish school in Nassau County, New York. One New Jersey boy, planning his bar mitzva in Israel, invited the Israeli partner class.