BGU PRESIDENT'S REPORT 2021

OUR NEXT FIFTY

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 Training of guide dogs continued despite restrictions.  On Channukah, over 70 volunteers in Beer Sheva and Eilat visited and lit candles with the elderly isolated at home. Photo: Courtesy.

The Lillian and Larry Goodman Open Apartments Program community theater produced a unique film instead of plays this year. “ Flowers and Silence” depicts community members' lives under the first lockdown movingly and poetically. The film showed in a number of Israeli film festivals this year. Social Work students at the Eilat Campus who volunteer regularly with asylum seekers, mobilized to make changing regulations accessible and comprehensible to this vulnerable community and were able to secure government support for those affected by the pandemic. Itamar Glaser, a 4 th year mechanical engineering student, received a Lubner Prize for Community Service for an initiative he started a year ago, at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. “Sweets for the Soul” now has 3,000 volunteers all over the country who bake cakes and visit with lonely elderly and the needy every Thursday evening ahead of the Sabbath.

 Students from BGU's Eilat campus volunteer regularly with asylum seekers. Photo: Shaked Barzilay.  Lillian and Larry Goodman Open Apartments Program volunteer and neighborhood resident. Photo: Amit Levy.

The Rothschild Cube – Center for Social Innovatio n provided guidance on prudent financial and consumer behavior to hundreds of participants from disadvantaged communities in dozens of Zoom sessions. BGU staff collected school supplies for children of families adversely affected by the pandemic.