Most of the women at the gala wore colorful saris typical of their Pakistani heritage. Mira Bader wore her bat mitzvah dress.
Mira, 13, is an eighth-grader at Yavneh Day School, a K-8 Jewish school on the Silicon Valley Jewish community’s Levy Family Campus in Los Gatos. She also became the belle of the ball at a recent fundraiser sponsored by Developments in Literacy, which supports girls’ education in Pakistan.
Through her social justice class at Yavneh last spring, Bader persuaded fellow students to give a sizable donation, $550, to DIL, and the mostly Muslim leaders of the agency showed their appreciation by asking the Jewish teen to speak at their Oct. 26 event, held at the Crowne Plaza Cabana Hotel in Palo Alto.
“It makes me feel pretty accomplished,” Mira said about the experience. “That I somehow made a difference in the lives of some of these girls.”
The Palo Alto teen attended the event with her social justice teacher, Susan Ellenberg, who teaches the subject to the middle school. Ellenberg’s seventh-grade curriculum focuses on monetary philanthropy.
Every school year, parents donate to a class fund, which in Mira’s class topped $3,500. But it’s up to individual students to persuade their classmates where to donate the money.
“The students choose organizations that represent areas of injustice about which they feel passionate,” Ellenberg said. “Because it was an all-girls class, I took the opportunity to explore issues affecting girls and women.”
One of the speakers brought in was Ambreen Jamal, the local DIL chapter president. From her, the students learned that in parts of Pakistan illiteracy rates among women are 38 percent and higher, and that the Taliban forbids girls’ education. They also learned more about 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai, an activist and girls’ education advocate who was shot last year in an assassination attempt by the Taliban. Despite that, DIL continues to sponsor girls’ schools throughout the country.
Mira, who has been a student at Yavneh since first grade, was deeply affected by Jamal’s talk.
“I realized how similar the girls in Pakistan are to us,” she said. “We’re so lucky we get to go to school. They don’t. It touched me that I could help these girls go to school and get an education.”
But DIL was only one of 11 organizations the class considered. Each student had to write a persuasive essay and make a speech pitching their favorite charity. Then everyone in the class made allocation decisions.
According to Ellenberg, there were only two rules: The students had to send each of the 11 a minimum gift, and they were not allowed to divide the pot evenly.
“Mira is a very articulate speaker and advocate,” Ellenberg says of her student. “Her style is much more collaborative. But she spoke to the class so passionately about this issue.”
The class made its donation last spring, but only now did DIL get a chance to publicly thank the girls by inviting Mira to speak at the gala last month. She was also presented with a certificate of appreciation.
In her speech, Mira told several hundred attendees, most of them Pakistani, “We are taught the values of our tradition that command us to care for the vulnerable, not just in our own communities but throughout the world. We agreed that educating all children should be a universal priority, and in particular, girls, because they are so often left behind.”
Said her proud teacher: “Mira got up there and was fantastic. She said she was a nervous wreck, but she was poised, and flooded with compliments afterward.”
After this school year, Mira will attend Gunn High School in Palo Alto. But she says the values she has learned at Yavneh — and especially her recent experience as a Jewish philanthropist — will stick with her.
“It really showed me what being Jewish is all about,” Mira said. “For years we’re told to give tzedakah to make the world a better place and show people you care. Up until now, I understood we did these things, but had never seen it carried out. Now I know this is what our culture does.”