On Saturday, May 3, the Israeli Yad group spent the day touring and having fun with 25 kids from the Karmiel Children's Village who are participants in the P2K "Sponsor  Families" project.

At 9AM sharp, the bus picked up the children and the participating YAD families from the village and headed for Ein Hod, a village situated along the southwestern foothills of the Carmel mountain range.

The first stop in Ein Hod was at the "Nisco Museum for Mechanical Music". The museum, situated on a street packed with artist studios, is the culmination of a life long effort made by Nissan Cohen, a collector for the past forty years of a variety of musical instruments. The collection includes hundreds of items including unique music boxes, a mechanical organ, manual pianos, gramophones and "Jack in the Box" games originating as early as the late 19th Century until the mid-20th Century.

From there they continued on to the expansive Carmel Forests National Park, where together they  prepared a great picnic lunch that included pita bread baked in an outdoor oven, campfire baked potatoes and other home cooked items prepared by the members of our group. After lunch, the children each received a wooden music box (inspired by the visit to the museum) that they could paint and decorate as they wished.

The noise of happy, creative and active children resonated throughout the forest and flooded everyone, YAD members, village counselors and the children with a warm, heartfelt sense of happiness and excitement.

Furthermore, each child was given a butterfly for him or her to paint as part of The Butterfly Project sponsored by "Holocaust Museum Houston".

At the end of the day before returning home, they took a hike along the "Hanging Bridges" spread out across the park.