By Yisrael Clark
In the wonderful city of Beit Shemesh there are several libraries, but the best is undoubtedly the Benjamin Children’s Library. In this library I have spent many hours reading, studying, and more recently- volunteering.
This past summer, the library encouraged teenagers to give some of their time to the community and volunteer at the library, and many did. Aliza Lipner, the bat sherut in charge of volunteering at the library, estimates the number of volunteers at around 30. The volunteers (myself included) preformed a variety of jobs:
1. Shelving. Many books are taken out and returned to the library each day, and needless to say, they cannot be left in an immense pile at the front desk. So the volunteers were tasked with shelving all the books that were returned to the library on a daily basis.
2. Fixing. Look kid, bad things happen, and there’s nothing you can do about them, right? Wrong! Often, pages get torn by over-zealous readers, or the binding of a book will come apart due to age, or a cover will be ripped off by accident. In these situations, someone needs to return these books to their former glory, and this past summer, the teenaged volunteers can be credited with fixing the damaged books.
3. Organizing. One of the advantages of the library over a bookstore is the ability to pick a good book off the shelf, crash on a comfy chair, and start reading. And often, readers forget to return the book to its proper place. And so, volunteers would scan shelves, searching for misplaced books and putting them where they belong, so that the next reader could find the book with ease, without having to turn the entire library upside down.
4. The Reading Club. To encourage young readers, the library holds a reading club every summer, for elementary school aged children. This year, the theme was nature, being green. Every session, the kids would make a project related to the theme, and the volunteers would step in to provide a helping hand whenever it was needed.
5. The Mentoring Program. Every child has something they excel at, and something they have great difficulty with. For those kids who have trouble with reading, the library supplied a mentor, in the form of a teenaged volunteer. This summer, 8 pairs of mentors and kids met twice a week at the library, read together for 25 minutes, and then proceeded to do an activity such as coloring, dressing up, or playing a game. The kids got to take home a book as well.
Additionally, the volunteers took part in many projects set to them by Aliza Lipner, such as weeding out unread books or sorting the library’s substantial movie collection. Some volunteers would even take on personal projects, such as moving an entire section of the library around, in order to create space for new books.
The importance of these volunteers should be clear by now, and Aliza Lipner herself has expressed how the library couldn’t function without them. To show its gratitude, the library gave each volunteer a free membership for the summer and a voucher for פיצה חלב ודבש. Obviously, these gifts are not payment, for it is impossible to repay a teenager who has selflessly come to the library every week and used his precious time to help others. On the other hand, as a volunteer, I can testify that I enjoyed all the time I spent at the library, be it carrying mountains of books to shelve, or wandering through the library searching for my favorite author.