On Monday, Wise School students were treated to a presentation and a Q&A with athletes from the Israel Sport Center for the Disabled (ISCD), a longtime tikkun olam partner of Stephen Wise Temple and Schools.
Leading the presentation was Boaz Kramer, ISCD’s executive director. A 15-year veteran of Israel’s national wheelchair tennis team, Kramer won the World Cup for wheelchair tennis and was a quarterfinalist at the London Paralympic Games in 2012. He was joined by Mayam Zikri, a current wheelchair tennis star who previously spent seven years playing wheelchair basketball, including a stint on the Israeli boys national team. After switching sports, the 19-year-old is now a top-25 player in the world.
One of the ISCD guests was a familiar one for Wise School students: Caroline Tabib. Tabib, paralyzed from the waist down since birth, visited Wise School with the ISCD last year, and is currently the No. 7 wheelchair table tennis player in the world. Asked how she moves laterally in one of the world’s fastest sports, the 2016 Paralympic quarterfinalist had a ready answer: “Like anything else,” she said. “Lots of practice.”
The fourth athlete to speak with Wise School students was 8-year-old Yonatan Minkin. Born with cerebral palsy, Minkin first arrived at the center when he was 18 months old, and now swims, plays basketball, and is starting to play rugby.
“The sport center is a place where I completely fit in,” he told Wise’s fifth and sixth graders. “In every other part of my life, even though I have many friends at school, I’m the person with the disability. At the center, there are so many other kids and adults just like me. We’re all different, so no one’s different. it’s my favorite place to be, because I can dream of playing any sport there, and I can dream of being a professional athlete, and I plan on winning many medals.”
Accompanying the athletes, who spoke to each grade level, were the West Coast Director for American Friends of the ISCD, Marsha Rothpan, and AFISCD National Executive Director Jennifer Fink, who shared that, in January, ISCD will take on a new name: the Israel Parasport Center.