In days when many students find themselves cut off from educational frameworks due to war, evacuation or instability – the “Focus Hour” project proves how a single initiative, born out of chaos, can become an island of routine and learning. This is a volunteer project that provides free private lessons via Zoom to evacuee students from all over the country. So far, hundreds of volunteers have participated in it and hundreds of students have benefited from it, and it doesn’t look like it will stop anytime soon.
It all started with a sense of frustration. Ohad Tshuva, an electrical engineering student at the Technion and a soldier in the reserves: “We learned significant lessons in mutual guarantee in battle. I tried to understand how I could transfer the lesson I learned in battle – to real life.” At the beginning of the war, Ohad found himself without a reserve assignment. The strong desire to contribute led him to a hotel in Herzliya, where evacuees from the south were staying, where he guided and taught children who were cut off from the school framework.
According to him, “After about fifty days in the hotel, he was drafted into the reserves in Gaza. When he returned from the front, after the funerals of close friends, he looked for another way to contribute.”
Within a group of friends at the Technion, Shalev Shreiki threw out an idea: “If we were five to ten students and we started giving private lessons – it could be very significant.” And indeed, it was. At first it wasn’t easy – little advertising, complex logistics in coordinating between students and volunteers. But over time, the project gained momentum. Today, it has been operating for a year and a half, has worked with over 500 students and has about 250 volunteers.
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