Best Kids Books to Gift This Chanukah
A Kids Book About Perseverance
By Yonina Schnall Lermer
akidsco.com
A Kids Book About Perseverance
By Yonina Schnall Lermer
akidsco.com
Yonina Schnall Lermer, a veteran teacher and literacy curriculum coordinator, wrote A Kids Book About Perseverance for youngsters who, facing a challenge, tell themselves “I can’t do this.” In thirty-two pages, she tells them—and shows them—how they can.
From her years in the classroom, she writes, she learned that she “had to begin teaching more than the curriculum” to influence her students not to give up when discouraged. She needed to teach them, while they were still children, to develop perseverance, which means “continued effort to achieve a goal, despite challenges and obstacles.”
In short sentences, a few age-appropriate words on a page, accompanied by nifty illustrations, Lermer tells her young readers not to take an easy path, not to depend on other people to do difficult tasks for them. She stresses patience. “Keep doing something even though it will take a long time to succeed.”
She stresses “the power of yet . . . a teeny, tiny word with huge powers!!!” Saying “I don’t know how to do this . . . yet” indicates that it will be possible eventually. “If we give up immediately, it’ll never happen.”
Patience is hard, Lermer’s book admits. “Doing hard things is good for us”; it builds “muscles” of resilience.
“Do we always reach the yet?” Lermer asks. “TRUTHFULLY . . . NO.”
Her book—part of a “kids book about” series that includes such topics as imagination, anger and confidence—teaches realism. “Effort doesn’t always equal success,” she writes.
The author teaches in a Jewish day school in the Greater New York area. The lessons she teaches in the kids’ book, which also makes worthy reading for adults, clearly reflect a traditional Jewish perspective of not giving up on reaching a goal. In the spirit of Pirkei Avot, which teach a balance in all endeavors and all middot, Lermer has, for a general audience, succinctly packaged Jewish teachings about building strong character traits and mature behavior.
In the case of Lermer’s book—“best read together, grown-up and kid”—the sayings of the Avot are made accessible to the children.
We are God’s Partners: Caring for our World in the Story of Creation
By Rick Magder
Independently published
We are G-d’s Partners: Caring for Our World in the Story of Creation
By Rick Magder
Independently published
In his new children’s book, Rick Magder, the director of media at the Afikim Foundation and CEO of Bright River Media Inc., a film production and marketing company, a central address for educators and communities to develop and promote educational series, presents a contemporary, kid’s-eye perspective on an ancient theme—the Torah’s rendition of the first six days of creation.
His message in We are G-d’s Partners: Caring for our World in the Story of Creation: G-d gave the earth to us, children included; we, children included, have to take care of it. Man’s responsibility as stewards of the world began on the eighth day—immediately after G-d rested on the seventh, Magder’s book strongly implies.
“As G-d’s children, every one of us is responsible to preserve and protect this gift we call home,” Magder writes in his introduction. He calls this message “foundational to developing self-worth, confidence, kindness toward others, leadership skills, and much more.”
The son of a successful filmmaker in Toronto, Magder, a proud baal teshuvah, entered his father’s profession, found himself drawn to Torah Judaism and eventually decided to use his creative skills for the benefit of the Torah-observant community—and now he has expanded his outreach to a children’s book.
“It took six days for G-d to make the world. Let’s see how He did it,” he writes, leading into the author’s example of caring for creation as “a paradigm for chesed for G-d’s living creations.”
Magder brings a similar perspective of appreciation to the creation of the sky, the land and the sea, (“G-d made the Earth into a big beautiful garden”), the sun and moon and stars, the animals in the sea and birds in the sky (“We can protect and help them by keeping their homes clean”—i.e., recycle and don’t litter), the land animals and Mankind. And Shabbat: “It’s a special day to rest and say thank you to G-d.”
In forty-four pages on which stunning color illustrations accompany text, he brings together two emphases: concern for the environment and Divine creation. Magder’s words serve as a mussar-based Torah commentary through the lens of creation, written at a child’s level.
“G-d’s special light . . . helps us know what is right and wrong, what’s important and why our world is so special to us and to G-d,” Magder writes. His advice to readers who may be sad: “Think of all the good things that you have, like your family and friends and the gifts that G-d has given you including our beautiful world.”
For readers interested in hands-on actions, the author includes at the end of his book, several suggestions for fun and exciting ways to get children involved in environmental stewardship.
He urges readers to “think of some of the ways that you can say thank you to G-d for giving us such a special world. G-d made the world and everything in it for us to enjoy,” Magder writes. “That’s why G-d made us His partners. He wants us to take care of the Earth and everything that lives on it.”
My Special Uncle
By Ahava Ehrenpreis, illustrations by Mira Simon
Mosaica Press
My Special Uncle
By Ahava Ehrenpreis, illustrations by Mira Simon
Mosaica Press
Uncle Dovi is an adult, chronologically, but to the unnamed nephew who tells his Orthodox family’s story in My Special Uncle, Dovi is an enigma—he acts out and sometimes behaves immaturely. Dovi’s nephew is clearly confused by Dovi’s often unadult-like behavior. My Special Uncle describes, from a child’s point of view, what it means to be intellectually limited, how such a person fits into a family, and the importance of treating the individual with love and acceptance.
in terms a child can understand, what being an individual with disabilities means, and how such an
Author Ahava Ehrenpreis is the mother of a son who had Down Syndrome (Saadya, who died at thirty-five during the Covid pandemic), and writer of a series of articles geared towards special needs families.
In the book, Dovi is patterned after Saadya, z”l; the drawings of Dovi strikingly resemble the author’s late son. Ehrenpreis’ insightful words and Mira Simon’s effective illustrations sympathetically depict how the book’s protagonist comes to understand and embrace his uncle’s intellectual shortcomings. The illustrations picture Dovi honestly but poignantly.
Doctors had told Saadya’s parents that he might not ever learn to talk or be independent. He proved them wrong, graduating from high school, going on unescorted jaunts around New York City, learning to read in English and Hebrew, participating in a gap year yeshivah program in Israel for special needs students, living in a supervised apartment in Brooklyn, and enrolling in Yeshiva University’s Makor College Experience, a program for young men with special needs.
Dovi’s nephew concludes that “I’m really happy that Hashem gave me an uncle who is really special. Because being ‘special’ is really . . . well . . . SPECIAL!”
The Boy Who Loved Torah
By Carol Ungar
Menucha Publishers, Young Readers Biography
The Boy Who Loved Torah
By Carol Ungar
Menucha Publishers, Young Readers Biography
Following the dictum that “the boy is the father of the man,” Carol Ungar tells the story of Rabbi Shmaryahu Yosef Chaim Kanievsky, a European-born scion of a distinguished rabbinic family. Rabbi Kanievsky moved to British Palestine with his parents in 1934 at the age of six. He never left the country that became Israel in 1948 and earned a reputation as the most prominent authority on Jewish law of his generation, an honored figure especially in the country’s Chareidi community.
Rabbi Kanievsky was known as the Sar HaTorah (Prince of Torah), a man who spent his life learning Torah, never accepting an official yeshivah, rabbinic, synagogue or communal position. He simply sat and learned in his modest Bnei Brak apartment, graciously accepting the thousands of people who came to him for blessings or Talmudic decisions or sent him questions that he answered by postcard in small script.
“Rav Chaim didn’t like crowds,” Ungar writes. “He didn’t like commotion.”
His father was Rabbi Yaakov Kanievsky (The Steipler, the title derived from Hornsteipel, the Ukrainian city of his birth. His uncle was the renowned Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz (The Chazon Ish). His father-in-law was the equally renowned Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv. And his wife’s grandfather was Rabbi Aryeh Levin, the beloved “Tzaddik of Jerusalem.”
With such distinguished yichut (lineage), he was virtually destined for greatness, Ungar writes. “When it came to Torah, his family was millionaires.”
Ungar’s book, with illustrations by Dena Ackerman, makes Rabbi Kanievsky, who was a familiar name in Israel’s Chareidi community, a figure to be admired by young Jewish readers in the Diaspora. She describes him as “a very holy person” who “was believed to have ruach hakodesh,” showing how the boy who loved Torah became the man who spread it.
Rabbi Kanievsky was born in Pinsk, Poland (now Belarus). Ungar focuses on his childhood, when, in an atmosphere of intense Torah study, he used his photographic memory in service of his Torah study. By his bar mitzvah, he had completed Shas.
His family settled in the recently established city of Bnei Brak, “a tiny town of small one-story houses and dirt roads,” where his father was appointed head of a branch of the Novardak Yeshiva.
As an adult, Rabbi Kanievsky wrote several books of Torah scholarship, was drafted into the Israeli Army during the nascent country’s War of Independence, and late in life, after his wife’s passing in 2011, founded Belev Echad, a nonprofit that provided social services and medical equipment to the infirm and disabled.
He died at ninety-four in 2022, on Shushan Purim. His funeral, Ungar writes, was attended “by close to a million people, many of whom wept as if they had lost their own father.”
Steve Lipman is a frequent contributor to Jewish Action.