Just over a month after the tragic death of one of their classmates, students from YULA Girls High School have decided to honor her through yearlong community service projects.
Tsofia Mesica was 15 when she died in an accident in Tarzana this past September. Now, her peers are using that as inspiration for volunteer work that will benefit patients of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
“They decided all their service projects they will do this year will have something to do with something that was important to Tsofia,” said Adeena Bleich, regional director of the Jefferson Awards Foundation, an organization that champions public service and leadership and is helping to facilitate YULA’s project.
Taking care of sick children was important to Mesica — thus the focus on Children’s Hospital, according to Rabbi Yaakov Cohen, a Torah studies instructor at YULA.
“The reason we decided to do a hospital is she connected with that. She connected with kids who were sick and trying to bring joy to kids who were sick,” he said.
Twelve YULA students attended Students in Action, an Oct. 20 leadership conference organized by the Jefferson Awards Foundation. There they spoke with Mary Fagnano, whose son, Nick, died in 2014 after he was struck by lightning at Venice Beach. They discussed the Thrive in Joy Nick Fagnano Foundation, which Fagnano has been overseeing since her son’s death and which encourages and rewards character through education and recreation while serving children who are in need.
Cohen explained, “We told her about Tsofia and wanting to do something positive that is just focused on her and who she was, all her positive qualities and what she brought to the world. Once we heard about Thrive in Joy, it was the perfect fit.”
About 30 YULA students, in addition to those who attended the conference, will be involved with the project, Cohen said.
The service projects by girls at the Orthodox high school are underway. During the first weekend in November, YULA students went on a Shabbaton at Camp Ramah, where they designed tie-dye pillowcases that they will give to patients at the hospital.
They also will be putting together care packages to take to the patients on Thanksgiving, according to Gila Manzour, a 10th-grader who was a friend of Mesica’s. Another program in the works will build one-on-one relationships between patients and about a dozen YULA students, including Manzour.
“Girls from YULA can go to the hospital and have one-on-one time with the kids,” Manzour said in a phone interview. “I thought that would be cool because when we take our package, we go [in] person. It’s not just being delivered, it’s being personally delivered … so we will have that genuine connection.”
Manzour said she’s pleased to be part of the Jefferson Awards Foundation program. “I’m excited to see where this goes. … I’m excited to be trying it out.”
The foundation has done more than expose the YULA students to community service opportunities. Its Students in Action program — which is focused on training students to become leaders in their communities (and which also drew students from Shalhevet High School) — exposed them to a geographically diverse group of peers, as the recent conference drew public and private schools from a variety of neighborhoods.
“It was cool to know we could all mesh together as one. We sat at different tables with students from different schools and we came together as one within two hours, and it was nice to see,” Manzour said.
Bleich, for her part, found meaning in watching students from such different circumstances come together at the conference.
“There was an amazing moment when one of the Compton students talked about meeting the girls from Beverly Hills and how she realized how they were more the same than different but she never met anyone from Beverly Hills before and how Compton is not a nice place but that they didn’t make her feel different … It was very powerful,” she wrote in an email.
Meanwhile, Manzour said that she and her classmates who were close with Mesica are going to go beyond their involvement with the foundation as part of remembering their friend.
“The whole school is not on the same emotional level as us,” she said. “I personally want to try different things to carry on her legacy with me and not involve a foundation with it.”
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