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Written by Esther
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 What is Tikkun Olam? Gabriel Catan, from Uruguay, shares his thoughts:
What is Tikkun Olam? What's the importance of helping our fellow man? Should we first help and reach out to our local Jewish communities or do we focus on other non-Jewish needs as well?
These were questions that our track of Tikkun Olam asked during all the ROI 120 Summit. And as a part of our leadership responsibility to share and implement what we learned during this international meeting, I decided to run an activity on Tikkun Olam for a group of young Jewish students of my local Sephardic community.
Twice a month, our Rabbi organizes an informal meeting of young people in order to discuss topics such as leadership, intermarriage, Jewish values and morals, holidays, etc. from the point of view of Orthodox Judaism. As we found ourselves in the time of reading the parshiot dealing with the life experiences of Abraham Avinu, one of the exemplary personalities dedicated to Tikkun Olam, I thought that it was an appropriate idea to bring up this topic.
The peulah (activity) consisted first in watching a video about the role of Israel in world disasters such as earthquakes, its part in combating poverty in Africa, and international cooperation in fields such as agriculture and science. We then implemented an activity in which the participants worked in pairs. I presented each pair with various theoretical situations to select (similar to the ones in the Tikkun Olam poll). Each of the participants was to guess which option their partner would choose, and then explain why. After some challenging debates and discussions, the activity closed with two insights about Abraham and the order of priorities when giving Tzedak
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