9 A Sandwich a Day for Every Child in Israel in a country where one-third of the children live below the poverty line This program started in 2003 when HOT partnered with the elderly women volunteers from the Beit Frankforter (BF) Community Center, who were at that time preparing sandwiches for about 100 children. We expanded the BF Program to 500 sandwiches and then started a partnership with Leket Israel, who in the 2016/2017 school year distributed the bread and fillings for between 8,000 & 8,500 sandwiches every school day. Today, we fund only Leket. The children who need our sandwiches are from low-income families. Many are from families where one parent is sick, is unemployed, or in prison. The children are a mixture of sabras (native Israelis), and new immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, Ethiopia and South America. For many, the sandwich is the only meal they have before dinner; for others, it is lunch and/or a supplement to a completely inadequate diet. Every school has to go through a screening process to become part of the program. Leket makes periodic visits to the schools to check on how the project is running and to make sure that there is no abuse of the project and that the distribution of sandwiches to the children is handled with dignity. HOT meets with the men and women who make the sandwiches and pack the lunches and the principals of schools in the program. Israel has a nationwide program that is “supposed to” feed all needy children a hot lunch, BUT it is only mandatory for younger children and even then, children who are in school all day. BUT for many Israeli children school ends at 1 PM and they only get food if the municipality, or in some cases the principal of the school, decides to allocate some of the shekels they receive from the Ministry of Education for food rather than for a teacher or two and/or other parts of what is necessary to give quality education. This results in there being tens of thousands of Israeli children who are not getting the basic nourishment necessary to concentrate on their schoolwork. Because the needs were greater than Leket or its donors could possibly fund, a few years ago Leket went to the municipalities and offered to supply food for the children ONLY if the school either contributed 1/3 of its cost or found someone (e.g. local businessmen) to contribute 1/3 of the cost of what is necessary to feed the needy kids.