El Al Does a Big Mitzvah

Summary of Article: Every year for the last 20 years, El Al, the Israeli airline, has partnered with Chai Lifeline to bring Israeli children with cancer to New York so they can attend summer camp and forget their troubles for a while. Inbal, an 11 year old cancer patient, was on board an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to New York waiting for take off. Senior staff began collecting the children's' passports, but no one could find Inbal's. Flight attendants and crew personnel searched everywhere for it. Finally, they had to ask her to leave the airplane. As she sat at the airport in tears, the plane began to depart. Suddenly, her passport was found in another kid's backpack on board. Flight attendants and the pilots desperately alerted El AL and the control tower for permission to return to the terminal. After 30 minutes, they returned, picked up Inbal, who made it back onto the airplane. The whole plane, including all the other passengers, cried and cheered. It is almost unheard of for planes that have already taken off to return to the terminal to pick up a passenger.

Questions for Kids:

• What is a mitzvah/good deed? 
• There are lots of mitzvahs in this story. Name 3. 
• If you were Inbal, how would you have felt at different times as the events unfolded?