See how this sister duo are helping kids battle cancer at Temple Hillel.

The hallways at Temple Hillel were abuzz with students from the Chabad of Valley Stream Hebrew Program for Children last Sunday morning. About two dozen of them filed into a small classroom with their teacher and program director in tow. The children were greeted with tables equipped with kits stuffed with clay and glass beads, jewelry wire, and paper plates — the ingredients needed to make a customized bracelet.

But not for themselves. Their handiwork would be given as get-well gifts to other children stricken with cancer more than 5,000 miles away at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and Dana-Dwek Children’s Hospital in Tel Aviv through the Israel Children's Cancer Foundation.

Making it all possible was self-confident, bubbly 12-year-old Gabriella Vernov, who introduced herself and her little sister Sarina as the founders of Glow4Kids. The organization is aimed at gifting handmade, individually unique, and kid-approved beaded bracelets to kids suffering from cancer in the United States and abroad.

The sisters came up with the idea for their company when Sarina was gifted with a beaded bracelet kit on her sixth birthday. They saw the kit’s potential to spread compassion and hope in the lives of others and inspire kids like them to make it happen.

At first, the sisters confined their bracelet-making base of operations to their home, with everyone in the family chipping in. For every bracelet purchased, three of its kind would be given to kids with cancer, with the earnings from the sale funding the supplies to make more bracelets.

But the business was already coming in fast.

“Within the first week, we were asked to do about 200 bracelets for all these hospitals and organizations,” said their mom Inna Vernov, who helped the girls launch the organization earlier this year.  “So we were just a little overwhelmed. And we figured we can’t do it alone.”

To scale up their efforts and get the Glow4Kids movement off the ground, the girls knew they needed to push ahead with recruiting kids from various school and service organizations across Valley Stream and neighboring communities to make the beaded bracelets.

They also wanted to cast a wider net to enlist kids to become “ambassadors.”

“An ambassador is a child who draws a picture in the postcards we package with the bracelets and send them out to hospitals,” said 9-year-old Sarina. “And if you want to draw a picture, then ask your mom and dad to go on the website and submit it.”

“We’re trying to find ambassadors all over the country, you know, to really participate,” said Inna.

Millions of Americans, of all ages and backgrounds, have been touched by cancer in one form or another. Nearly 10,000 children below the age of 15 are projected to be diagnosed with cancer this year, according to the American Cancer Society.

“There are sick kids, you know, no matter if they’re six months old, or six years old,” said Inna. “So we just want to make sure that kids who are healthy can give something to a child who’s not.”

There are a number of adult-run foundations, walkathons, and charity events that provide research, treatment, and care for cancer patients and their families. Inna and her daughters, however, were struck by how scarce the opportunities were for kids to show solidarity and compassion for other kids.

“There are different ways to take out a tumor. But they’re not always like fun. So we just wanted to bring happiness into their lives,” Gabriella told the students at Temple Hillel.

Inna noted that — despite a strong and understandable parental instinct to try and shield children from the harsher realities of life — kids prove surprisingly able to comprehend the difficulties of the world around them, and they want to make a difference. Especially when those realities become real and immediate.

Just ask Gabriella, who lost her grandmother and great-grandmother to pancreatic cancer.

“God really connected the cancer situation to me and to make me think about my family and other people’s family going through the same thing,” she said.

“We wanted to make sure that our students, upon heading into the holiday of Purim, where we enjoy gifts and give to others, that we make sure kids that are sick will have some way to have a little joy,” said Itty Goldshmid, the Chabad program director. “We can do that today thanks to what these two girls are doing.”

While the beaded bracelets are meant to brighten and uplift kids undergoing a great deal of suffering and pain, Goldshmid noted that it also helps the kids who make the bracelets develop deeper compassion.

Just give kids an outlet to express compassion, and they’ll express it, she noted — one threaded bead at a time.

Have an opinion on this article? Send an email to jlasso@liherald.com.