A Wildlife Park, Learning Center, and Training Center
to Prepare Youth at Risk to enter the Work Market and the IDF.

Wing of Love has created an educational and therapeutic environment in a wildlife park near Kibbutz Kfar Menachem in the northern Negev, which prepares youth at risk to fit into normative society and to enter the work market.

The program combines learning and working, while caring for animals.
Twenty boys, who have been removed from their homes by court order, take part in this full-time program, for 18 to 36 months.

The Learning Center: Half of the boys study in the 12^th grade program and half learn in the 10^th grade program.

Preparation for the Work Market: They all learn work skills and gain work experience, at first in the park in our sheltered environment.
The next stage is for our staff to find him work in the open market and to provide guidance for both the employer as well as the boy, as they both meet new challenges.
Some of the boys then enlist for army service, while others engage in community service or gain jobs and are able to leave and end their dependency on the welfare services.

Socialization and Values: Visitors to the park, including families, soldiers, volunteers, and others, who join the teenagers at work in the park and enable our youth to meet new role models, absorb values, and help others, while preparing the teenage boys to move back into society and succeed in life.

Wildlife: The animals in the park include a variety of pheasants from the Far East, including endangered species, curassows from the Amazon also endangered in the wild, blue, green and white peacocks, vulturine guineafowl from East Africa, emus from Australia, and rheas from South American, ornamental fowl, waterfowl, monkeys, spotted deer, oryxes, coons, and more.

History

The 30-dunam wildlife park at Kfar Menachem began in the late 1970’s.
Animal-loving kibbutzniks, including the two brothers, Avital and Gadi Patish, and Tuvya Shelo and his son Guy, laid out homes for animals – a safari for Israeli animals, ponds for waterfowl, a hatchery and breeding units for chicks, a stable for horses and ponies, a rabbit hutch, housing for raccoons and a safe place for monkeys too.
All this was finished by 1980, when 20 year-old Guy was killed in a military operation in southern Lebanon. His desolated friends and family chose to set up a memorial in the center of the park, where he had spent so many happy days of his youth.
The Patish brothers continued to develop the park, but 11 years later, Gadi Patish also died, of cancer.

Kibbutz folk continued to maintain and develop the park for many years. But in 2003, they leased the park to the non-profit organization, Wing of Love, for 20 years.
Wing of Love turned the park into a work place for young people with special needs, a garden for animals and people, in the belief that such youth could blossom through caring for animals in this setting.