These young sisters’ vision? Helping kids in the hospital.

By JUAN lASSo jlasso@liherald.com

The hallways at Temple Hillel were abuzz with Hebrew School students 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 getwell gifts to other children stricken with cancer more than 5,000 miles away at the Hadassah Med- ical Center in Jerusalem and Dana-Dwek Children’s Hospital in Tel Aviv.

Making it all possible was selfconfident, 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 kidapproved 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

How to get involved 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 neigh-

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