Haredi teens give $7,000 to their UK lifeboat rescuers

Orthodox Jewish teenagers from London have donated £5,000 (approx. $7,225) to the lifeboat team that rescued them from the water earlier this week.

Thirty-four boys from Stamford Hill in North London were rescued Monday from the beach at Dover by a helicopter and lifeboats after they were trapped by a tide that rolled in quickly. The 14- to 17-year-olds had guided the rescuers, including 40 volunteers, to their location using the flashlights on their cellphones.

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution lifeboat station located in Dover, a town in the English county of Kent, reportedly relies on donations to operate.

A letter from the Ahavas Yisrael Community Centre in Stamford Hill to the station operations manager read: “The centre, together with our entire community, would like to extend their warmest gratitude and appreciation to you and your colleagues for the swift action and heroism of the Dover RNLI station, which ensured the safety of our boys.

“Following the incident you referred to the boys being in high spirits. I can assure you that this is in no small measure due to the care that the boys received from your team at the scene.”

The letter added that immediately after the accident, the families of the boys began raising funds for the station and would hold more fundraisers over the summer, the Kent online news website reported Thursday.