SEND ME YOUR CHILDREN

A Musical Concert of Healing and Hope for the Children of Israel, Gaza and the Ukraine

At

The Berklee Performance Center

April 12, 2025

Co-sponsored by No Limits Media and Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education

Over the past three years, the children of Israel, Gaza and the Ukraine have suffered innumerable physical and emotional disabilities. The Send Me Your Children concert is an effort to use music to help these children heal as well as to imagine a future filled with possibilities. The concert will be led by people with disabilities. No other community understands better what it takes to recover from disabilities. Send Me Your Children will include popular songs and classical music that represent its twin themes such as Hard Times Come Around No More, Let It Be, Ode to Joy, We Are the World, We Are the Children, Amazing Grace, True Colors and more. In addition, there will be Israeli, Palestinian and Ukrainian songs of healing and hope.

A ten-minute film of the concert will be created by acclaimed documentarian Alice Stone. Alice has worked with such renowned directors as Academy Award winner Jonathon Demme (Silence of the Lambs), Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet (Homicide) and Susan Seidelman (She-Devil starring Meryl Streep). Her own films included When We Were Young, There Was A War, She Loves to Ride, and Tillie to the Rescue. Alice’s documentaries have been shown on PBS and the Discovery Channel. Alice is an honors graduate of Harvard College.

The concert will be part of Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education’s ABLE Assembly, which brings together disability educators, artists, researchers, policymakers, school administrators, program administrators, and students to share best practices, explore new research, and learn from each other. 

The concert is based on a song written by Larry Rothstein, Ed.D. co-founder and executive director of No Limits Media, a nonprofit whose mission is to show the abilities and value of people with disabilities. Kai Levin, a 15-year-old student with autism at the Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education, has composed the music to accompany the lyrics and will perform the song at the concert.

The lyrics are:

SEND ME YOUR CHILDREN

Send me your children I will try to keep them from harm,

Send me your children I will enfold them in my arms,

Send me your daughters,

And send me your sons,

And I will try to keep them from the slaughter of the guns.

Send me your children, I will hide them away,

Send me your children, I will let them out when it’s safe to play,

Send me your daughters

And send me your sons,

And I will try to keep them from the slaughter of the guns.

There is madness on the land,

Nobody really understands the pain of the parents,

The anguish of their friends,

When will it stop?

When will it end?

So, send me your children I will teach them wrong from right,

Send me your children, I will tuck them in at night,

Send me your precious daughters,

And send me your beloved sons,

And I will try to keep them,

We all must try to keep them,

From the slaughter of the guns.