Clown shows children that road safety is no laughing matter

As a school instructor on road safety who also performs as a clown at children's hospitals, Michael Tulkoff seeks a balance when raising awareness among children about how devastating road accidents can be.

"With younger children I tone it down, but with sixth-graders I talk about some of the injuries I see at hospitals (see box) and especially head injuries in traffic accidents," the U.S.-born Tulkoff, 46 said in an interview for National Road Safety Day, which was marked across Israel this past Tuesday.

An instructor with certification from the education and transportation ministries, Tulkoff has performed before approximately 15,000 elementary school children between the age of four and 12 in over 200 schools across Israel, mostly in Hebrew but also in English.

"I try to keep my performances fun and interactive, but with the older children I feel I need to tell them about the horrible outcomes of not being careful on the road," Tulkoff said after a recent English-language performance to third-graders at Jaffa's Tabeetha School which belongs to The Church of Scotland.

Tulkoff, who moved here from Baltimore in 2001, managed to introduce the abstract danger of ending up in the hospital into his otherwise perfectly cheerful and zany performance to the very young crowd at the Tabeetha School. In what his audience clearly regarded as one of the highlights of his 30-minute show, Tulkoff hurled around a baby doll to demonstrate the forces at play inside a car which is forced to break suddenly into a screeching halt.

Performing with his bag of magic tricks before the crowd of Arab-Israeli, American and European children, Tulkoff had a total of less than half an hour to get across several main messages, such as look before you cross, you're not as obvious to the driver as you think you are, always wear seat belts and plan your route out. In between, he shows the 40 kids sitting opposite him a good time with the dozens of shiny and flashy objects he brought with him. Judging by the gleeful screams and avid participation of nearly all the children there, it seemed to work.

"When people see me they often think I work with religious schools or something,' says Tulkoff, an Orthodox Jew who lives in Rehovot with his wife, Debbie, and their six children. "But, my sector isn't religious. It's children."

Venues like the Tabeetha School, says Tulkoff, offer a special added value. "This was a fantastic show. In some schools I will be the first guy the kids see up close and interact with who's wearing a black kipah and payot (black skull cap and side curls)," he says. "They see I don't bite and that's a good thing."

This year, the Transportation Ministry cut back funding for some educational programs by 20 percent or more in favor of what the ministry calls infrastructure projects. As a result, Tulkoff - who is paid per appearance by the ministry - receives fewer bookings to perform at schools. "The children are the ones who suffer because of this," he says.