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April 23, 2004/Iyar 2 5764, Vol. 56, No. 31
Young man travels the world
BETH OLSON
Staff Writer
In the last year, Zachary Snader has traveled on peer trips to Washington, D.C., England, France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland - and he's only 12 years old.
Zachary, a straight-A student at Cocopah Middle School in Scottsdale, was selected to participate in the People to People Student Ambassador Program last summer. As a U.S. am-bassador, he traveled to France and England, visiting such sights as Oxford, Eton College, the Louvre, Buckingham Palace, and his favorite, the London Eye.
"It's the biggest Ferris wheel in the world and you can see 25 miles out," he recalls.
Within days of returning from Europe, Zachary headed off to Washington for the Junior National Youth Leadership Conference. For a week, the participants visited sites, studied government and politics and attended a camaraderie training course.
Zachary's family met him in Washington at the end of the conference and they spent two weeks touring the nation's capital, visiting every Smithsonian museum, as well as the new International Spy Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In March, Zachary partici-pated in a school trip to Germany, including visits to concentration camps.
"It was pretty gruesome. Dachau was huge. It was scary. They had all the crematoriums and you could go in them and you could see the small bunks," he recalls.
Included in the tour were visits to Austria, Italy and Switzerland, where Zachary says the participants were impressed with the snow.
"In Switzerland we went to a hotel in Lucerne and we kept throwing snowballs through-out the rooms," he laughs.
Zachary also enjoys doing community service work. He works in the Peer Integra- tion program at Cocopah, attending art class each day with the disabled students at the school and assisting them with their art projects. Additionally, Zachary will work for Habitat for Humanity this summer, building homes for families who need housing, as his mitzvah project for his October bar mitzvah.
Zachary enjoys playing competitive football and likes to skateboard and play basketball in his spare time.
He lives in Scottsdale with his mother, Lynne Os-treicher, stepfather, Rick Turkian, and two brothers, Robbie, 9, and Asher, 11. The family is affiliated with Temple Chai. Zachary's father, Howard Snader, resides in Phoenix.
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