Yashfe, 31, believes that education should not be the province of nonprofit organizations. "A few years ago I preferred to say no to a half-million shekel grant because I didn't want to operate as an association. Teachers need to make a living too," he says.
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Yashfe admits that he was a fat, angry child. "I didn't communicate," he says, "not at home, not at school and not with friends."

His life began to change when he received a video camera as a present at the age of 15. Yashfe and his camera became inseparable. "I could tell the camera anything. It embraced me. For years I documented my life and talked to everybody through it. That ability to communicate through the screen changed all my relationships."

At school he became "the kid with the camera." His videos brought him the esteem he had been missing all those years as the "problem kid."

As his skills developed, Yashfe began creating and editing home movies. People would bring him their raw footage and he would return it to them as a movie, together with his analysis of the images he had edited. During this period he began creating a curriculum for at-risk teenagers as well as teens with disabilities that he called "advanced communications."

In 2000 a Jerusalem school for children with developmental disabilities gave Yashfe his first chance, inviting him to conduct a short workshop for the kids. Yashfe immediately bought three used video cameras and went to the school.

"It was beautiful," he recalls with evident excitement even years later. "They made wonderful movies based on their dreams. Nobody would have thought they were a different population. It's hard to power they got from that workshop."

Yashfe worked out of a Jerusalem studio for eight years, developing his vision. He began to train coaches to lead workshops in which children learn to overcome their communication difficulties with the help of a video camera.

Six months ago he opened Re'iya ("vision" or "sight"). Located in a renovated building in the heart of Tel Aviv, Re'iya has two classrooms, an editing room and a lounge. People, most notably ordinary teachers but also young graduates of his workshops who want to become coaches themselves, come from all over Israel to learn his method of using the video camera as a tool for teaching communication.

In addition to training coaches Re'iya also conducts standalone four-hour workshops for groups, whether of teachers, children or even business people.

"They come to experience a group dynamic, to express and to empower themselves through making a movie," Yashfe says. It also works for children. "We can bring in a group of say 80 kids. We split them into groups. They write scripts, act in their movies, watch them and then discuss the results."

The videos that the children (or adults) create are fundamentally for their own use. They film images that express their feelings. His idea therefore can apply to anybody, child, teen or adult, and it isn't even only for the communication-impaired. That said, one key target population is alienated, at-risk teens who have difficulty communicating.

In just a short time Yashfe and his school became the talk of the education system, and requests began to stream in from all over.

Yashfe emphasizes that the idea is not to get the communication-impaired to talk to the camera. The idea is for participants to create movies that represent what they feel. Then, through watching the film and then discussing it they learn to get in touch with and to describe their feelings. They learn, in short, to communicate.

One child, Yashfe says by way of example, was having difficulty coping with the divorce of his parents. He filmed their bed, with only one person sleeping in it, and added sad background music. The young filmmaker then viewed the resultant clip in order to contend with his experience and to thus become able to talk about it, Yashfe says. Through talking about the movie, the students can talk about his feelings.

The workshop taught in schools or community centers is a year-long course, in which the young participants meet with the coach once a week. "It's a process," explains Yashfe. An educational or psychological counselor from the school is involved with the course.

About 400 students a year attend the workshops through their schools, community centers and so on. "Every day more schools phone, asking for workshops," Yashfe says. "I don't have enough teachers to supply the demand."

Yashfe intends to invest the $100,000 in further renovations to the school and to marketing. He expects to achieve a turnover of NIS 2 million in 2009.