They left 90 minutes later with a $5,000 check for their tutoring program.

The students, who attend the E. Alma Flagg School, are members of SCEEP of West Essex, the Suburban Cultural Educational Enrichment Program. They are tutored by high school students in programs sponsored by businesses, churches, and synagogues — including Congregation Agudath Israel of West Essex in Caldwell, which provides funding, and Temple Sholom of West Essex in Cedar Grove, which hosts the weekly sessions. (See sidebar below.)

The $5,000 gift came from Newark Now, an organization Booker began in 2002 as a city council member. Its stated mission is to empower every resident and to make each of the city’s neighborhoods livable.

Before presenting the donation, Booker stood in front of the young people in the temple’s social hall, picking handwritten questions they had placed in a basket beforehand.

With a series of gentle promises, he pledged to address their concerns, ranging from drugs and violence in their neighborhoods to stray dogs in their streets.

The mayor spoke of one of his own friends — a gang member in a housing project who was recently shot to death — as he urged the young people to reject gang culture.

When one boy seated in the front row made hand gestures that Booker perceived as gang signals, the mayor singled him out. “I’ve got a vocabulary word for you,” he said. “Hesed. You know what that means?”

The student shrugged.

“It means kindness,” said Booker, an African-American Baptist who nonetheless served as president of a Jewish society while a student at Oxford University in England. “The Hebrews had that word for kindness. It means divinity in your core. Everybody, I believe, has divinity in their core. But the problem is all of our behavior does not reflect who we are.

“I believe when we flash gang signs, we don’t reflect who we truly are. You always have to return to your core — to your hesed, your love, your kindness. Life is about finding out who you really are.”

“What is Heber?” asked another student.

“I don’t know what Heber is,” the mayor answered. “But Hebrew is a language, like Spanish, like Portuguese, and some of the greatest philosophers of all time were well-versed in Hebrew. People like Maimonides. He was one of the first pluralistic thinkers of all times. He saw the beauty in other faiths.”

Then Booker turned to the youngsters and doled out advice.

“Never give up on your dreams,” he said. “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever.”

“I’ve got a question,” said one girl.

“I’ve got enough questions here,” joked the mayor, gesturing at the basket. “I want to know your dream.”

“I want to become a doctor, a designer, a chef, and a mom,” she replied.

“You can do all of those things,” he assured her. “But I can’t do all of those things. I can never be a mother.”

Calling on the young people to make “real decisions” about their lives, Booker told them that “a real decision means to cut off any other options but to succeed.”

Citing Harriet Tubman, the freed slave who led some 300 others on the Underground Railroad to freedom in the North, Booker said that “she made real decisions. When she was traveling north with escaped slaves and some of them wanted to turn around and go back home, you know what she would do? She would pull out her Colt .45 revolver, stick it in their faces, and say, ‘You’ve got to decide: Live free or die.’”

“This world so desperately needs real leaders,” he told them. “It needs people to stand up and say, ‘The world as it is now is unacceptable. I’m going to change it. I am going to make a difference with my life.’ And the best way to make a difference is by doing something yourself, about yourself.” Getting the best education you can “is the very definition of excellence.”

Booker then asked for a chair, saying he had a “math problem.” He summoned two high school student tutors to stand on it, one after the other.

“There were three frogs sitting on a log. If one of those frogs decides to jump off, how many are left?” he asked.

Each answered “two.”

“Wrong,” said Booker.

But when he called on a fifth-grader, Michelle Rojas, to stand on the chair, and then repeated the words “decides to jump” with great emphasis, she gave the correct answer. “Three.”

The audience applauded and Booker presented her with an envelope containing the $5,000 check.

“The gift will enable us to run our program next year,” said Alison Frost of North Caldwell, an Agudath Israel member who cochairs the after-school program. “Everything we do — not only from a volunteer standpoint but from a space standpoint, is donated. Supplies, curriculum, everything. We have no board. We have no nothing.”

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