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by Phyllis Bernstein
Those who know me know about my efforts to create a shared society of Jews and Arabs in Israel. People have asked me why I am involved in this work. It’s because the idea of “loving the stranger among us” is mentioned no fewer than 36 times throughout the Torah. These are my Jewish values.
The promise that Israel would be a “light unto the nations” is one of the state’s fundamental principles. Through its Global Connections department, Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest is actively working to create a shared society in Israel. I am thrilled to highlight some of Federation’s many efforts to achieve social justice within Israel’s more challenging communities.
Project Atzmaut (Project Independence) in Rishon LeZion was started and continues to be supported by our Federation, and has become a model for similar initiatives throughout Israel. This program integrates Ethiopian Jews into mainstream Israeli society, with a unique focus on helping the whole family assimilate into their new environment — providing assistance for adults to gain employment, education for children, and counseling to help support entire families.
The story of mass Ethiopian Aliyah to Israel is a moving and dramatic one – from Operation Moses, which aided the arrival of almost 8,000 Jews in 1984, to Operation Solomon in 1991, which rescued approximately 14,500 Ethiopian Jews by air. After 30 years, we are still working to ensure that their absorption and integration into the Israeli community is successful.
Our Federation’s relationship with Rishon LeZion began years ago. In 1977, Prime Minister Menachem Begin began an urban renewal program throughout Israel’s lower-income neighborhoods and cities. At the time, United Jewish Federation of MetroWest was paired with the struggling neighborhood of Ramat Eliyahu, one of the older areas of Rishon LeZion. The Matnas (community center) of the new neighborhood of Neve Eliyahu was established in 1978. I have visited this Matnas several times and heard much talk about how our Federation played a major hand in bringing innovative, future-oriented, and successful projects to the community. Project Atzmaut is one of those initiatives.
Project Atzmaut is a completely Ethiopian-led program that has serviced hundreds of local families with vocational training, education, and family management aid. Its broad and insightful Homework at Home program, for instance, works with families to help them understand the importance of homework and after-school studying, a challenge within a population where many parents did not receive any type of formal education in their rural agricultural villages in Ethiopia. I’m proud that our Federation is an unequivocal part of the engine that drives these efforts, providing equal opportunities to those in need and giving thousands of Israelis a path to a brighter future.
I serve as co-chair of economic development of the Social Venture Fund for Jewish-Arab Equality and Shared Society (SVF) and I love, love, love it! The SVF was launched in 2007 to strengthen and coordinate the Jewish community’s efforts to address the unmet needs of Israel’s Arab citizens. Our Federation has been involved for about seven years.
The SVF, now a part of the Jewish Funders Network, brings together 20 Federations, foundations, and individual philanthropists to make strategic financial investments in non-profit groups that focus on social change to promote equality and shared society in Israel. To date, the SVF has allocated more than $8 million towards programs in the areas of education and economic development, with a particular focus on Arab women’s empowerment and capacity building.
The SVF funds strategic initiatives in Israel that: (1) build mutual respect and understanding between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel; (2) increase opportunities for Israel’s Arab citizens to share equally in the social, educational, and economic life of the country; and (3) promote structural and institutional reforms that support the vision of Israel as a shared society that benefits all of its citizens. Most important, the SVF is committed to a State of Israel based on the values of freedom, justice, and peace.
As women, we know how important education is for our children’s future. A group of Jewish and Arab parents from Be’er Sheva, who share a vision of a just society where Jews and Arabs can live together in cooperation, trust, and understanding, founded the Hagar Association in 2006. The Hagar School is the newest integrated bilingual Jewish-Arab school in Israel and the only one in the Negev, providing daycare, pre-K, kindergarten, and elementary school through grade 6.
The Hagar School was started to create a bilingual, multicultural education program and includes an educational institute and a community outreach center. It was founded in cooperation with Hand in Hand: Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel, which has been implementing its model of bilingual education for the past nine years in six schools in different parts of Israel. The parents who founded this school decided to be the change they wanted to see in society. Hagar today has two teachers in every classroom, one Jewish and one Arab, co-teaching a mixed class of Jewish and Arab students. They teach in their respective languages with a progressive curriculum that exceeds the standards of Israel’s Ministry of Education. In addition, community members get together to form bonds throughout the program.
I have visited this school and a few other Hand in Hand schools on various trips to Israel. This education model is terrific. People really do connect to one another and learn both Hebrew and Arabic. In my opinion it is the best elementary school option for Arab Bedouins in the South, who are among the poorest and least educated in Israel. The school expands on a yearly basis and aims to become a full K-12 school in the future. I am excited about its expansion and I hope more schools adopt this model. Currently only 1,500 children are in bilingual education, out of approximately 1.5 million students in Israeli schools. Hagar is not meant to be its own world, but an example for others.
This February, the Women’s Philanthropy National Heart to Heart Mission visited the Al Arz Tahini Factory, which is owned by Julia Zaher and employs several Christian Arab women with disabilities, a demographic that has a very low rate of workforce participation due to social stigma and lack of access to services, education, and employment. To develop services and models for advancing the rights of people with disabilities in the Arab community, the tahini factory received a grant through one of our partner agencies, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Israel’s Division for Disabilities and Rehabilitation. In 2011, backed by an executive board of prominent Arab business leaders, this special employment project became funded through The Masira (Journey) Fund, which works to improve the lives of adults with disabilities in Israel’s Arab communities by establishing infrastructures that maintain and promote programs for the disabled.
GMW Mission chair Debby Brafman described the plant as beautiful, clean, welcoming, and warm. “The woman and her middle-aged children running the factory wanted us to see it,” she said. “We toured the factory, we ate lunch together, and we felt like one big family with no difference between Jew and Arab.” Debby described the visit as “the high point of her trip.”
If you want to help support or become involved in these and other initiatives, please contact me at (908) 232-3785 or phyllisb756@gmail.com, or contact Sandy Green, Global Connections Director, at (973) 929-3070 or SGreen@jfedgmw.