An Israeli Arab teenager won a national contest for her illustrations of the Passover Haggadah.
Malek Sharkiyeh, a Muslim ninth-grader from Acco, took the $300 prize this week in a competition by Israel’s ORT school system for Haggadah illustrations.
“The subject of the Haggadah exhilarated me,” Sharkiyeh told Ma’ariv on Thursday. “I like to draw, and that’s why it was natural for me to take part in a drawing contest.”
Mohammed Hajuj, the principal at Sharkiyeh’s school, noted that the Exodus story appears in the Koran — albeit with some differences.
“It’s about what happened to Pharaoh in Egypt,” he said. “It isn’t a victory over the Arabs, so the students didn’t find anything in it that was against them.”
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