Five years ago this week, a handful of Sephardic Jews assembled at a midtown law office to lay the groundwork for a visionary program aimed at bridging the social, economic and cultural gaps between Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Israel. They have since provided more than 2,600 scholarships to needy students of Sephardic background, and embarked on a far-sighted self-help campaign by which students from disadvantaged neighborhoods extend their own contributions to communities like the ones from which they came.
The birth of the International Sephardic Education Foundation (ISEF) was, according to Nina Weiner, its founder and president, a response to a long standing imbalance between Ashkenazim and Sephardim that was preventing a large segment of Israel’s population from achieving their full potential in contributing to Israeli life.
For years, Weiner said, in an interview at the same Manhattan low office where the organization was founded, the Zionist community in Israel and abroad had avoided addressing the problem of Sephardic Jewry in the Jewish state. “Because Israel was so besieged and beleaguered with all the wars, it really couldn’t focus on, or even talk about the social problems,” Weiner said. “But the time has come where it’s there and we have to start doing something about it,”
Weiner, who was born in Egypt to a third-generation Israeli mother of Sephardic origin, and an Ashkenazi father, emigrated as a teenager to the United States following a two year stay in Israel and completion of a degree in psychology. She has worked in this country as a vocational counselor both within and outside the Jewish community, has served for the past four years as alternate representative of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) to the United Nations.
SCHOLARSHIPS PROVIDED
Having undertaken to address the problems of Sephardic Jewry in Israel, Weiner decided that Israel’s ethnic imbalance could best be corrected by upgrading the educational level of its Sephardic citizens, who, she noted, represent only 16 percent of the total university student body in that country, even though they comprise well over half of Israel’s population. Following consultations in 1977 with a number of Sephardic Israeli leaders, including Yitzhak Navon, then a member of Knesset and now President of Israel, it was agreed that such on effort would be most effective at the university level, since higher education could provide the Sephardic community with a capable leadership that might, in turn, offer positive role models for Israel’s younger Sephardic population, and eventually help to correct ethnic imbalance in other spheres, such as housing and unemployment.
When the twenty founding members of ISEF met that year to create the new organization, their goals did not extend beyond the raising of funds to finance education for a select number of potential university students. But a year after the foundation’s program had gone into effect – with 400 scholarships distributed through Israel’s six universities, as well as academic institutions abroad – it become apparent that scholarships by themselves would not eliminate the obstacles confronting many of Israel’s Sephardic students.
Although financial distress has undoubtedly contributed to the high drop-out rate among Sephardic students – 92 percent according to figures provided by ISEF – other factors related to circumstances common to a majority of these students were causing some of the scholarship recipients to abandon their studies, despite ISEF’s declared commitment to providing financial support for the duration of each student’s academic program.
SUSTAINING SERVICES
One such factor, according to Weiner, was the feeling of frustration and self-doubt that was experienced by students who were unaccustomed to dealing with complex bureaucracies of the kind they encountered in university administration. “If a typical Israeli student has to go to the any. It’s very easy to make up on exam,” Weiner said. “There’s a rule. It’s clear.” But, she added, “when he has to go and say that one of his seven brothers is in trouble, or the father died, or one of these family problems, he becomes discouraged to go back and start explaining the problem.”
In view of this, ISEF expanded its assistance to the scholarship recipients by providing a network of sustaining services, including the maintenance at each university of at least two “mekashrim” -liaison students who serve as ombudsmen of sorts between their peers at the institution and the university administration. ISEF has also undertaken to allocate a fraction of its shoestring budget to helping the universities maintain staff counselors and tutorial services. In Haifa University, the foundation now maintains a full-time worker to head a special ISEF section within that institution’s “Unit for Bridging the Gap” – a campus service aimed at assisting Sephardic students of disadvantaged backgrounds with academic as well as personal problems.
The network of sustaining services, says Weiner, is designed to see the students through from beginning to end, “to follow them through the year so that they don’t fall. Whenever they are about to fall, someone is there to help them pass through that moment.”
As testimony to ISEF’s success in that respect, Weiner pointed out that its scholarship students boost a substantially lower drop-out rate than that of Israel’s total Sephardic university student population.
WORKING IN COMMUNITIES
The sustaining services, however, represent only one direction for ISEF. During the last couple of years, the foundation has also participated in community work programs, offering its finances as well as the volunteer services of nearly half of its scholarship recipients, to youngsters in disadvantaged, predominantly Sephardic communities.
The most ambitious of its undertakings in this field is ISEF’s participation in the Open Apartment Project at Ben Gurion University. The Foundation now sponsors ten apartments in slum neighborhoods located near the campus, which have been renovated and occupied by ISEF scholarship recipients who use the apartments as both dormitories and community centers in which youngsters, frequently from large families in overcrowded tenements, find an atmosphere conducive to schoolwork or, at other times, to cultural activities with their peers. In addition, residents of the open apartment attempt to enhance the quality of life in their neighborhoods with such projects as day-care centers, adult education, cultural evenings, clean-up campaigns “bootstrap” neighborhood committees and an informal kind of social work that reaches out to members of street gongs and juvenile offenders in an at. tempt to restore them to the fold of society. Weiner, whose, studies in child psychology included volunteer work with children at the transition comps in southern France established in the 1950’s for Moroccan Jews en-route to Israel, explained the Open Apartment Project as one feature of a program to provide deprived Sephardic youngsters with role models from among their peers. “We try to have them see an older peer from the same background that succeeded, and say ‘If he can do it, so can I,” Weiner said. “That sort of thinking is very, very important.”
STUDENTS HELP YOUNGER SEPHARDI
With this aim in mind, ISEF students at Bar lion University have participated in a nationwide program called “Perah” – an equivalent of the “Big Brother” project in this country. Scholarship recipients provide high school students with tutoring, and with companionship on a one-to-one basis, all the while serving as role models and indirectly involving the developing communities in university life.
Just as ISEF students serve as living examples to youngsters from similar disadvantaged communities of what they might achieve, so ISEF’s Advisory Academic Committee, composed primarily of Sephardic professors drawn from all the Israeli universities to assist the foundation with its planning, provides role models for the ISEF students, some of whom have already achieved post graduate degrees and joined the faculties of Israeli universities.
Magnifying ISEF’s achievements many times over is the modest style of its operation, directed with a frugal budget that consists exclusively of administrative and only three percent of which is spent on administrative costs, including a full-time coordinator in Israel. Having raised over a million dollars for scholarships, the foundation has remained a kind of “mom and pop” setup, that draws its volunteer staff and patrons primarily through community contacts in Brooklyn and Manhattan No attempt has been made to plug in to other larger Jewish philanthropic organizations.
Weiner, who calls herself a “volunteer executive, directs the foundation from her home in New York. Legal aid is provided on a volunteer basis by her husband’s law firm – the company which hosted ISEF’s initial meeting five years ago. Amnon Giniger, director of the firm’s associate office in Israel, manages the distribution of ISEF scholarships on a volunteer basis. Similarly, accounting services are provided gratis by a sympathetic firm.
ISEF has also remained decidedly non-political and, according to Weiner, has abstained from dogmatic accusations or demands for immediate panaceas to the problem of Israel’s cultural gap.
Looking toward the future, Weiner, who travels to Israel each year to oversee the foundation’s programs, envisions a bridging of Israel’s Ashkenazic-Sephardic gap through systematic efforts at unearthing the roots of the current ethnic imbalance. “I would like to have more research on the problem of the gap,” Weiner said. “I would like to be able more and more to get at the real facts, the real numbers, and to see in a concrete way how we can help to solve these problems. I have a vision for twenty years to come.”
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