Behind the Headlines: Comparing Notes on Troubled Youth, U.S. Official. Praises Israeli Model

Seeking ideas and guidance on how to deal with troubled youth in America, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala spent Thanksgiving at this Israeli youth village near Haifa.

Shalala said her visit to the Yemin Orde Youth Village in the Carmel was in recognition of the success and effectiveness of the village, which is part of the Jewish Agency’s youth aliyah system of boarding schools for immigrants and poor and troubled Israelis.

The village is home to 500 youth from Ethiopia, the former Soviet Union and 15 other countries.

“The model is very famous,” said Shalala, during her two-hour stop here, where she ate Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry sauce prepared especially in her honor.

The village is “a stop for everyone in the States interested” in children, education and the family, she said.

Shalala’s visit follows a trip to the United States earlier this year by some of Yemin Orde’s Ethiopian residents. It also follows testimony in Washington by the village’s director, Haim Peri, before a House of Representatives subcommittee on education.

Peri welcomed Shalala to the village with a summary of Yemin Orde’s guiding philosophies. “Our kids have one thing in common,” he said, “too many separations and too many disappointments.”

But “this is not another temporary experience,” Peri said. The children know “this is a haven for the rest of their lives. They come and go until they are under the wedding canopy,” the same as children do with their biological parents, he said.

Shalala later said this “continuity” was what struck her most about the village.

The idea of “`sink or swim’ is not good practice, even for world-class swimmers,” she said. “What’s important is putting our arms around young people and holding on, whether or not it is in an institutional setting.”

Peri told Shalala that the village’s other principal commitment is to nurture the cultural background of each student.

This, he said, was learned from the “lessons of atrocities” in decades past, where the emphasis on a “melting pot” in Israel led to a costly denial of richly diverse immigrant heritages.

“We go a long way to learn about the past culture of every child,” said Peri, adding that it is impossible to build a future without an anchor in the past.

While there is no official U.S. plan to adopt the Yemin Orde mode, its “insight and genius” can serve as the basis for an adaptation of programs for troubled youth in the United States, according to Peter Edelman, a counselor to Shalala who accompanies her too Israel.

“It is a wonderful program,” but “It is not easily replicated,” he said of Yemin Orde.

For one thing, he said, “there is a uniqueness of leadership here,” he said. Secondly, “you can’t take the kinds of problems we have in the United States and use residential solutions on a large scale” because of the enormous resources and expertise required.

“Taking kids out of their environment, away from their families, is very difficult to do well and, as history demonstrates, all too easy to do badly,” said Edelman.

“Our experiences with orphanages was terrible and we transitioned out of that,” added Shalala. She also said that the boarding schools for Native Americans that were run until very recently “didn’t do well,” especially when it came to maintaining links to the youths’ culture.

Although Yemin Orde may not be adopted as a model on the federal level, the village in finding adherents in local U.S. communities.

Peri said he is serving as an adviser to a private foundation in Philadelphia that plans to build a youth village based on the model of Yemin Orde. He also said the municipality of Detroit has informed him that it plans to adopt the model in its development of residential youth programs.

Meanwhile, Igor Schneider, 18, an immigrant from Latvia who lives at Yemin Orde, shared his own view of the village with Shalala.

“This place is my home,” said Schneider, who came to Israel in 1992 and has since converted to Judaism because his mother is not Jewish. His father followed five months ago, settling in a small community outside of Tel Aviv.

While in Israel, Shalala also met with senior staff of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Brookdale Institute to talk about children and youth at risk, health care reform, and health education programs co-sponsored by the JDC for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Shalala, who is of Lebanese descent, also visited Gaza, where she reportedly told Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat that the Americans would support his urgent call for funding by the international community of his self-rule administration.

She also received an honorary degree from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.