Research Program at Aliya Centers in Israel Receives $400,000 from U.S. Agency

A four-year research program at several youth aliya centers in Israel is being funded by the National Institutes of Health with $400,000 for the four year period, it was announced here today by Mrs. High Salpeter, chairman of Hadassah’s National Youth Aliya Committee. The aim of the program, Mrs. Salpeter told the more than 2500 delegates attending the Hadassah annual convention, will be to study the mental processes of educationally retarded youths and to determine what is required in the way of environmental enrichment and educational devices that can help improve their social integration, self-acceptance and level of functioning. This is a new investigation in the field of educational deprivation. “It has generally been assumed,” Mrs. Salpeter explained, “that the effects of early cultural deprivation are irreversible. However. Youth Aliyah’s experimental programs in Israel have shown that intelligence quotient levels of deprived children can be raised by an average of 20 points during pre-school years and about 10 points in adolescence.” Although the problems of socially deprived and educationally retarded adolescents loom ever larger in our increasingly sophisticated technological society, “only cursory attempts at reversal, based often on low expectation of success, have been made at this age level as compared with the variety of compensatory programs for younger children,” Mrs. Saltpeter said.

The U.S. grant for this project in Israel was made to Youth Aliyah because it has been involved with child rescue, rehabilitation, education and training since 1935. It maintains children’s villages and day-care centers for normal children, as well as several special institutions for the study and treatment of the culturally and/or socially deprived. Approximately 10,000 wards are educated annually–8,000 in residential settings and 2,000 in day centers. The investigation is following 300 boys and girls, 12-15 years old, half of whom will live in Ramat Hadassah Szold and Kiryat Yearim, children’s villages, and the control group will live at home and attend day centers. Each group, in turn, will be divided into deeply retarded–a knowledge of letters but no reading ability–who can add and subtract; and significantly retarded–ability to read at 2-3rd grade level, and can multiply and divide, Mrs. Salpeter stated. Some of the students will be given special enrichments in the residential and the day-care centers, others will not. Only the research staff will know what level of child is assigned to each group, so that the teacher will not be influenced in his expectation or judgment. “These children are chronologically on the threshold of adulthood but emotionally they are like crippled children with a stunted capacity to grow,” Mrs. Salpeter said.