Shalem Students Awarded Schusterman Grant for Innovative Community-Service Initiative
Two Shalem students have received a Make It Happen grant from the Schusterman Philanthropic Network, awarded to enterprising young Jews around the world who seek to create innovative Jewish experiences for themselves and their communities.
Hadas Yedidovitch and Yitzhak Mor proposed the creation of an educational program for the benefit of maintenance workers at Kiryat Moriah, the Jewish Agency complex that is home to Shalem College, as well as numerous initiatives aimed at facilitating dialogue between Israelis and Diaspora Jews. These workers—most of whom are new immigrants from Ethiopia and South-American countries—know little if any Hebrew, and struggle to navigate their new culture. By offering them Hebrew-language courses and skills-building workshops, explained Hadas, the “Kiria Ne’emana” (Faithful City) program “will aim to boost these workers’ self-esteem and heighten their sense of belonging to their immediate environment.” This will be, she hopes, “the first step in their developing a real sense of having a stake in Israeli society. We’re thrilled that the Schusterman Foundation is supporting our effort to make Jewish values a reality on the grounds of Shalem’s campus.”
“Kiria Ne’emana” is an outgrowth of the Campus Justice project, a joint venture of Shalem College and the Jewish Agency for Israel that implements initiatives to improve the Jerusalem neighborhood of which Shalem is a part. Examples of programs in which more than a dozen Shalem students currently participate are a “time bank” that teaches families the time- and budget-management skills necessary to avoid debt and poverty, and cultural programming designed to provide low-income families with the means to expose their children to music and the arts. Alan Hoffman, Director General of the Agency, expressed his enthusiasm for Shalem’s insistence on “making involvement with one’s community an educational priority. If the public thought that academia was synonymous with civic indifference and detachment, the Campus Justice initiative at Kiryat Moriah, which the Jewish Agency is proud to run jointly with Shalem College, demonstrates that there is an educational model that can foster a passionate and purposeful sense of civic responsibility.”
Three months in the making, “Kiria Ne’emana” was conceived during the first semester’s “incubator period,” in which “students assessed the needs of the community, and learned not only what the problems are, but also how they could address them at their roots,” said Stephen Hazan Arnoff, Director of Culture, Community, and Student Life at Shalem. “That means, in many cases, taking on projects that have less of a ‘wow’ factor, but which are in fact laying the groundwork for change on a large scale. We expect,” Hazan Arnoff concludes, “that this grant will not only have a positive impact on the lives of the individuals who work here at Kiryat Moriah, but will provide the students who have spearheaded the project important experience in developing a visionary approach to leadership and service.”
