Aliyah aftermath: Bnei Menashe receive after-school program and job training in Upper Nazareth
Bnei Menashe students receiving homework help at Moadonit Miriam
In coordination with the Israeli Education Ministry, Shavei Israel has opened a special after-school study program for Bnei Menashe youngsters who have settled with their families in the town of Upper Nazareth. The program is called Moadonit Miriam, in honor of Shavei Israel Chairman Michael Freund’s maternal grandmother, Miriam Rosenthal. (Moadon means “club” in Hebrew and a moadonit is a “small club.”)
Fifteen to twenty Bnei Menashe children in the 1st through 6th grades are attending Moadonit Miriam 3-4 times a week, for up to three hours each day. The program is supervised by Kinneret Krispil, Shavei Israel’s coordinator for Bnei Menashe activities in Upper Nazareth.
There are several goals to the program, explains Rabbi Hanoch Avitzedek, Shavei Israel’s Director of Bnei Menashe Aliyah and Absorption. “The first is to ensure that someone will be waiting for the children when they finish school. Their parents are working very hard and can’t always be home for them. So it’s very important that they have a familiar, warm and supportive environment to come home from school to.”
A second goal is to help the newcomers with their homework. This is a problem common to nearly every immigrant group, where the parents don’t have the language skills to help their children with their studies, Rabbi Avitzedek says.
And the third goal: to have fun – through various extracurricular activities. “When I visited last week, I saw a group of boys learning how to bake a very tasty chocolate cake,” Rabbi Avitzedek says with a smile that indicates he may have sneaked a bite. “It’s very emotional to see such love and support surrounding the kids. We see what we’re doing as both social and education security.”
Upper Nazraeth now has a population of 160 Bnei Menashe (around 30 families), all of them from the group that arrived from the Indian state of Mizoram in November 2013. This was the first group of the current wave of nearly 900 Bnei Menashe immigrants who have made aliyah in the last year.
While the children are in school and attending Moadonit Miriam, their parents are receiving intensive job preparation. After completing five months of Hebrew language ulpan (which started at the Kfar Hasidim absorption center where the Bnei Menashe first landed), the new immigrants are now in a special “business language” course, where they learn career-specific terminology along with role playing (in Hebrew of course) for everything from how to pass an employment interview to succeeding on the job.
Shavei Israel is working closely with local industry leaders and the Israeli Economy Ministry to identify appropriate positions where the Bnei Menashe can find well paying jobs that will enable them to jump-start their new lives in Israel. The most promising are in hi-tech.
Bnei Menashe men are being trained to become CNC operators, running computer-controlled machines for cutting all kinds of materials, from wood to steel and plastics. For example, Pilo is an Israeli company operating from the nearby Tefen Industrial Park that is a world leader specializing in the CNC manufacture of a wide variety of hangers for bicycles. Bnei Menashe women are also heading to work at Tefen, where they are now training to build hardware components for computers and other electronic devices.
In this way, Shavei Israel is playing a critical, on-going role in the absorption of the new immigrants from India. “It’s important that the Bnei Menashe won’t study a new profession and then not find work,” Rabbi Avitzedek says. “So we are directing them to the most attractive projects.”
And with the youngest Bnei Menashe now in a caring afterschool framework, Shavei Israel clearly is covering all the bases to make sure this aliyah from India will be the most successful ever.