USC Reporting on Israel
The next American Idol
By Diane Winston
http://reporting-on-israel.tumblr.com/post/3863692922/the-next-american-idol
By Diane Winston
Like most almost 14-year-olds, Rivka Bayene has big dreams.
“I’m going to America, I’m going to sing, I’m going to be on ‘American Idol,’” she told a
roomful of guests at Kedma School, her home away from home in Jerusalem’s south central
Katamon neighborhood.
Katamon looks similar to LA’s South Central neighborhood. Houses are neat but need a fresh
coat of paint, grass pokes out from cracks in the sidewalks and trash chokes weeds in large,
empty lots. Katamon also is home to the city’s people of color, and Kedma School is a safe
haven for black and brown Jews.
Rivka’s parents immigrated to Israel when she was a year old. Her father wanted her to have a
better life than the one awaiting her in Addis Ababa. But when she started school, Rivka learned
it was hard to be different in Israel. Between 90,000 and 120,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel. In
the 1980s, the Israeli government mounted “rescue” operations to bring home these “lost” and
“forgotten” African Jews. But many Ethiopians say they have faced discrimination, if not
outright racism, in their new country.
“People didn’t want to be close,” Rivka said, describing life at her old school.
Happily, things are different at Kedma where the faculty works to create a loving and supportive
atmosphere. The only school of its kind in the city, it welcomes children who have had difficulty
fitting into public schools. Rivka said she was relieved to find people at Kedma who looked like
her, and teachers who wanted to hug her. But she says the journey is not over. She’s planning to
be the next Rihanna and she expects she will need to move to the US if she wants to succeed bigtime.
“In America, they have many black people,” she told us, adding with a sly smile, “It’s going to
be good.”
Educational inequality divides Israeli Jews
by Sharis Delgadillo
http://reporting-on-israel.tumblr.com/post/3862048791/educational-inequality-divides-israelijews
Aside from Israel’s ongoing conflict with its Palestinian and Arab neighbors, it must also deal
with the internal complexities that exist in most modern societies, like immigration and racial
discrimination.
An example of this can be seen inside the immigrant and impoverished neighborhood of
Katamonim of Jerusalem. There, the Kedma School serves Jewish students that come from
countries such as Ethiopia, Kurdistan, Morocco, Yemen, and Iraq – called Mizrahi Jews.
Kedma’s mission is to combat the educational inequality these students face at other schools
where the dominant population of students are Jews of Eastern European descent – called
Ashkenazi Jews. It’s a small school for 160 seventh to 12th graders. Many of these Mizrahi
students were unpopular at their previous schools. Some say they weren’t accepted socially, seen
as outsiders by their classmates and troublemakers by their instructors.
The Kedma School provides smaller class sizes – two teachers for every 26- student class – than
the typical public school, which has one teacher for more than every 40 students. According to
the school’s website, only 10 percent of students from the greater Katamonia community
complete high school. Many of these students come from single parent homes and are not
encouraged to pursue professional careers in other schools.
Yardena Hamu grew up in this neighborhood and faced the same discrimination as these
students. After receiving her bachelors’ degree in art, she returned to be a mentor and teacher at
the Kedma School.
Hamu can relate to her students. She keeps them motivated as though they were her own
children. “We hug the, we kiss them, and we shout at them.”
‫מאמר קצר נוסף‬
http://reporting-on-israel.tumblr.com/post/3836183485/when-life-gives-you-lemons