Ethiopian Israelis take their education - and fate - into their own hands
Having Amharic-Hebrew speakers mediate between
Ethiopian students, their parents and school faculty boosts educational
achievement, reduces culture clashes and prejudice and revives
self-belief in the Israeli-Ethiopian community.
The
Fidel Association,
one of the first Ethiopian-led NGOs in Israel, just celebrated its 15th
anniversary. Fidel, which means “alphabet” in Amharic, was the
brainchild of Dr. Nigist Mengesha, who reached Israel in 1984 with four
children and a social work degree. Mengesha believed that if the next
generation’s experience was going to be any different from that of her
own, Ethiopian immigrants would need to help themselves.
(Full
disclosure: I am the Israel program director for the Moriah Fund which
has supported Fidel from day one, and direct an NGO, the Israel
Association for Educational Innovation (ICEI), which partners with
Fidel.)
While
working at Shatil, the technical support organization for NGOs,
Mengesha was recruited to the Mandel Leadership Institute, a program to
transform midcareer professionals into educational leaders. Despite the
fact that seven years had passed between Operation Moses and Operation
Solomon in 1991, Mengesha believed that Israel’s school system had
learned little about addressing the needs of Ethiopian children, an
intuition reinforced by her informal survey of Ethiopian parents at
temporary caravan camps. She became convinced that education was the top
priority for the new immigrants, and that special education was being
used as a dumping ground for Ethiopian children whom the school system
did not know how to serve.
As
her final project at Mandel, Mengesha tried to re-envision the role of
the school-based megasher (from the Hebrew, to bridge), a liaison who
functioned primarily as an Amharic-Hebrew translator. In Mengesha’s
view, the megasher would instead mediate between three groups: the
Ethiopian students, their parents and school faculty. They could provide
on-site emotional support for Ethiopian students, boosting their
self-image and confidence, and help each party navigate the mutually
misconstrued Ethiopian and Israeli cultural codes.
The
misunderstandings were many, and they fostered bad feelings and bad
policy. School faculty, for example, were ignorant of the strict rules
dictating Ethiopian children’s interactions with adults; in
conversation, Ethiopian children are taught to face down rather than
look adults in the eye, to answer when spoken to but not to initiate
exchanges, and to respond in a soft voice, all out of respect to their
elders. Teachers and principals routinely misinterpreted these behaviors
as reluctance to engage, disrespect or stupidity.
Equally
baffling to educators was the disappearance of children for several
days as their families attended funerals or weddings of even distant
relatives. Megashrim help faculty understand that absence from such
events leads to extreme social ostracism within the Ethiopian community,
and helps parents grasp the need to notify the school in advance, so
that children can make up missed instruction.
Another
example involves children's names. Very young Ethiopian children are
called by a different name by each adult member of their family: Mom
might call you Shoshana, while Dad calls you Esther, and your
grandmother calls you Talia. Children who were asked their names ("How
are you called?" in Hebrew) sometimes did not know which name to give,
and were then referred for special education. Had the question been
framed differently - What does your father call you? What does your
mother call you? What does your grandmother call you? - the children
could have rattled off a list of monikers used by specific relatives.
Mengesha
was encouraged to think big by two "mentors": Ariel Landau, the vice
president of Elbit, who read an interview with Mengesha in Haaretz and
insisted on helping her found her own NGO, and Mary Ann Stein, president
of the Moriah Fund, who believed in Mengesha’s idea and provided the
seed money for the new organization.
When
the new megashrim training program was launched at Beit Berl, nobody
was sure enough qualified Ethiopian candidates – they needed at least a
high school diploma – could be found. When the time came, Landau, lawyer
Miki Safra and businessman Nochi Dankner joined Mengesha to interview
the 70 applicants, 30 of whom were accepted.
To
date, Fidel has trained 144 megashrim, more than 80 percent of whom
remain involved in the field. The importance of their role was
eventually recognized by the government, and the majority of megashrim
now working in schools are employed by the Education Ministry through a
steering committee.
The
training program has also spurred higher education; graduates earned a
full year’s credit at Israeli colleges and universities, and Fidel
arranged for scholarships to continue their studies. Most megashrim have
at least a bachelor's degree. While prejudice has not disappeared,
megashrim have dramatically affected the expectations between school
faculty and Ethiopian parents.
Fidel
has also scored some big wins on the advocacy front, notably the
requirement to have an Amharic-speaking megasher or social worker
present at all special education placement hearings for Ethiopian
pupils, so parents can understand the proceedings. Parents also learned
that they don't have to allow their children to be assessed. While the
initial crisis was largely resolved, as the number of Ethiopian children
referred to special education dropped dramatically, a new challenge
arose for megashrim, if on a smaller scale: some Ethiopian kids who need
special education don’t get it because their parents are so suspicious
they refuse to allow them to be assessed.
Seven years ago, Fidel led the fight to re-open the
Hadarim School
in the isolated neighborhood of Kiryat Moshe in Rehovot and the school,
renamed for Ethiopian Jewish leader Yona Bogale is considered a
success, and an example to Ethiopian activists about their capacity to
influence policy.
At
the fifteenth anniversary celebration, Mengesha recalled desperate
attempts to get the Education Ministry's attention and marveled at the
roster of speakers, which included former Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin
and recently retired Air Force Maj. Gen. and former head of Israel
Defense Forces Military Intelligence, Amos Yadlin – one of several
pilots so affected by taking part in an Ethiopian airlift that he joined
Fidel’s board. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a video-taped
message.
Mengesha
herself went on to earn a PhD, and to be the first head of the
Ethiopian National Project, a large scale joint venture between the
North American Jewry and the Israeli government. But she lamented that
her initial prediction – that Fidel would help solve the community's
educational problems within a decade – has not proven accurate.
The
community’s needs have diversified; new immigrants are arriving, many
of whom are illiterate, but there are also young parents who were
educated largely in Israel who have completed army service and college
degrees. Alongside numerous individual success stories are the symptoms
of incomplete integration, including high dropout rates and a disturbing
gap between Ethiopian students and their non-Ethiopian peers. Anyone
trying to close these gaps must find a way to inculcate a culture of
literacy and expectation early, and raise achievement levels to them a
fighting chance in competitive, high-tech Israel.
As
other agencies were charged with supervising megashrim, Fidel refocused
on empowering young people and parents through youth centers and
leadership programs. They have also partnered with my own organization,
ICEI, in a turnaround program for underachieving elementary schools with
high concentrations of Ethiopian students. They are also considering
training a new cadre of megashrim, focusing on parents' empowerment
within schools.
Fidel
is now led by Michal Avera Samuel, who also arrived in Operation Moses
as a nine-year-old village girl who had spent a full year in Sudan.
Samuel was separated from her family at age 10 - to her regret she was
sent to boarding school as part of a blanket policy applied to Ethiopian
immigrant children - and went on to earn a master's in guidance
counseling. After confounding visitors as a delegate to the Israel
pavilion at Epcot for a year (“They couldn’t understand that I was a
black Jew”), Samuel joined Fidel, providing guidance and support to
megashrim in the field. In 2011, she was named the fourth director of
Fidel, embodying Mengesha’s dream that the next generation would help
the community take its educational fate into its own hands.
