Family Education Workshop Outline

We are building a national network of family education centers in Israel that will use innovative holistic educational programming and in large part directed by Ethiopians. One of these programs is our educational workshops. Our ramily education centers will aid Ethiopian Jewish immigrants in their struggle to become successfully integrated Israeli citizens contributing meaningfully to Israeli society.

The Problem

Over the course of the past 30 years 120,000 Jews have immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia. The majority of the adults are illiterate in Hebrew, struggle to find work and adapt to a new society, and find themselves living in poverty. Their children often perform poorly in school. Disturbing trends toward drug use and crime are emerging in the community.

Absorption programs primarily attempt to help children and youth. These programs see the parents as “the desert generation,” and neglect them, thus rendering them unable to support their children, to impose their authority, or to act as positive role models.

In order to succeed in the larger Israeli community, many Ethiopian children feel that they must reject their parents’ traditions and their authority, thus breaking the chain of their Ethiopian Jewish cultural heritage; this often results in interfamilial and intercommunity violence and alienation between the generations. While they reject their families in order to become Israeli, they never become truly Israeli because they have lost the essential qualities that characterize Israeli society – financial, educational, and emotional support from their families. Many rootless children struggling to find their identity in a foreign society end up taking refuge in drugs and violence. Our family education centers hope to break this destructive cycle.

The Organization: The National Movement for Equal Opportunity for Ethiopian Jews in Israel (EOEJ)

In response to increasing social distress among Ethiopian Jews and the need for innovation from within the Ethiopian community itself, a group of educators and social activists came together in 2004 to form a nonprofit organization,the National Movement for Equal Opportunity for Ethiopian Jews in Israel, or EOEJ (In Hebrew, it’s called Amuta.) The movement was tasked with finding a new approach to solve Ethiopian immigrants’ social and educational problems and implementing a solution from within the Ethiopian community.

Goals for All Program Participants

To create a model of intergenerational dialogue that builds understanding of the interests and sensitivities of both children and parents.
To create a space for multigenerational cultural activities expressing various traditions from both the Israeli and Ethiopian communities.
To build community solidarity by giving people a forum to help one another.
To allow the families to develop a connection to Jewish sources in an open, value-centered atmosphere, which in turn will help the parents relay moral messages to their children
To help families formulate their Jewish Israeli-Ethiopian identity

Goals for Parents

To involve parents in their children’s academic life; to enlist community leaders to encourage parents to be involved in education.
To encourage parents to address the tradition in which they were raised, on the assumption that by doing so they will enhance their self-esteem and their esteem in the eyes of their children.
To empower the parents to strengthen or take back their lost parental authority.
To clarify the importance of acquiring Western knowledge.

The Structure of Our Educational Workshops

The Five Neighborhoods: We have already discussed this program with the leadership of four Ethiopian neighborhoods in Jerusalem: Katamon, Neve Yaacov, Kiryat Menachem-Kiryat Yovel, and Talpiot, and with the leadership in Beit Shemesh. These neighborhoods have the largest Ethiopian population in the Jerusalem – Beit Shemesh area.

The Target Population: At first, we target Ethiopian families in the five neighborhoods - the parents during the adult education sessions and their fourth- through sixth-grade children during parent-children sessions. A total of 100 families will participate in the five workshops, 20 in each workshop.

The Instructors: There will be one male and one female instructor for each workshop, which will comprise about 20 families. The instructors will be those people from the neighborhood the local leadership considers most able to teach, and because they will be chosen by the leadership they will be the most acceptable to the neighborhood population. There will be 10 instructions trained in our first course.

The Workshop Meetings – Three stages:

4 meetings – men with the male instructor and women will the female instructor. The emphasis will be on parents’ taking responsibility and authority for their children’s education and on how to why it is necessary to the Israeli education system and how to explain it.
4-6 meetings – the parents (10 couples, men and women together, broken into two groups) will meet with each of the two instructors, changing halfway through the session. The emphasis will be on parents working as a couple to assume responsibility and authority for their children’s education.
6 meetings – parents and children study together. In a preliminary session, the adults will learn about the topic to be presented when their children join them. The emphasis will be on intergenerational dialogue that builds an understanding of both children’s and parents’ interests and sensitivities.

Workshop Pilots

During 2006-07 Rav Yafet Alemu and Mizrach Shemesh taught two pilot adult education workshops. One, for men only, was held in Beit Shemesh, and the other, for men and women together, was in Jerusalem.
During this time Rav Yafet and Yahalom also taught three pilot parent-children workshops.
We have built our three-stage workshop program using the experience garnered from these pilot workshops; they are structured in a way that will be acceptable to both generations and will bridge Ethiopian and Israeli society.

Workshop Session Axioms

The program deals with values. The program identifies the central values and bases the program around them.
The program must be relevant to the parents during the adult sessions and to the parents and their children during the joint sessions. We will look for subjects that are relevant to the group.
Every session will include study of Jewish sources; we will draw on all periods of Jewish history.
Active continuous participation is imperative. Parents will bring problems to discuss with the group, empowering themselves and others to solve their problems about their children’s education.

For more information please email the program director, Rav Yafet Alemu, at aytegeb@gmail.com or call him at 052-2388764. Or email the program’s director of education and community organizing, Aviva Groen, at avivagroen@gmail.com, or call her at 02-6437982, 050-7634449.