Tirat Carmel

Opportunities for Assistance:
Make a Difference in Tirat Hacarmel

Your support will help create a brighter future for Ethipoian-Israelis in Yehud Tirat Hacarmel

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The Challenge

A Community in Tirat Carmel At High Risk of Ending Up in Poverty, Underachievement, and Crime.

Tirat Carmel is a city overlooking the Carmel forest in Northern Israel. A well-known retired football player named Reuven Atar lived in this city. Nowadays, he is the manager of Maccabi Netanya, an Israeli football club based in Netanya.

 According to CBS Israel, Tirat Carmel had 18,700 inhabitants at the end of 2007. The city is home to 700 Ethiopian-Israelis, 125 of whom are between 13 and 18 years old.

Between 1996 and 2005, before the launch of ENP, the number of juvenile delinquency files among Ethiopian-Israeli youth increased over 600%, from 139 to 900 cases (Myers-DJC-Broodale study, 2009). Tirat Carmel is one of the many places where Ethiopian-Israelis have struggled. Without proper intervention, these youth have a risk of getting stuck in a vicious cycle of poverty, crime, and underachievement, which condemns them and future generations to a life of poverty.

ENP's Response

Facing Educational Challenges and Preventing Ethiopian-Israelis from Getting Into Trouble

To face the critical challenges of preventing youth from ending up in poverty and facing underachievement and crime, ENP launched both a Scholastic Assistance Program as well as a Youth Outreach Center in Tirat Carmel. The ENP Scholastic Assistance Program provides supplementary hours of educational support to students in grades 7 to 12 in order to strengthen their achievements. 85 Ethiopian-Israeli teenagers are currently a part of the scholastic assistance program. This program would not be such a wonderful success without the generous support of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. The goals of the program are to:

• Increase the number of students matriculating and improve the level of achievement on the matriculation exams.

• Improve academic achievement in the years leading up to matriculation.

• Reduce the numbers dropping out of normative, educational frameworks and the extent of hidden dropouts.

• Strengthen students’ motivation to study as well as their self-confidence in their abilities.

 After school, Ethiopian-Israeli youth can go to the ENP Youth Outreach Center. Nowadays, the center provides around 50 teenagers with a variety of enriching, creative, and empowering extra-curricular activities. In addition, this center:

• Encourages the teens to take on responsibilities for different tasks at the Center, enabling them to feel a greater sense of ownership and to give them a chance to actualize their leadership potential.

• Offers youth a wholesome, supportive, and safe place to socialize.

• Encourages personal growth, higher aspirations for the future, greater self-confidence, and improved interpersonal skills by providing workshops and activities such as soccer, music and leadership.

• Provides workshops in areas such as violence prevention, strengthening self-image, and personal identity.  Assistance is also provided to the parents to help them understand and deal with the additional struggle of coping with raising youth in Israel. 

 Did you know that…

The teens of Tirat Carmel feel that the Youth Outreach Center is like a second home, and many attend on a daily basis. In fact, when the devastating forest fires occurred in 2010 near Tirat Carmel and forced many to evacuate their homes, the teenagers led their families across town to the shelter of the Center and resided there over the entire Shabbat, even when offered alternative shelters.