With the establishment of an online Holocaust Education Resource Center in Bulgaria, World ORT has facilitated a grass roots move by the country's teachers to plug a gap in Bulgaria's education. The Resource Center will serve as a repository for lesson plans and other material which teachers can access to help raise awareness and understanding of the Shoah among teenagers. The project, co-funded by World ORT and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, has also held training seminars at which 180 teachers from across Bulgaria have shared experiences and best practice. "During the days of socialism it was not taught for ideological reasons, because those who helped the Jews - such as the church - were out of favor with the ruling regime. When communism collapsed there was huge … Continue Reading
ORT Russia and Cisco Sign New Initiative
ORT students in Russia are joining the "world's largest classroom" thanks to an agreement signed with American technology company Cisco. The Memorandum of Understanding will see Cisco provide free access to educational material in its Networking Academy and ORT play an integral role in Cisco's plan to treble the number of its academies in Russia by mid-2014. Six institutions in the ORT network have already started offering Cisco courses, including schools in Kazan and Moscow, the Tula Vocational Training Boarding School for Deaf Children, and ORT-Keshernet centers in Tula and Tambov. "Often schools are divorced from the real world," said ORT Russia National Director Dr Sergey Gorinskiy, who signed the agreement with Cisco's director of Government Affairs, Mikhail Pakhomov. "Our partnership … Continue Reading
The Fellowship Continues to Support ORT Schools in FSU
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, often known as The Fellowship, has provided emergency funding of $400,000 to assist World ORT’s network of 17 schools in the FSU region cope with students’ basic needs in the face of continued underfunding of the Heftsiba system. The money is earmarked for essential needs, such as school buses and hot lunches - critical services for schools serving Jewish communities scattered across large urban sprawls and teaching a curriculum that demands long days - and security. Established more than twenty years ago, Heftsiba has been the conduit through which the State of Israel has supported the education of Jewish children attending ORT, Or Avner and Shema Israel schools in the FSU. The system provides management, quality control and … Continue Reading
ORT Argentina Inaugurates New Science Building
ORT Argentina has inaugurated a new four story science and technology center which includes state-of-the-art labs in fields such as mechatronics, media production, applied maths, design and architecture, biochemistry, physics and environmental sciences. The building was designed, pro-bono, by ORT Argentina Vice-President Dario Jaraj. Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Jaraj said, “This is a particularly special day for all of us at ORT Argentina. We are witnessing the realisation of a coveted desire: the opening of new classrooms in a new building which extends the campus by 6,000 square meters and which will house the hopes and dreams of our students. This is undoubtedly a milestone in the history of ORT Argentina, an organisation which for 76 years has been continuously working to … Continue Reading
Innovation for Africa
by Benji Shulman There is an oft repeated narrative about the South African community that talks about a small, conservative, aging group of Jews stuck at the bottom of the Dark Continent. The South African Young Jewish Innovators Gathering, held Feb. 11-12 and hosted by the Schusterman Family Foundation and Sasfin Bank, not only blew this conception out of the water but also showed the interesting paths that the community may take in the future in South Africa. What was perhaps the most interesting aspect was that the big bogey men of the Jewish world were largely absent from the debates taking place among the 50-plus Jewish innovators that attended. There was no talk of anti-Semitism, religious divides, the peace process or assimilation. In general, the focus was innovation, how we could … Continue Reading
Israel’s First Ethiopian Heritage Center Opens
The Lipson Ethiopian Heritage Center in Kiryat Yam, the first of its kind in Israel, has opened. The Center, a prominent part of the Alex and Betty Schoenbaum, Science, Educational, Cultural and Sports Campus inaugurated in 2010, is an initiative of World ORT. Kiryat Yam, a mostly blue-collar seaside town whose 45,000 residents include thousands of Ethiopians, has benefited from the well-used campus facilities which include a science center, planetarium building, an oceanarium and an athletics stadium - all testament to the vision of Betty Schoenbaum, the nonagenarian driving force behind the campus. As to the center, "She wants to see Ethiopian kids integrating into Israeli society and this center has everything necessary to make a significant contribution to that," said Shlomi Gedamo, the … Continue Reading
FSU World ORT Students Prepare for International Robotics Competition
by Abigail Pickus Six schools from the World ORT network in the former Soviet Union (FSU) are preparing to send a team of students to Israel to participate in an international robotics competition at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. While ORT schools have participated in the prestigious competition in the past, this year Luxoft, the largest Eastern Europe software developer, has agreed to sponsor their teams by sending 2 students and a teacher from each participating school. The students are in junior high or high school. “This is a wonderful opportunity,” said Misha Libkin, Director of Development for ORT Russia. “It’s very interesting for the students. We teach robotics in all of our schools and with this competition, it gives them the motivation to produce the … Continue Reading
First Holocaust Exhibition has Opened in Cuba
An exhibition about the Holocaust has opened in Havana, Cuba, the country's first, but so far it is attracting more foreign visitors than locals. Initiated by ORT Cuba National Director William Miller two years ago, "We Remember - The Holocaust and the Creation of a Living Community" combines text, photographs and video to enable the island's resurgent Jewish community to better understand its roots and for the general public to learn about the nadir of modern civilization. Knowledge of the Holocaust is next to non-existent among Cuba’s non-Jewish population and the exhibition has yet to draw wide-scale attention locally. "People passing by the Sephardic Center notice that the exhibition is here and come in but we're working hard to spread the word among teachers and the general population to … Continue Reading
World ORT and ORT Russia to Help Develop School for Russia’s Silicon Valley
World ORT and ORT Russia have been given the task of designing a massive new school to serve the population of the Skolkovo Innovation Center - Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley. After beating a field of 200 domestic and international competitors for the multi-million-dollar tender, ORT has initiated a consortium of companies and organizations which were similarly shortlisted by the Skolkovo Foundation, the agency responsible for the Innovation Center. The idea is to create a “smart school”, similar to the concept which World ORT is developing in Israel where two client schools have been earmarked for the necessary radical overhaul to enable them to use technology to create an individualised and collaborative learning environment with more opportunities for cross-curricular integration and … Continue Reading
Two Years Later: JDC in Haiti
For 8th grader Fabienne and her fellow students at the Zoranje educational campus, learning is the order of the day at a new, state-of-the-art, handicap-accessible middle school built and opened by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). That's because two years after the earthquake, JDC has focused its relief work on children’s education and disabilities-related programming in collaboration with its Haitian, Israeli and other NGO partners. Through $8.6 million dollars in donations from the Jewish Federations of North America and tens of thousands of individual donors, JDC’s projects, including the middle school, have impacted nearly 300,000 Haitians to date. The middle school, which was funded by The Bonita Trust and JDC, is located 30 miles outside of Port-Au-Prince on the … Continue Reading
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