Press & Publicity

In war-torn Africa, a Jewish home emerges

By Stacey Palevsky
June 15, 2007
Jewish News Weekly

More than 1 million children in Rwanda are orphans.

The magnitude size of that statistic — equal to 15 percent of the nation’s population — took Anne Heyman’s breath away.

She wondered: Could she help? And if she did, could she weave Jewish values into her efforts?

Yes and yes.

Last year, Heyman founded the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, which is slated to open its doors to Rwanda’s teenage orphans in 2008.

The youth village will be a home for about 125 teenagers, all of whom have lost their parents to the Rwandan genocide or AIDS. Eventually, the village’s population could swell to 500.

But Heyman’s project is not simply international aid work. She has put a Jewish face on the project, modeling it after a similar, successful program in Israel.

“I want people to look at Israel and say: What do they do that is of value to the world?” she said during a presentation at the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation on Monday, June 11. It was the first stop on her cross-country campaign, the goal of which is to raise $10 million by next year.

“There is a campaign to demonize Israel. And we can fight that in a really positive way,” Heyman said.

[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]

 

 

Survivors of Rwandan Genocide Learn From Ethiopian Israelis

By Eric Silver
February 5, 2007
The Jerusalem Report

Fifteen young Ethiopian Jews are training to use their own experience as displaced Africans successfully absorbed into Israeli society to help rehabilitate some of the 1.2 million orphans of the Rwandan genocide. In 1994, members of the dominant Hutu community in the former Belgian colony massacred more than 800,000 of the minority Tutsi.

The 15 are among nearly 2,000 Ethiopians who have graduated since 1981 from Yemin Orde, an innovative youth village in western Galilee that houses more than 500 immigrant and at-risk children. Chaim Peri, Yemin Orde’s veteran principal, told The Report, “Their return to Africa on a life-saving mission is significant not only in itself, but for what it does for their selfesteem.”

The Ethiopian Israelis will go to Rwanda as mentors to a Rwandan charity which is setting up a village, modeled on Yemin Orde, in the central African state. Ten Rwandan educators and social workers completed an intensive week of workshops at Yemin Orde in December.

Isachar Mekonen, who immigrated to Israel with his parents as a 6-year-old in 1972 and served as a major in the paratroops, will lead the Israeli mission. “When you feel good,” he said, “when you feel strong, you can make another people feel strong. I feel I can help the kids who went through the genocide.”

Mekonen, now a father of three and service manager in the Israel Electric Corporation, graduated high school in 1985 after four years at Yemin Orde. The school aims to fill the scholastic gaps of underprivileged children, Peri explained, and give them what their environment cannot provide. “We focus on telling them how important they are, that they are not inferior, that they are destined for greatness.”

[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]

 

 

Ethiopian Israelis provide training for Rwandan youth village

By Stephanie Freid
December 25, 2006
Israel21c

Jean-Pierre Nkuranga was twenty in 1994 when he hid in the bushes outside his home in Rwanda and watched helplessly as Hutu militiamen ruthlessly attacked his family members. He lost four siblings and both parents in the carnage that was later known as Rwanda’s genocide.

“Children heads of household were common - some as young as ten. The kids would put together households of other kids and live in the streets or build tent camps with leaves and mud.” Nkuranga said.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide left over 800,000 Tutsis dead. One of the most devastating aftermaths of the tragedy was the approximately 1,200,000 children - almost 15% of the Rwandan population - who became instant orphans and lost their homes forever. Nkuranga became the parent to his four remaining siblings in the aftermath of the violence and he eventually took in six additional neighboring children.

Overcome by the enormity of loss, Nkuranga vowed to help build a future for the children orphaned in Rwanda. And today, he’s beginning to achieve that goal with the help of Israel.

Nkuranga was part of a ten-person delegation of Rwandan youth experts who recently spenta week at the Yemin Orde Youth Village south of Haifa in order to gain tools for opening the Agahozo-Shalom Village in Rwanda, which will be modeled after Yemin Orde.

[To read more of this article, download the PDF.]