36 Friday, May 23, 1986 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS • SUN SUITS • SWIM SUITS • SHORTS • • SUN DRESSES • TANK TOPS • PANTS • • SPORTSWEAR • SLEEP WEAR • • DRESSES AND MORE! 11-kUBs,,Dflt FRIDB-r SATURDAY SuNDF‘t ocsikg LINCOLN CENTER Boys and Girls Wear because your children are special! 10 1/2 & Greenfield * • ,N.*:1?3 , ? \ • • • i European Design and Craftmanship by project undertaken while a child is away, so that he or she will have a better home life to come back to. Parents seeking to evade responsibility for their problems are sometimes encour- aged to send their children to boarding schools by recruiters from Orthodox ye- shivas who frequent disadvantaged areas in search of pupils who can be supported by Youth Aliya. ince 1971, major investments — far exceeding what Youth Aliya has spent on disadvantaged youth — have been made in improving educational oppor- tunities and social services in the neighborhoods and towns that have been the department's primary recruiting ground. The Education Ministry initiated its Educational Welfare Program in the mid-1970s to boost remedial and enrich- ment activities in local schools, and has built dozens of comprehensive high schools in disadvantaged areas. Community cen- ters have opened in dozens of these locali- ties since 1969 providing informal educa- tion and cultural enrichment for children, youth and adults. The director-general of the Education Ministry, Eliezer Shmueli, was one of the founders of the ministry's own network of boarding schools. He too felt that the time had come to re-examine the overall role of residential education in Israel, but felt that coordination of this service by a central- ized agency would not be practical. He noted that today, the quality of the educa- tional services found in many of the areas from which boarding school pupils have been drawn in the past are better than those available in the youth villages themselves. Another source of improvement for Israel's disadvantaged areas has been the $650 million spent by Project Renewal since 1977 in a massive effort to improve physical conditions and social services in these areas. This is a joint rehabilitation project of the Israeli government and Diaspora Jewry, acting through the Jewish Agency. In the 82 neighborhoods and towns now in the project, the most exten- sive social investments have been in formal and informal education, and new programs have been developed to improve school achievement levels, starting with early childhood and continuing through high school. The basic philosophy of Project Renewal is that the depressed towns and urban slums can and should be made to be "decent places to live and bring up children?' Even though Project Renewal has won high marks from an evaluation committee composed of experts from Israel and abroad, it has not solved all the social and educational problems in these areas, nor has it been organized effectively in all the towns and neighborhoods that it serves. S But it has become Israel's most impressive expression of commitment to the approach that community solutions to social and educational problems are preferable either to bulldozing the problems away or to tak- ing the most promising young people out while letting others degenerate. The most successful Project Renewal communities have demonstrated that they can make their areas attractive not only for their own youth to return to after army service, but also to people outside the neighborhood who would have never before considered moving into what was previously regarded as a slum. As strange as it may seem for a depart- ment concerned with the social and educa- tional future of Israel's youth, Youth Aliya continues to ignore these developments in its official policy statements. Pronounce- ments issued in the past year by the head of the department and by its director, Eli Amir, continue to rest on the fundamental assumption that opportunities for social advancement and integration with the mainstream of Israeli society cannot be found - in the towns and neighborhoods where the bulk of Israel's disadvantaged population is concentrated — those areas that are in fact the primary targets of Pro- ject Renewal. All this is even more puzzling consider- ing that the Jewish Agency is responsible for both Youth Aliya and Project Renewal, but it has failed to coordinate or reconcile their divergent policies and viewpoints. So Youth Aliya continues to take the most promising youth out of these areas, while Project Renewal looks for ways to keep them there so that they can progress and contribute to the neighborhood as a whole. A case in point: Former Youth Aliya de- partmental director Meir Gottesman cites the cultural advantages of residential education for youth from deprived back- grounds. "In the youth village," he writes, "the youngsters, most of them from needy homes, come to know and enjoy a variety of activities they could never afford in the city. Even if the opportunity were there (community centers, etc.), they would prob- ably lack the motivation and encourage- ment from home to take advantage of it." He also mentions sports activities, tutor- ing and library facilities as opportunities not available for these young people in their home areas. This statement was published in late 1985, and it would have been accurate in the mid-1970s or earlier. But it ignores the fact that one of the most substantial achieve- ments of Project Renewal and the com- munity center movement in Israel has been precisely in providing the kind of oppor- tunities that Gottesman describes, in ad- dition to stimulating and educating the residents of these areas to utilize them for themselves and for their children. The head of Youth Aliya placement ser- vices, Yehiel Shilo, expressed similar views. Where Do All Our Dollars Go? Specializing in: 8575 CAPITAL OAK PARK, MI 48237 542.1185 wood marble stainless steel laminates .