I’ll give it a shot, one part of really eye-opening article, if the mods will allow it through…
During the decades that Rozman, the new school’s founder, spent teaching at a religious seminary, she found that when girls began flouting the dress code or not showing up, it often correlated with attention deficit disorder or with stress at home. “Not dressing appropriately was only the call for help, the SOS,” Rozman said. “They had real struggles, often inside, and the school had no real way to help them.” Such girls often left or were kicked out, leaving them with no other options.
“And the fall for ultra-Orthodox girls who are not within an educational framework is very steep and very fast,” Rozman said. “Once they do one thing that is not acceptable, it often leads to doing many other things.”
Around the same time, about a decade ago, her husband, Dov, a judge on a Jerusalem religious court, also noticed the high number of ultra-Orthodox boys who, instead of attending yeshiva, spent their days hanging out on the street. “Everyone sees these kids in the streets,” Dov said. “But the Haredi system did not have any solution for them back then. There was nothing for these weaker learners to do.”
So in 2008, the Rozmans, who have nine children, opened one program for boys and one program for girls who had dropped out of the traditional education system. They teamed up with the Amal Educational Network, which operates high schools around Israel with a strong focus on technology, and also offers programs for youth-at-risk, to design the first alternative ultra-Orthodox educational framework. The boys’ school is called Amalenu and combines traditional yeshiva-style learning with technical and vocational skills, as well as offers counseling and life-skills courses. The girls’ school, called Tlamim, also incorporates counseling and operates three dorms to house students who have left home, sometimes by choice and sometimes by court order. Neot Tamar is the couple’s most recent project.
The biggest difference between the boys’ and girls’ programs is that in most cases the boys have left the traditional yeshiva framework, which requires long days of Talmud study, due to learning disabilities. “But the girls, we only see things like learning disabilities in about 40 percent,” Ester Rozman said. “In most cases, they are suffering and end up outside the traditional framework because of bad situations at home.”
That’s how one 18-year-old Jerusalem girl ended up at Tlamim. “What happened at home is really complicated,” the girl said, declining to give details. But two years ago she moved to Tlamim and finally found herself feeling secure enough to focus on her studies. “This is a very warm place, and here I have figured out that if I make the investment, I can do anything and go anywhere,” said the girl. “Before this, I never did anything.” On the day she spoke with me, she was one of only two girls in Tlamim’s school building, near the Central Bus Station. There were no classes due to the Lag BaOmer holiday, but this particular girl had come in to spend extra time studying for a final exam in Hebrew language and grammar.
“Let’s just say that I was in a very difficult place when I came here,” she said. “And even though I still don’t know exactly what I want to do, at least now I understand myself better.”