Cheder Maleh—AMIT’s Unique Program to Change Lives and Influence Israeli

eit Shemesh, located about 20 miles west of Jerusalem, still reflects its roots as a development town founded in the early 1950s to accommodate the thousands of Jews who flooded into the newborn state of Israel from Romania, Bulgaria, North Africa, Iran and various Arab lands. Since the 1990s, the population in Beit Shemesh, which now tops 105,000, also includes Russian-speaking Jews and a high proportion of Jews with roots in Ethiopia.