Principal Moriah Shapira
BY MICHELE CHABIN
HAIFA – Maayan Nagosa, a 17-year-old senior at AMIT Anna Teich Ulpanat Haifa, already has the next few years of her life planned out.
“First I’ll serve in the army and then I want to study law,” said Nagosa, who was born in Israel to parents who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia.
Seated next to her in a cozy grouping of chairs in the corridor, Nagosa’s friend Noga Ben-Ari, also 17 and Israeli-born, said she hopes to be accepted to the Technion—Israel’s equivalent of MIT—after completing her army service.
Their friend Rebecca Naze, also 17, who moved to Israel from France when she was 10, has her heart set on being a doctor.
“I’m preparing by taking 5-point biology,” Naze said, clearly proud, referring to the highest level of Israeli matriculation exams.
These students come from vastly different backgrounds but share a strong drive to succeed thanks to the years they have spent at the ulpana, or religious girls’ high school.
Established in 1967 and part of the AMIT network since 1995, the Modern Orthodox school is known for its emphasis on math and science achievement, and for the fact that for the past few years, 98 to 100 percent of its students have passed their matriculation exams.
That’s a remarkable achievement for any school, but especially an Orthodox girls’ school with no entrance exams that accepts students from a wide range of academic and socioeconomic backgrounds.
The 250 students who study in the ulpana’s middle school and high school come from all sectors of Israeli society. “On the one hand, we have girls from wealthy families, the daughters of scientists at the Technion, high-tech employees at IBM and Rafael, and doctors at Rambam hospital. On the other hand, we have girls whose parents clean houses or are unemployed,” said Moriah Shapira, the new principal, who took the helm last August, as she gave a tour of the school, which is distributed over nine – yes, nine – floors.
“Welcome to Haifa, where you get a lot of exercise,” she quipped.
This ulpana’s high level of diversity is “fairly unique,” Shapira said, even for Haifa, a city in northern Israel with an unusually diverse population.
Regardless of a student’s home life, “when a student arrives at school we look for her strengths and address her weaknesses,” Shapira said. “Does she excel in art or music? Does she love literature? At the same time, we examine where she is in English, math, and science and help her fulfill her potential.”
In addition to their pedagogic duties, all of the school’s homeroom teachers devote two hours per week to one-on-one meetings with their students.
“The teachers are like coaches. They ask, ‘What are you having difficulty with?’ Once this is known, they are able to build an individualized program to help the student progress,” Shapira said.
Tami Kaplan, the school’s pedagogic coordinator, said the teachers “don’t give up on any student.” The school offers tutoring for struggling students and enrichment programs “not only for the top 1 percent but the ones in the middle, too,” Kaplan said.
Rotem Mattias, 16, said she hasn’t always been a stellar student, but that the school has helped her improve.
“I’ve always been accepted for who I am, even when I had some behavioral problems,” she said with a sheepish smile. “When I asked for help in math and English I received it. And I’m a better student because of it.”
The Leading Women to the Technion program, for example, exposes many of the school’s girls to Israel’s booming high-tech and science sectors as a way to encourage them to pursue careers in these fields.
“We’re so lucky to be located in Haifa, because the program sends students on field trips to places like Rambam Hospital and Philips,” a leading electronics company, Kaplan noted.
Danielle Lavie, a 10th-grader at the ulpana, has been in the Technion program since 7th grade. “My father was a professor at the Technion for many years and I know he’s had a meaningful career, the kind I want for myself. Being in the program has exposed me to different scientific subjects and given me the confidence that I can succeed,” Lavie said.
The 10th to 12th graders at Ulpanat Amit Haifa have access to on-site biology, physics, and computer labs, facilities most Israeli high schools don’t offer.
Although the principal is justly proud of her school’s high level of science and math courses, she plans to introduce more humanities courses within the year.
“When you study Jewish and world history, philosophy and literature you end up developing tolerance and become acquainted with other points of view,” Shapira said. “It helps you develop your own values.”
Jewish values are at the center of life at the school, as they are throughout the AMIT network, but students and teachers are given the space to express them in ways that are meaningful to them.
Although the school is Orthodox, everyone realizes that there is a “rainbow of observance” within Orthodox parameters,” said 12th grade homeroom school teacher Tzlil Shilemay. “There is an openness at this school that you don’t find in other religious girls’ high schools. There is room to ask questions,” Shilemay said.
Bracha Enat, the school’s security advisor, said Ulpanat AMIT Haifa serves all the religious Zionist communities in the area, both in Haifa and beyond.
“Our goal is that the girls will feel that Judaism is their home and not just something they inherited from their parents. Today’s generation is searching for meaning and we want them to discover Judaism’s beauty and relevance to the world they’re living in,” Enat said.
Students are required to perform many hours of volunteer service in the community, including visits to a nearby old-age home. They also undertake chesed projects. For example, on their own initiative, they recently raised money to buy heaters to keep needy Holocaust survivors warm during the winter.
Every Sunday (the first day of the work week in Israel), the students attend an assembly that tackles a particular issue. “The discussion could be about the best way to perform volunteer work or a more serious issue, like cutting classes,” Liat Mark, the school’s social coordinator, explained. “Not long ago the cousin of one of our students spoke to the girls about what it is like to have a disability. “There is much more to life than book learning,” Mark said.
Shapira said she and her team of educators receive much of their inspiration from the AMIT network. “It’s a supportive community, like being part of a family. They keep us five steps ahead of where education in Israel is today. They’re at the cutting edge of educational innovation.”
With the assistance of AMIT’s Gogya training center, Shapira is planning to transform the school’s dated library into a much more welcoming experiential learning center where groups of students from different classes will be able to work together and explore ideas in a non-traditional setting.
“It will be an area where we can learn,” Shapira said, walking through the library, which was empty save for the librarian. “The idea of Gogya is to break down the traditional structure of the classroom, to be creative, and teach differently.”
Instead of teaching frontally in the library, teachers will help students tackle a topic by directing them to resources and encouraging them to do independent research.
“Let’s say we want to learn about liberty. Fifty girls can research together in groups to study the laws related to liberty and discover which nations have liberty, and the limits of liberty. We want learning to be interesting and fun,” Shapira said.
The ulpana’s reputation for excellence and warmth also attracts girls from outside the city.
Lior Weissman, 15, said she travels quite a long distance from a Haifa suburb to attend the ulpana because it “feels like a family to me.”
Standing in the hallway during a break between classes, Weissman said that “everyone is so accepting. Plus, we have a strong connection with the community center next door, where we volunteer with the new immigrant families from Ethiopia and Russia.”
Michal Shpitzer, 16, said she appreciates the ulpana even more following the year she spent at a different school.
“I returned to the ulpana because the level of learning and the conditions at the other school weren’t as high as they are here,” Shpitzer said. “And I’m not only talking about the classes. Have you been to the ulpana’s bathrooms? They’re clean!”
The school’s high standards, whether educational or hygenic “says the teachers care about us and we feel it,” Shpitzer said.
Michele Chabin, an award-winning journalist based in Israel, is a frequent contributor to AMIT magazine.
