Eleventh-grade students at AMIT Bellows Ulpanat Noga High School helped organize a seminar on women’s empowerment at their school, which included workshops and lectures about identity, developing personal strengths and leadership skills, self-defense, and taking initiative.
The young women worked with school faculty to develop and plan the seminar, which included meeting with Beit Shemesh Mayor Aliza Bloch, the city’s first woman mayor and a rising star on Israel’s political stage. Mayor Bloch hosted the students at her office and described her journey in becoming elected mayor. She told them that being a woman is only one component of her identity, and that each young woman can choose how to define herself.
“The ability to decide what your strength is rests in your hands,” Mayor Bloch told them, adding that they can choose what they want to pursue. “I made a conscious choice to pursue a path of conflict resolution through dialogue, not to dwell on matters of ego and respect.”
Mayor Bloch landed on the Jerusalem Post’s list of 50 Most Influential Jews of 2019 for her work in uniting the city’s different populations, including native English-speakers and immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, living in Beit Shemesh. Beit Shemesh has made headlines for its sometimes conflicts between Haredi and non-religious Jews.
“I ran for mayor because I can do the job,” she told the Jerusalem Post. “If every woman says, ‘We can do it,’ I think that when our children – boys and girls – see women, they will think they can do it. They will see women in leadership as a normal thing…. Women: Don’t be afraid. You can do it.”
The students’ meeting with Mayor Bloch, who is a role model of female achievement, is part and parcel of AMIT’s mission to help empower its girls by showing them what they can achieve. The theme of the seminar – women’s empowerment – is another concrete example of how AMIT schools opens up horizons for all of its students. Many of AMIT’s girls, especially those on the socioeconomic or geographic periphery, don’t see themselves reaching the stars. AMIT opens the skies for them. Mayor Bloch was in New York this past June and was the guest speaker at AMIT’s Annual Assembly & Inauguration.
The ulpana students also got to hear their teachers’ views on how female identity is empowering and creates unique opportunities for women.
“The students learned in a significant and experiential way about the strength they hold in their hands — the strength of female power,” said Principal Miriam Koren. “They acquired important tools,
insights and advice, for the important choices they make today and will make in the future as well.”
