November 2010 - Words, words, words

Coexistence group wins major U.S. languages grant

Coexist Magazine
THE U.S. State Department has awarded a Jewish-Arab coexistence group a three-year grant of $1 million. The Abraham Fund Initiatives, which takes its name from Abraham-Ibrahim, the biblical father of both Arab and Jewish nationhood, received the grant to advance peace and reconciliation through bilingual education.

This is part of the Conflict Mitigation and Reconciliation Program of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID). The program aims to promote mutual respect and understanding by enabling Arab and Jewish youngsters in Israel to communicate in the country’s two official languages, Hebrew and Arabic.

The State Department-funded program will organize cultural encounters between Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Jewish youngsters throughout the school year. Arab students will participate in Jewish cultural seminars and Hebrew-language enrichment classes, while Jewish students will participate in Arab cultural activities and courses in conversational Arabic. In all, 1,600 Arab and Jewish students will take part.

“Although they share a state, Jewish and Arab Israelis are still divided by language, culture and history," said Dadi Komem, director of coexistence education for The Abraham Fund in Israel. "This grant will help us expand our work to better equip Arab and Jewish children with the educational and social experiences they need to live peacefully in a shared society.”

The program is part of The Abraham Fund’s Language as a Cultural Bridge initiative, which lobbies for the teaching of Arabic language and culture in Israeli Jewish public schools, starting in the elementary grades.

Arab students are required to study Hebrew as part of their public school curriculum but Jewish students are not obliged to study Arabic. The pilot program now has more than 15,000 students in 220 schools studying the languages as a required subject during the 2010-11 school year.

(Picture: Another Abraham Fund initiative - Arab Israelis attend a program for women without work experience, to gain skills that would enable them to join the job market).