$360,000 pledged to bring more students to ‘mechinot’

Kibbutz Be’erot Yitzhak ceremony marks grant of what is hoped to bring more youth from peripheral communities to premilitary preparatory colleges

By JONAH MANDEL
education 311 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
education 311
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
A ceremony on Sunday in Kibbutz Be’erot Yitzhak marked the grant of what is hoped to bring more youth from Israel’s peripheral communities to premilitary preparatory colleges (mechinot) and a better future.
The Yedidut Toronto NGO has pledged $360,000 to mechinot that will take high-school graduates who were part of the Ma’agalim program.
The sum will be divided among the institutions taking some 300 young men from around the country, and serve “to augment, upgrade and enrich their educational infrastructure,” thus creating a great incentive for the mechinot to accept these youths, explained the NGO’s program director, Moshe Goldstein.
Ma’agalim was founded by Assaf Weiss 10 years ago to connect youths from the periphery to a world of ideals, motivation and military service by having a young counselor teach a weekly class to 11th- and 12th-graders, an extra-curricular session dedicated to moral dilemmas, military experiences, values and motivation.
At the end of the process, the counselor also exposes the students to various premilitary frameworks, such as mechinot and yeshivot.