Another portion of our cultural immersion was an invitation to the Netanya Foundation Ethiopian Center. An extremely rich cultural experience, the people at the Netanya Center shared traditional tea and bread-breaking with our group (shown below), as well as a tour of the facilities and resources available to the community. The Netanya Center was an experience that the students found incredibly impactful as they also reflected on community differences here in Milwaukee.

Student Katie Shaw shares her experience and her personal reflections:

“As part of our visit in Israel, we visited the Netanya Foundation Ethiopian Heritage Center, a community center located in Netanya that supports the local population of Ethiopian Jews, many of whom are first or second generation immigrants to Israel. Our guide throughout the Center was Avi, an Ethiopian Jew who traveled to Sudan to later migrate to Israel in 1984. Heidi, who works at the Ethiopian Heritage Center, helped translate from Hebrew to English for Avi.

The Marquette family — indeed, the Milwaukee community and the state more generally — lost one of its great leaders yesterday when Marc Marotta suddenly passed away. His death was jarring; he was only 52. Many people knew Marc far better than I, but I had the great fortune of getting to know him through our work together on the Board of Directors of the Bradley Center Sports and Entertainment Corporation for the past few years. In fact, I saw him on Tuesday morning at a board meeting, where he was his usual self: energetic, gregarious, and engaging … which made yesterday’s news even more incomprehensible.

My interest in this post is not to detail Marc’s many accomplishments; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel does a great job of it here (though no one article can truly do justice to the work and legacy of Marc Marotta). Instead, as our third-year students inch closer to graduation and becoming Marquette lawyers, I hope to highlight aspects of Marc’s life and career that are worth reflection by our students — indeed, by all of us in the profession — as they become lawyers and serve the public.

Marc was an excellent lawyer — just ask anyone with whom he worked.