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.