(December 13, 2022) Degel Menashe is pleased to invite all scholarship beneficiaries and their families on the 22/12/22 to come for the ceremony. The event will take place at the Indian Community Club, Ramla, near the Magen Shalom Synagogue. For those of you using waze/gps may enter 'Magen Shalom Synagogue, Ramla'. This is to remind all of you that the ceremony will begin at 1800. Please reach the premises by 1730. Light dinner will be served along with lighting the Hannuka candle. Thank you all and looking forward to seeing you.
(December 8, 2022) The names of Degel Menashe’s 2023 scholarship winners were announced this week. Twenty-one recipients will share IS75,000 in award money averaging 30 to 50 percent of their tuition fees for the year.
Arbi Hnamte
The winners come from all over Israel, from Kiryat Arba, Nitzan, and Sderot in the south to Afula and Yesud Hama’ala in the north. They range in age from 37-year-old Arbi Hnamte, who is starting her last year of nursing school at the Hebrew University, to 11-year-old Dan Haokip (see last week’s Website article “Helping A Star to Be Born”), who trains at football with the junior youth team of Hapoel Jerusalem. They are planning for careers in such diverse fields as education, molecular biology, interior design, statistics, health management, and traditional Chinese medicine. Two are studying full stack development, which involves the application of computer technologies to commercial projects. Some were born in Israel, others came from India with their families at a young age, others have arrived in the last decade. All of them B’nei Menashe, they are a diverse group.
Their scholarships will be a great help to them. “I’m now starting my first year as a B.A. student in economics and business administration at Ariel University,” wrote Shoshana Menashe on her application form. “Because it’s far from where my parents live, I have to take a room in the dormitories, for which they pay. But they’re trying to save money to buy a home of their own and I can’t ask them for more, and so the tuition is up to me. It’s hard to have to work to earn the money for it while studying at the same time, which is why I’ve asked for financial assistance.”
Simcha Chenkual
Many of the scholarship winners feel that they are being enabled to fulfill an ambition that might otherwise be beyond their means. “My parents came to Israel in 1999,” wrote Simcha Chenkual, “and ever since I was small, the desire to study and contribute to Israeli society has been an important part of me. This year, I’ll be starting the Open University in Haifa, where I’ll major in psychology and education for those with learning disabilities. I have three younger brothers, and I hope our generation will be the first in our family to have the opportunity for academic study. A scholarship that will pay for part of my tuition will help me to make my dream come true.”
Yael Lunkhel
Yael Lunkhel, who is studying at Shenkar College in Tel Aviv, spelled her dream out more poetically. She wrote:
“I’m now on my way to obtaining a B.A. degree in industrial design and material engineering. This involves courses in math, chemistry, physics, and art. Everything in this world is made of something, and it will be my job to use these materials for both my personal vision and the products I design. For me, industrial design is like a magic show: matter from different spheres is taken and combined to make something new, which is revealed at the end when the magician removes his cloak in front of an amazed audience. Yet the magician knows that it’s not magic but a dance of science with creativity.
“When I think of myself at the end of my studies, I imagine being able to make the world a better place with my knowledge and skills. At the age of 24, I’ve finally taken the plunge and gotten down to fulfilling myself.”
Degel Menashe wishes all our scholarship winners a year of learning and achievement!
(December 1, 2022) At the age of 11, Dan Haokip, who will be among the 20 Degel Menashe 2022-23 academic and vocational scholarship recipients to be announced later this month, is the youngest award winner to date. And not only his age is unusual. So is what he wishes to study. It’s football.
And yet why not? A professional career in football, if you have the talent for it, is not a career – and Doron Dadash, Dan’s coach at Hapoel Jerusalem, with whose children’s team he plays and works out several times a week, thinks he has a lot of it. “I believe Dan can go far,” Dadash told our Newsletter. “Although he’s been training and playing with Hapoel for only a few months, he’s already on the level of boys who have been with us for several years. It’s not only his technical skills, which are advanced for his age. It’s his football intelligence. He has an instinctive ability to read the play on the field and know where to be at any moment. You don’t often see that in eleven-year-olds.”
Dan not only has talent, he has ambition. How far can he go? “I’d like to play in the European Champions League,” he told us over the phone.
“Dan has loved football practically since was a baby,” says his mother, Esther Haokip, who is separated from her husband and lives with her four children in Kiryat Arba. “I used to find him glued to the TV screen, watching a football game, before he knew how to talk. And as soon as he started talking, he could name all the famous football stars in the world. When he got to be a little older, he joined a children’s football club in Kiryat Arba. It cost money, and we never have enough of that, but how could I have told him he couldn’t? I could see how happy it made him.”
Earlier this year, Esther had a visit from an old friend who noticed Dan’s love of the sport and told them she had heard that Hapoel Jerusalem was scouting for young talent and that it held try-outs. “There was a try-out last May,” Esther says, “and I took Dan to Jerusalem for it. He was asked to play and then given a physical check-up, and we were told that we would hear from the club in two or three weeks. To my mind, it was just a fun day for Dan. I never thought anything would come of it.”
Football practice never stops: Dan Haokip in his bedroom.
Yet that same evening, Esther received a call from Doron Dadash. “He told me,” she relates, “that Hapoel was so impressed by Dan’s performance that it was accepting him immediately and wanted him to come four times a week for training sessions. I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t know how we would manage It’s over an hour each way, traveling by bus, from our home in Kiryat Arba to the Hapoel field, and the bus fare, which has to be for two people because Dan is too young to travel alone, isn’t cheap. There were costs to pay Hapoel, too. Even though I knew we couldn’t afford it, I also knew how important it was for Dan, so I decided to give it a try.”
Dan began traveling to Jerusalem four days a week after school, sometimes with his mother and sometimes with a family friend or relative. After a month of this, though, Esther decided it was simply too hard. “I told Dan he would have to stop,” she says. “It was a great disappointment to him but he understood. Doron was disappointed, too. He started calling me on the phone to try to get me to change my mind. He said I shouldn’t worry about the money, that Hapoel would work something out with me, and that I mustn’t let Dan’s potential go to waste. In the end, I gave in and Dan started going again. But even if Hapoel covered the costs at its end, I didn’t know how I was going to pay for the transportation.”
That’s when Degel Menashe stepped in. Hearing Dan’s story, it contacted Esther Haokip and told her it was offering Dan a scholarship that would pay for the travel expenses.
And so Dan is back on the playing field. We spoke again with him over the phone the other night. He and his mother had just gotten home from Jerusalem. He had already done his homework in his free moments at school and had just enough time for dinner and a bath before going to bed. Perhaps for a few minutes of watching the Mondial, too. Dan is rooting for Brazil. That’s because his favorite player is the Brazilian star Neymar. “I like his style,” he says. “He knows exactly what to do with the ball.” That, says, Doron Dadash, is what Dan knows, too.
