AMIT Alumni Leading Israel: The Real Impact Your

AMIT alumni leading Israel:

The real-life impact of your investment.

Amir Chenchinski A

MIT alumnus Amir Chenchinski, 47, is a successful international tax partner with the global firm Ernst & Young who manages to make time from his high-powered job to promote educational projects and help strengthen Israeli society.

Amir lectures at Ono Academic College and is a board member of a pre-army preparation program and of

BY HELGA ABRAHAM

the Israel Scholarship Education Foundation (ISEF), an organization that enables disadvantaged students to access every level of higher education.

Through his involvement with ISEF, Amir says he has witnessed how educational opportunities not only change the fate of a student but also that of his siblings, parents, and even neighborhood.

He describes his own experience at AMIT Ginsburg Bar Ilan Gush Dan Junior and Senior High School for Boys as formative. He credits the school with instilling in him the aspiration for excellence as well as love for Israel and religious values. It is for this reason that he has placed his two eldest sons in AMIT schools and continues to be involved with AMIT through his alma mater’s alumni association.

Much of his own personal success, he says, can be attributed to the education he received at AMIT: “It is the combination of Torah and advanced science and technology which is the key to AMIT’s success and that of its students,” he says. “Torah without modernity or modernity without Torah cannot succeed. One needs the other and this is the model of AMIT.”

This combination, he says, will become more and more important as high-tech and innovation become the basis of world economies. “High-tech is the Qatar of Israel,” he says. “It is the wealth that will take Israel forward and AMIT is playing a big part in this process.”

Torah without modernity other modernity without Torah cannot succeed. One needs the other and this is the model of AMIT.”

Shalom Giat: AMIT is my Home

The formative years that 39-year-old Shalom Giat spent at AMIT Frisch Beit Hayeled Youth Village, AMIT’s unique residential school for disadvantaged children in Jerusalem, are inscribed in his mind.

“From the age of five, Beit Hayeled gave me a home,” he says. “I received enormous love and warmth there and also tools for life — how to look after myself, how to clean floors, how to deal with my outbursts of anger.”

Unable to serve in the army because of clinical depression, Shalom performed menial jobs for several years until, by chance, he was asked to work as a substitute teacher in an elementary school. “I fell in love with teaching from day one,” he recalls, “and I used a lot of the skills I learned at AMIT, such as how to listen to others and how to be sensitive to the needs of students.”

While teaching, Shalom acquired a BA in Education and in 2017 he joined AMIT Eitan High School in Ma’aleh Adumim, where he teaches Bible studies, literature, and citizenship. He was recently appointed homeroom teacher and is currently studying for an MA.

“I found my vocation,” he says, “and I feel that I have closed the circle. AMIT was my home and is my home today.”

Boaz Yosefi: Student Turned Principal

Boaz Yosefi, the Principal of AMIT Hatzor Haglilit, has a long history with the school and with Hatzor Haglilit, a small development town in northern Israel. He was born there and studied at AMIT Hatzor from the second year of the school’s existence, watching it grow into a fullfledged religious high school for boys and girls.

After serving in the IDF as a commander in the Givati Brigade, Boaz became a teacher by chance: “I had not thought of going into education,” he says, “but when the opportunity arose I saw it as an obligation to return to the community what I had gained from it, and at AMIT, I had learned the values of kindness and giving.” After serving at AMIT Hatzor as teacher, homeroom teacher, and deputy principal, Boaz was appointed Principal in 2016.

He points out that the school is unique in several ways: “Firstly, we accept every type of student — religious, ultra-Orthodox, traditional and secular — because we strongly believe in Klal Yisrael, one people with one Torah, and secondly we do not separate bright from poor students.”

While this policy creates challenges for his teaching staff, it has proven successful, with 98 percent of students at AMIT Hatzor graduating with a full high school certificate. But for Boaz, academic achievements are not the only goal. “The most important thing,” he says, “is for the students to be happy and I can say that 99 percent of them are happy here.”