Forging Friendships

Tucked away in an apartment building in Jaffa, Israel, Friendship’s Way provides 50 poor youngsters with 15 hours of academic lessons each week, along with arts and athletic activities, hot meals, and medical care.

What sets the charity’s work apart from other social-service programs is that it specifically seeks ways to bring together Arab and Jewish children, to bridge the differences in their worlds.

“When you have a society that is sharply divided, it is very, very important to give children the experience of shared interests,” says Alan B. Slifka, a money manager who founded the Abraham Fund, an operating foundation in New York that supports Friendship’s Way. That is especially important in Israel, he says, since Arab and Jewish children attend separate school systems.

Friendship’s Way is one of nearly 100 programs supported each year by the Abraham Fund, a 10-year-old charity whose mission is to improve relations between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens. The organization, which raises $1-million a year, is named after the the biblical patriarch Abraham, considered an ancestor of both Jews and Arabs through his sons Isaac and Ishmael.

Here, a group of children in the Friendship’s Way program share a lighthearted moment. Behind them are posters with the Arab and Hebrew alphabets — symbols of the charity’s efforts to forge a common bond between the two groups.