Gap year Israel scholarships honor Alisa Flatow z”l
The Jewish Community Foundation of Greater MetroWest NJ offers a new scholarship named in memory of Alisa Flatow. It’s called the Alisa Fund.
Alisa grew up in West Orange and attended day school at the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy and at Yeshivat Frisch in Paramus. Her father, Stephen Flatow, said, “Alisa was the driving force for Yiddishkeit in the family. As a college junior, she took a semester off from Brandeis University to study at Nishmat, a women’s seminary in Jerusalem. She was thrilled to be in Israel and to be learning Torah intensively.”
Alisa died on April 10, 1995, when she and seven others were murdered in a terrorist attack in Israel. She was 20 years old.
Three awards of up to $5,000 each will be granted to girls who intend to study full-time at an Israel gap-year program dedicated to traditional Jewish studies. Girls who live or study in the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest’s catchment area (Essex, Morris, Sussex, Union, and parts of Somerset counties) are eligible and encouraged to apply.
Between 2001 and 2016, when it went dormant, the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater MetroWest’s Alisa Flatow Memorial Scholarship Fund gave financial awards to more than 150 students who were learning in Israel gap-year programs. Thanks to a legacy gift from Edith J. Lowen z’l, in honor of Pearl P. Stein z’l, the fund once again will provide scholarships and grants in 2025 and beyond.
Applications for the 2025-2026 academic year are available; submissions are due by February 11, 2025. For more information, go to jcfgmw.org/alisafund or call fund coordinator Pam Greenwood at (973) 929-3005.
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