‘If you don’t have a quality school system, no one’s coming back’
Gottesman Family Supporting Foundation’s gift nurtures Israel Sci-Tech Schools in northern Israel
More than 60,000 Israelis, including approximately 16,000 school-age children, were forced to flee their homes in Israel’s north as Hezbollah began firing rockets from Lebanon in October 2023.
Starting on March 1 of this year, Israeli authorities encouraged evacuated residents to go back. But not everyone is returning. Some lost their physical homes or for other reasons found permanent employment and housing elsewhere. Others are simply wary of the tenuous ceasefire.
A recent half-million-dollar donation from the Jerry and Paula Gottesman Family Supporting Foundation in Whippany could help northern Israelis feel more confident about coming home.
The donation was part of the foundation’s decade-long support of Israel Sci-Tech Schools, the largest independent charter school network in the Israeli public education system.
Israel Sci-Tech educates about 100,000 students annually across 250 middle and high schools, vocational training centers, and colleges of practical engineering in 60 municipalities, including 17 in the North.
Dar Nadler, executive director of North American fundraising organization Friends of Israel Sci-Tech Schools, said this network had the most evacuee students. In the Lebanese border city of Kiryat Shemona alone, Israel Sci-Tech operates three schools.
“Over 400 of the students’ homes were directly hit by missiles while they were gone, and the high school also got hit in October 2024 and sustained some damage,” she said.
“We had over 2,000 students who needed a solution and had been through a lot. Some were evacuated to specific places, and others went to live with relatives. It was very challenging to build some sort of educational routine for 2,000 students spread across different locations.”
And now, as families weigh the decision to return to Israel’s geographic periphery, it has become critical to gather the resources to enhance schools and broaden their role into “community anchors” for unity and resilience,” Ms. Nadler said. “If you don’t have a quality school system, nobody’s coming back. We must offer something even better than before October 7; otherwise, we’ll lose the communities that agree to live so close to the borders.”
That assertion is backed by evidence.
A survey of northern evacuees conducted by the Institute for National Security Studies in late 2024 found that only 21 percent of respondents with minor children were certain they would return. And a survey by the Eastern Galilee Regional Knowledge Center revealed that “all evacuated residents believe that investing in quality teaching staff, emotional support, social skills, and children’s resilience would encourage families to return.”
Accordingly, the newest Gottesman investment in Israel Sci-Tech — the foundation has given more than $2 million over the last decade — will help the network’s CEO, Raz Frohlich, implement a “municipal model” designed to cultivate schools as a local force for educational and communal revival in the wake of war.
“Donations like Paula’s will help us start implementing the municipal model in the North,” Ms. Nadler said. “It will cost around $350,000 per municipality per year for the coming three years, as we walk them through the process of mapping needs, above and beyond education, all the way to implementation.”
The plan will encompass the formal and informal education continuum from preschool through high school.
“If you want to create a strong, resilient society, you have to provide a framework for all ages, all times of the day, and all year,” Ms. Nadler said. “Paula Gottesman understands the need for this forward-looking initiative.”
Indeed, Ms. Gottesman and her husband, Jerry, who died in 2017, are well known in Greater MetroWest and beyond for their family foundation’s support of Jewish day schools and Jewish summer camps with a focus on affordability and excellence.
“There are many ways to use your resources, but none more rewarding than nurturing a project you believe in,” Ms. Gottesman said. “My late husband and I were fortunate enough to be able to promote our concerns in concentrating our efforts on Jewish education in the U.S. and in Israel, and we are committed to Israel’s next generation now more than ever before.”
Ms. Nadler noted that Ms. Gottesman has often traveled to see close family in Israel. Her visit in early 2023 coincided with the dedication of Israel Sci-Tech’s Gottesman Center for Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship in the northern city of Afula.
“Over the years, the foundation supported our Adopt-A-City model, in which a donor could give half a million dollars to schools in a city that needs this investment, and we’d match it,” Ms. Nadler said. In the past, Paula adopted Afula, Ramla, and Kiryat Shemona — every few years she’d adopt a different city — where we have seen unbelievable improvement in various benchmarks of performance.
“This time, because we are dealing with unprecedented and unknown challenges due to the war, we asked her to make the donation unrestricted so we could use it where most needed,” she added.
“When something really bad is happening, this is when you understand how lucky you are to have partners like Paula Gottesman, who says, ‘I totally get what’s happening and I trust that my partner knows what to do with the funds.’ It is very much our privilege to have the Gottesman Foundation as our supporter and partner when challenges and trauma are affecting every single student in Israel.”
Mr. Frohlich echoed that sentiment. “Paula Gottesman’s generosity is not just a gift; it is a powerful act of solidarity and trust,” he said. “With partners like Mrs. Gottesman we can achieve sustainable social change through education.”
Israel Sci-Tech emphasizes iSTEAM education — iSTEAM is an acronym for “innovation, science, technology, engineering, arts, and math” — for all Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Bedouin, and Druze students in its network.
The new plan’s stated goal is to strengthen education in those fields alongside “nurturing values, community engagement, and youth leadership … through collaboration with youth movements, gap-year and national service programs, and meaningful IDF military service, which is the foundation for social and democratic resilience.”
“We’re literally taking care of the next generation in Israel,” Ms. Nadler said. “It is comforting and reassuring to have partners like Paula — you can dream and invest, and you know that they will join you.”
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