In a packed hall on the Reichman University campus this week, an elderly woman in traditional Ethiopian dress sat beside her granddaughter, an IDF officer now studying entrepreneurship at Reichman University. Around them, sons and daughters who had grown up doing menial work so their children wouldn't have to, watched twenty years of a promise come full circle.
The occasion was the 20th anniversary of Israel at Heart, the program that has shaped a generation of Ethiopian-Israeli students, many of them first in their families to serve in IDF combat units, many the first to set foot on a university campus at all. This wasn't a donor dinner or a graduation. It was something rarer: An evening built specifically for the parents and grandparents, the people who are so often thanked in passing but never given the room.
The Weight Carried Before the Degree
The biographies in that room did not read like typical university applications. They read like survival stories with a university degree stitched onto the end.
Divorce, financial hardship, parents working as caretakers and gardeners to keep food on the table, these were not footnotes for many of the families present, but the baseline conditions from which their children had climbed. And at the center of nearly every story stood a mother. Not a passive presence, but the family's chief strategist and enforcer of possibility: The one who understood, often without the vocabulary of "higher education" ever having been used in her own life, that her children's way forward ran through a classroom.
It is a matriarchal thread that runs through the Ethiopian-Israeli story more broadly, and it was on full display Tuesday evening. Grandmothers and mothers were not accessories to their children's achievements; they were their architects.
From Sudan to Herzliya
Behind every young officer or student in that hall was an elder who had made the original, far harder journey: The trek out of Ethiopia, sometimes through Sudan, with many relatives lost along the way, into a country whose language, systems and expectations were entirely foreign. Many of those elders never fully closed the gap in Hebrew or Israeli bureaucracy.
That gap between generations, between an aliya undertaken with almost nothing, and a grandchild pursuing a prestigious degree, is precisely what Israel at Heart set out to narrow two decades ago.
First to Serve, First to Study
A recurring thread in family after family: Sons and daughters who were the first in their line to serve in the IDF, and who disproportionately chose combat units. Several parents described the experience of watching a child enter an elite unit as the moment they understood their family's position in Israeli society had genuinely shifted - not symbolically, but structurally.
That military service, students and parents alike said, forged qualities that carried directly into university: Discipline, teamwork, a refusal to let a teammate fall behind.
Two-thirds of the current Israel at Heart cohort are women, and the achievement gap is, if anything, running in the opposite direction from stereotype: Young Ethiopian-Israeli women in the program are excelling at rates that have become a point of pride for the whole community, women of valor in the most literal sense, families said, watching daughters become the first in their line to hold an officer's rank and a university acceptance letter. Having said that many men in the program have excelled both academically and most were officers in combat units.
A Gap With No Safety Net
What became clear over the course of the evening is how different this climb is from that of an average middle-class Israeli student. A typical student arriving at RUNI might have grandparents who own an apartment, a family network that can open doors to a first job, an inheritance eventually passed down that provides some cushion against a bad year.
For many Ethiopian-Israeli families in the room, none of that exists. Some described modest homes with seven children sharing two bedrooms. There is no grandparent's financial assistance waiting at the end of the line, each generation is, in a real sense, starting from zero. The grandparents' support provides emotional and spiritual help and a shoulder to lean on.
"We Are Jewish First, Israeli and Ethiopian"
Perhaps the most striking undercurrent of the evening was identity itself. Students spoke of holding three things at once, in a specific order: Jewish first, Israeli second, and proudly, visibly Ethiopian, a heritage they are not shedding on the way to integration but carrying forward alongside it. The grandmother in traditional dress beside her granddaughter in officer's uniform was, in a sense, the evening's thesis in a single image: Continuity, not replacement.
A Program's Second Decade
Philanthropist Joey Low brought the idea of the program to founding president of Reichman University Prof. Uriel Reichman, who approved it twenty years ago and Jonathan Davis, VP, has overseen the Israel at Heart program's success ever since.
"Twenty years ago we set out to make sure that where a student came from would never determine where they could go," Davis said. "What I saw tonight - grandparents who made an impossible journey out of Ethiopia sitting beside grandkids commissioning as IDF officers and planning their future careers in psychology, entrepreneurship, public diplomacy; that's not a program statistic. That's a family's entire trajectory changing in one generation. After close to a thousand applicant interviews over twenty years, hearing the personal stories, the trauma and the joy of acculturation, I have gained a perspective that could almost stand as the basis for a PhD thesis on the subject".
The program now counts 250 alumni and 50 current students on campus, shaping Israeli society from every direction imaginable.
Parents, for their part, made a point on Tuesday evening of seeking out Joey and Jonathan personally to say thank you - not for their children's grades or acceptance letters, but for what the program had made possible for the whole family: A mother's instinct about education, finally given a place to land.
Israel at Heart is a scholarship program at Reichman University supporting Ethiopian-Israeli students, many of them first-generation university students and IDF combat veterans.
This article was written in a cooperation with Reichman University