Teens Tackle Biases, Note Similarities During Visit

When Osnat Nagosa, an Ethiopian Jew living in Israel, arrived to meet some Orange County students, she thought the teens would be standoffish and uninterested in opening up to her.

“I thought they would be pretty shy--not mean, but they wouldn’t speak to us,” said the 19-year-old schoolteacher.

But that was just one of many misconceptions and stereotypes breaking down this week as she and a group of fellow Ethiopian Israelis visit the area through a cultural exchange program sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL’s Children of the Dream program brings Ethiopian Jews--who escaped persecution and poverty in their homeland by fleeing to Israel in the 1980s and ‘90s--to America so they can learn about a different culture and introduce U.S. students to theirs. Later this year, a group of six Orange County students will reciprocate by traveling to Israel.

Thursday, the four Ethiopian teens and their chaperon met at Knott’s Berry Farm with a group of about 30 students from four high schools in Santa Ana and one in Los Alamitos to kick off the program and get to know each other. The group will be staying with Orthodox families in Irvine and visiting the five public schools and two Jewish academies over the next two weeks.

Most of the Orange County students had never been exposed to this culture.

“It’s the first time they realize there’s such a thing as a black Jew,” said Joyce Glen, who organizes the program for the ADL.

The local students were surprised at how “normal” the Ethiopians appeared, dressed in jeans and sweaters, with little distinguishing them save one young man who wore a traditional yarmulke.

“I thought they were going to be different,” said Valerie Martinez, 16, a junior at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana. “Like wearing the [ethnic] outfits and everything, but they’re just normal like us.”

“Who said you’re normal?” joked Nagosa, showing the rapport the two girls had established already even though they’d known one another less than an hour.

That rapport was cemented when Martinez discovered Nagosa had similar musical tastes--plus she spoke Spanish, along with three other languages.

Melissa Carr, head of the ADL’s World of Difference Institute Orange County branch, led the kids through a series of games designed to explore and overcome the stereotypes and misconceptions they might have had about each other. She urged the students to take the lessons they learned back to their schools.

“Try to mix it up at school,” Carr said. “Try to reach out to students to whom, for whatever reason, you would not have had an interest in reaching out to.”