User:Giulietta Masina

The ISEF Foundation

The [ISEF Foundation] works to expand access to higher education for Israelis from marginalized communities. ISEF underwrites the studies of more than 800 Israeli students a year from low-income families, with most being the first in their families to enroll in higher education. To date, the foundation has awarded 17,000 scholarships at all degree levels from B.A. to Ph.D. and postdoc.

Known in Israel as ISEF-the International Education Foundation (ISEF-HaKeren HaBeinLeumit LeHinuch), ISEF was established in 1977 as the International Sephardic Education Foundation by Sephardic Jewish philanthropists, led by the late Edmond J. Safra, who sought to aid Israel's Sephardic (Mizrahi) immigrant population. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants had arrived in Israel during the 1950s and '60s from countries in Asia and North Africa and found themselves largely relegated by Israel's establishment to small farms (moshavim), hastily-erected frontier development towns, and slum areas of major cities, where opportunities for advancement were few and the schools were markedly inferior to those in established cities and towns. By the 1970s, the Sephardic immigrant population was in ferment due to its continued second-class status. While the government sought to address this problem through slum rehabilitation, ISEF focused on education, and higher education in particular, as the key to solving the entrenched ills of Israel's growing underclass.

In the ensuing decades, as Israel took in new groups of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and South America, the Foundation expanded its focus to embrace all students from the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, regardless of ethnic origin. Today roughly 50% of ISEF scholarship winners identify themselves as Mizrahi or Sephardic.

.