Students & People with Disabilities
- 'Kesher' program: Some 70 students at the School of Occupational Therapy mentor people with a physical, mental, or cognitive disability and give them support, socially and within their communities, throughout the academic year. Hundreds of children, graduates and adults benefit from the 'Kesher' program and acknowledge how it contributed to their improved sense of belonging to the community.
- Self-awareness through cinema course: Both students and people with disabilities participate together in this special course, in collaboration with the Beit Issie Shapiro organization. In mixed groups, all the participants learn together how to produce films and their final productions are presented at a celebratory graduation party.
Good Neighbors Program
The university organizes activities for the residents of the Arab village of Issawiya that adjoins the Mount Scopus campus. The activities aim to strengthen connections between the local residents and the university. Some 60 high school students from Issawiya get to know the university’s labs and nature collections, and join in educational and cultural tours and activities in Jerusalem. This project is run by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.
Urban Clinic
The Urban Clinic project aims to help make the cities we live in sustainable and more equitable.
The clinic in Jerusalem has three main tracks:
- Improving spatial justice in Jerusalem: University students and faculty work with city officials and professionals towards this goal.
- Creating change on the ground in various Jerusalem locations, which in turn become precedents for changing municipal policies.
- Research and development of local urban planning as a continuum of similar research and development conducted worldwide.
Hosted by the university's Institute of Urban and Regional Studies, the clinic's major projects include urban planning in partnership with local communities, developing East Jerusalem, adapting the city for young children, housing and urban renewal, and a research group focusing on cities, diversity and social justice.
Legal Aid Clinics
Students at the university’s Faculty of Law provide free legal aid to help people and organizations protect their rights, through the Center for Clinical Legal Education. The legal clinics also aim to arm law students with social sensitivity and an understanding of the relationship between law in academia and in practice. The legal assistance covers a wide range of fields, including human rights, children’s rights, equality of rights for people with disabilities, rights in criminal proceedings, and rights in cyberspace.
Legal Assistance in Realizing Rights — 'Breira' (Choice) Center
Students at the university’s Faculty of Law provide free legal assistance to empower various sections of Jerusalem’s disadvantaged populations and enable them to realize their full social rights. The center’s activities include assistance desks in Jerusalem’s regional and rabbinical courts, practical support for children who are victims of crime – in cooperation with the Israel Council for the Child, support for the Methadone Center, and a community training project.
Faculty of Agriculture Students Help the Community
Giving back to Rehovot, their university town, students at the Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment spearhead a range of community assistance projects. These include bringing a smile to elderly and young patients at the Kaplan Medical Center with music and song, delivering food parcels to the needy on the festival of Purim, remembering the past on Holocaust Memorial Day by organizing memorial evenings in private homes where Holocaust survivors’ share their stories, providing food and clothing parcels for the town’s needy residents, and collecting money to help victims of the recent Ben Shemen forest fires.
Ethiopian-Israeli Farmers
Elderly Israelis of Ethiopian origin, who come from a tradition of farming but, on arriving in Israel, live in towns, receive land free of charge from the university’s Faculty of Agriculture in order to cultivate the land, grow traditional crops and maintain their traditional farming practices. Faculty members at the Faculty of Agriculture, whose plots adjoin the Ethiopian-Israeli homes, initiated this farming project. In addition, these veteran farmers share their knowledge of sustainable agriculture with the faculty’s students, in the Practical Agriculture course. In a third branch of the Faculty of Agriculture’s practical farming, students from Israel and abroad cultivate land together and in parallel with the veteran Ethiopian farmers.
Caring for Abandoned Animals
Pets in need of medical care that have been abandoned by their owners are treated by the University Veterinary Hospital, in collaboration with a number of local authorities and social organizations, on a voluntary basis.