The Youth Village for the Performing Arts at Eshkol is an initiative to provide a world-class, intensive, performing arts school and residence to high school students with significant artistic potential but from disadvantaged homes throughout Israel, with particular emphasis on the southern half of the country. Located in the Eshkol region, which borders the Gaza Strip, the Youth Village will create an environment of professional excellence as well as individual and collaborative achievement among youth who have hitherto felt marginalized in Israeli society, particularly in this region which has suffered years of trauma due to incessant rocket fire from Gaza. The Village opened in September 2014 on the premises of a former boarding school campus, Ma’ale Habesor, in the Eshkol Regional Council, located in the western Negev. Historically, high-quality training in the arts has been available only to children from affluent families in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Youth Village will change that. The impact of the program will be measured through a multi-year evaluation conducted by researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.This project has been designed to create a new social model for Israel, in which a thriving, high-profile center of cultural and professional excellence, as well as a source of inspiration for upward mobility via training, will be situated in a region of the country that until now has been associated almost exclusively with ongoing tensions with Gaza.

Professor in Department of General History.Professor in Department of Jewish History & Contemporary Jewry.Academic Chairman of Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry.Chairman of Division of Russian Studies.

Serviced and developed advanced agricultural machinery for a large, multi-crop farming enterprise.