Yaarach Bar-On

Yaarach Bar-On

Yaarach Bar-On is a president of the Oranim Academic College of Education. Located in the north of Israel, on the “gate” of multicultural region of Galilee, this exceptional college educating teachers for the whole country has student of different origin and identity, including Jews, Arabs, Druze, Ethiopians. As a president, together with the faculty, she is implementing a very innovative program focused on inter-cultural competence with a challenge to help to build a pluralistic modern society.

She holds a doctorate in history from Tel Aviv University and she was formerly a fellow at the Mandel School of Educational Leadership (1997-1999). In 1999-2000 she headed the Education Ministry department that oversaw implementation of the Shenhar- Kremnitzer reports, which dealt with Pluralism in Judaism and Civics+Peace education. For a decade 2003-2012 she served as deputy-president for academic affairs at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. She is a member of the board of the National Library of Israel.

Bar-On is a social historian and has published three books on the lives of women (in Hebrew): Crowded Delivery Room: Gender and Public Opinion in Early Modern Gynecology (2000); Sunrise in the Mediterranean: An American Women in the Labor Battalions ( 2005); and A Jewish Witch in the Court of Louis XIII (2011).

Dr. Moshe Shner, one of the Oranim College faculty member, in a text on Galilee as “multicultural laboratory” writes: Our challenge at Oranim College is to face the reality that each population has its own Galilee, mostly blind to the Galilee of the other populations. Neighboring populations live together and share the same infrastructure of roads, hospitals, malls and nature know very little about the other cultures. Teachers in our schools have no basic knowledge about the culture of the other and no training how to teach it; they can hardly support a serious multicultural dialogue. Part of it is due to the troubling fact that there is not even one full teachers training program in Israel which addresses this situation and gives teachers from each culture the professional knowledge and tools to teach his/her students the other cultures. We are all left with our stereotypes and mutual fears and mistrust, fueled by the sensitive security situation in our area. […]At the Galilee we do not have holy mountains or major sites of worship like in Jerusalem. We share markets, roads, hospitals, businesses and natural resources and we can learn how to make all of it part of a flourishing integrated enlightened modern society.