A Dream Turns Into a Dialogue : An exchange program brings minority students from Los Angeles together with Jewish youths from Israel. Crossing continents and cultures, they find they can leave their prejudices and stereotypes behind.

As a group of Ethiopian Jews walked off an airplane in 1991 after being secretly airlifted to Israel, William Lambert watched on television in Los Angeles and came up with an idea. “What would happen,” he wondered, “if we could get a group of black Ethiopian Jews and bring them to Los Angeles?”

Lambert, director of governmental relations for United Teachers-Los Angeles, the Los Angeles school district’s teachers union, said he was dismayed by a 1991 USC study that detailed the stereotypes of Jews held by young minorities in Los Angeles.

One of the students’ misconceptions was that all Jews are white, Lambert said.

He hoped that if he could get Ethiopian Jews to visit Los Angeles schools, they would help eradicate the prejudices students held about Judaism and build a bridge not only between Ethiopian Jews in Israel and minorities in the U.S., but among the many ethnic groups in Los Angeles.

In 1992, Lambert and the Anti-Defamation League in Los Angeles organized Children of the Dream, a program that during its first year brought 10 Ethiopian Jewish students from Israel to Los Angeles schools--including Crenshaw, Hollywood, North Hollywood and Gardena high schools--for two weeks.

Since then, Children of the Dream has sponsored two other trips by Israelis and a pair of visits to Israel by minority youths from Los Angeles. Six other cities--Santa Ana, Detroit, New York, Washington, St. Louis and Omaha--have adopted the program and invited Israeli students to their schools.

Now Lambert hopes to expand the project into a yearlong dialogue between Los Angeles’ minorities and Jewish students on the futility of racism.

Racial and religious intolerance continue to be a problem in Los Angeles. In 1995, according to Anti-Defamation League figures, the number of hate crimes in Los Angeles County nearly doubled, from 68 to 121. California ranked second nationwide in hate crime incidents.

“Our dream is to open the dialogue and give kids information,” Lambert said. “When someone says something about a black person or a Jew, we want someone to stand up and say that’s bad information. Bigotry comes when you don’t have information.”

Students who make the 10-day trek to Israel are selected by high school teachers, who recommend youth with leadership qualities and who voluntarily escort the Israeli students when they visit Los Angeles. All of the students’ travel expenses are paid for by the Anti-Defamation League, which uses private donations.

Many students who participated in the program had no exposure to Jewish culture before traveling to Israel. “I didn’t know anything about Jewish people, let alone black Jews,” said Martinique Mays, who in 1994 as a 17-year-old senior at Gardenia High School was among the first Los Angeles students to visit Israel.

Mays said the trip had a profound effect on her and changed the way she and other members of her group view the world. “It was like a total cathartic experience,” Mays said.

She said many of her fellow students had never examined other cultures or ventured far beyond Los Angeles. She recalled that when she arrived in Israel she expected to see a land in ruins and at war, but was surprised to discover a place that, to her, seemed safer than Los Angeles.

Marjorie Green, director of education for the Anti-Defamation League, said the experience of the Israelis, many of whom had to sneak out of their native countries to emigrate, resonated strongly with many of the minority students who had immigrated to the United States.

Other students said the experience brought them closer to their faith. “It brought lots of things out of the Bible,” said Gerson Ramirez, 17, a senior at the Downtown Business Magnetic School, who visited Israel last year.

While in Israel, Ramirez and 15 other U.S. students met five youths from the town of Afula who had survived a 1994 suicide bombing attack. Last month, the five Israeli teenagers came to Los Angeles to talk about the perils of racial hatred and then traveled to Oklahoma City to talk with youths who lived through the April 1994 explosion at the federal building there.

Green said the students, who came from a variety of backgrounds, learned to reach out to each other and became close friends.

“We came together,” Mays said of her group. “It was a real serious bond.”

Students from both groups continue to meet monthly and have spoken at other high schools about the need to bridge racial boundaries, Green said. She added that the Anti-Defamation League is hoping to make a video out of their discussions for use at other high schools.

“You have to understand each other, no matter how they look from the outside,” Ramirez said. Mays, who is pursuing a music career, wrote a poem about how her experience in Israel changed her.

“I became liberated,” she wrote, “. . . the kind of liberation that makes you free enough to live in a world where unity is an ordinary thing.”

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The Beat

Today’s centerpiece focuses on Children of the Dream, a program that brings Israeli youths to Los Angeles and sends local students to Israel. This effort is run by the Anti-Defamation League in Los Angeles. For information, contact Marjorie Green, director of education for the ADL, at (310) 446-8000.