Bar-Ilan U. grants students who are in IDF reserve duty emergency funds

After Tel Aviv University decided to grant NIS 1,000 apiece to 5,000 of its 30,000 students currently doing reserve duty, Bar-Ilan University (BIU) announced on Tuesday that it has established a NIS 16 million emergency fund to also assist a third of its 20,000 students who've been drafted into reserve duty. 

Students on the front lines will each receive a NIS 1,000-5,000 grant to be applied toward housing and tuition, emotional support, and additional study hours during the academic year. 

BIU president Prof. Arie Zaban said that “these students bear the weight not only of fighting for Israel's survival, but also the burden of concern for their and their families’ future. They’re distressed about how they'll pay for tuition and their rent. They’re fearful about covering their children’s expenses when they can’t work.”

He added that BIU “looks forward to seeing all our students back on campus as soon as the academic year begins. Thousands of our students are currently drafted into the reserves and others are volunteering in the variety of initiatives launched to benefit Israeli society. We greatly appreciate the contribution of each and every one of them. We have formed eight teams that will be in charge of reabsorbing students after the war. These teams are building an academic and emotional framework to ensure that the return to normalcy leaves no one behind.”

BIU director-general Zohar Yinon estimated that aside from the emergency fund, the university has invested an additional NIS 4 million ($1 m.) for a number of its initiatives launched in support of Israeli society as a whole. These initiatives include:

• a hotline manned by dozens of faculty members and graduates from the psychology department who are providing emotional support

• a school at Kfar Hamaccabiah in Ramat Gan launched by the Faculty of Education for evacuees of the Gaza Envelope

• a mock teddy-bear medical clinic to ease children’s fear of doctors set up by the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine

• a system that directs hundreds of students to various volunteering opportunities

• a mobile vision examination lab, dispatched by the School of Vision Sciences that has fitted hundreds of evacuees in Dead Sea and other hotels with new glasses

• lectures and seminars organized by the Center for Youth, lectures organized by the Faculty of Jewish Studies and the Faculty of Humanities

• briefings by researchers from the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies for the international and diplomatic communities

• activities in the US geared towards the fight against antisemitism organized by the Lookstein Center for Jewish Education and

• the distribution of hundreds of donated portable ultrasound machines to the IDF Medical Corps.