Younited Scholarship Funds

A Younited Scholarship Fund makes a lasting impact on students locally and globally. By funding education and the training of leaders with conflict mitigation skills, your generosity can create future leaders and changemakers.

We invite you to establish a named or anonymous scholarship and join the Younited Family in working toward a better, more peaceful future.

Establish a Scholarship Fund

For a minimum of $25,000 per year you can create a need-based, merit-based, and/or academics-based scholarship.

For further information about establishing a scholarship fund, please contact Clare King Lassman at clare@younitedschool.org.

Younited’s scholarship fund includes special opportunities for students who commit to additional volunteering hours in Israel during the school year or in their home country during breaks. In this way, they embody the mission of the school. Students selected to receive these personal scholarships will provide progress reports to the donor.

Recipients of Noemi’s Scholarship Fund will be young people who have already demonstrated a commitment to service. They will commit to additional volunteer hours while studying at Younited. Each year two students will be chosen by a committee to receive this special scholarship. At regular intervals, they will prepare a report showing the impact of their volunteering on them and the community. Recipients will be encouraged to continue giving back to the community after they graduate Younited.

Noemi’s Scholars will have the privilege of meeting with Noemi.

Caroline and Oscar Strassberg, my parents, lived in Antwerp, Belgium in the late 1930s.

There were rumblings of Nazi uprisings in Europe, so they prepared for a swift exit by purchasing a small suitcase for each and settling their finances.

Read More About Caroline and Oscar Strassberg

Caroline and Oscar Strassberg, my parents, lived in Antwerp, Belgium in the late 1930s.

There were rumblings of Nazi uprisings in Europe, so they prepared for a swift exit by purchasing a small suitcase for each and settling their finances.

They also made plans to meet friends in the South of France. One night they heard actual rumblings! They scooped up three-year-old me and their small suitcases and headed out to find a cab to start our journey south. Soon after, word reached them that Vichy France entered the war on the Nazi’s side, and they could travel no farther south!

I have no recollection of any of this. I have heard the stories many times! Of the days and nights spent running, hiding, meeting friends, bribing, packed tightly in train stations waiting for a way out, and finally…maybe a way out!

They made it back to Ostend where they befriended a worker on an Egyptian freighter, who happened to be married to a Jewish woman. He took pity on my parents and asked his captain to take us with them wherever they were going. Initially, the captain refused, but ultimately he agreed to pick us up in the water, as he was not allowed back on shore after loading his cargo. When the cargo was loaded, we climbed a rope ladder into the freighter!

We traveled to Ireland. They refused us entrance. We were finally accepted into England where they kept us confined, since my father was half Austrian.

In 1941 we settled in London. From that point, until they were no longer able, my parents worked tirelessly raising money for Israel, from even before it was established. Important government leaders who negotiated with Britain to create the State of Israel, came to our home to help fundraise. As a member of Habonim, I sang Israeli songs to entertain them! My parents’ efforts inspired me to follow in their footsteps to continue supporting important projects in Israel.

In 1953 we moved to New York. We connected with some remaining family members who had spent the war years in Cuba after being denied entry to the US. My parents continued their involvement in Zionist affairs, although on a more modest scale until their deaths.

My father, Oscar Strassberg, died in 1965. My mother, Caroline Strassberg, moved to Florida after spending time in Israel, and died in 2008.

Born on January 10, 1936 in Paris, Danielle Haddad came from an Ashkenazi Jewish family from Ukraine, who fled the pogroms in the late 19th Century to Palestine, North America and France. Her parents were born in Palestine; her mother in Petah Tikvah in 1902, and her father in Jerusalem in 1898. They later settled in Paris and developed a small carpentry business. They were involved in the “broken faces” campaign which helped World War I war veterans with head injuries.

The period of World War II was a painful time for Danielle, as for so many others. Her father was imprisoned in 1940, and spent the entire war at the Compiègne Camp, “protected” from deportation by his American passport. Following a tip-off, and along with her mother and two younger brothers, Danielle was arrested on January 23, 1944 by the French police. They were transferred to the Drancy transit camp near Paris, before being sent to Vittel in the East of France in June 1944. Thankfully, they were part of a prisoner exchange that took them, by train and boat, to Petah Tikvah, where they stayed until 1947 with her mother’s family. Her father, meanwhile, restarted the family carpentry business that had been confiscated during the war.

These years shaped Danielle’s personality: an appetite for life and for food; a burning desire to protect her loved ones; the skill to listen to others and fight injustice of all kinds; and, as her duty to remember, giving testimony in schools.

With a baccalaureate in literature, Danielle dreamed of becoming a film director. Then she met the man who became her husband, Gilbert, a Sephardic Jew from Tunisia who had come to work in Paris in 1958. After starting a family, she turned to teaching, in nursery schools and later, to children with disabilities.

She was involved in non-profits and political structures, including the Human Rights League, the Memory and Vigilance Association, and the French Friends of Givat Haviva since their foundation in 2010.