By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
All of the 2012 Block Award and Rosen Scholarship recipients onstage at the Stroum Jewish Community Center on Mercer Island.
For 53 years, the Seattle chapter of the American Jewish Committee has awarded more than 1,000 Seattle area teens — some of them Jewish, many of them not — the Max Block award, in honor of one of the chapter’s early presidents. These high school juniors and seniors in Washington State, “in their daily lives,” according to AJC Seattle executive director Wendy Rosen, “demonstrate exemplary human relations conduct in their dealings with others without regard to race, creed or national origin.”
These students, she said, are not always the ones with the highest grades or the stars of the football team.
“Young people, who in the face of street violence, complicated family lives, poverty and disease, have a vision to create a better world for all of us,” Rosen told family and friends of this year’s 24 award winners at a ceremony on May 10. “Despite the pressures of their daily lives, they take the time to make their vision a reality.”
Hong Dinh of Evergreen Campus High School is a gifted artist who overcame learning disabilities to enroll in college-level AP classes.
The students come from many different ethnic and economic backgrounds. They include Juleh Eide, who suffered hearing loss as an infant and currently volunteers at Seattle Children’s Hospital. And Saba Hadush, a student at Ballard High School, who has been recognized in her school for her work with the suicide prevention and awareness group, Student Lives Always Matter. Or Olivia Ochoa, whose love of theater brought her to Second Story Repertory in Redmond and the community of Jonestown, Miss. as an on-stage teaching assistant.
Three of the students honored received $2,000 scholarships from former AJC Seattle board president Deborah Rosen. Deborah Rosen told the audience that all of the students in attendance had made it onto the stage that evening because of their “core principle, which lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions which calls on us to help our fellow man.”
Rosen award winner Gillian Friedman of Roosevelt High School attended a weeklong program called Youth Undoing Institutional Racism at Seattle Freedom School two summers ago, where her eyes opened to the poverty she never knew existed in her own city.
“I’d never been in a room with so many people of color,” she said of her experience. “I felt vulnerable, different, and most of all ignorant. I knew nothing of poor neighborhoods, racial profiling, police brutality, losing a friend to gang violence or a brother to jail.”
One of the three Rosen scholarship recipients was never expected to live beyond 2 months of age. But Ofelia Sanchez survived, and as she reached 2 years old, her doctors thought she would never walk. Born with a mild cerebral palsy to a poor family in Mexico, Sanchez’s parents decided when she was in the 5th grade to come to the U.S. to make a better life. Despite her disabilities and the shyness that resulted from them, as a freshman at Interlake High School, Sanchez joined Elitas, a club that works with Latino students to help them achieve better grades and share their native traditions.
At Interlake she has thrived, helping her fellow students and working to create programs to involve the non-English—speaking parents of those students so they can better understand what their children need to apply for college and why it’s important that they go to college.
Sanchez, who crossed the stage on both feet to accept her award, said she wants to “continue motivating students to help them with [their] education.”
Ofelia Sanchez, who has made a difference for the Latino students in her high school, receives her Rosen award from Deborah Rosen.