Shuvu began with an impassioned drashah by Rav Avrohom Pam at the 1989 convention of Agudath Israel. Rav Pam spoke about the responsibility of American Jewry to provide the thousands of immigrant children arriving in Israel from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) with the Torah education denied to them by the Soviets for 70 years.
Today Shuvu is a vast network of kindergartens elementary schools and high schools serving Russian-speaking families and others. But before the first Shuvu school was dedicated the organization provided supplementary programs for independent religious schools which were ill-equipped to receive children from nonreligious Russian-speaking families.
Sha’arei Torah in Haifa was one such school. It is located in a neighborhood with a large Arab population where a lot of new Russian immigrants moved because of the cheap rents. Shuvu’s director Chaim Mikael Guttermann wanted to set up an afternoon program in the school but did not have the $700-per-month budget.
On a fundraising trip to the United States a few years after Shuvu started Gutterman went to brief Rav Pam. He mentioned the Haifa program and his inability to finance it. While he was speaking to Rav Pam he heard Rebbetzin Pam speaking on the phone to a travel agent and booking a reservation to Israel.
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