For more than 65 years, ORT Netherlands has been supporting educational projects for children on an international scale.
Maimonides Jewish Community School in Amsterdam affiliated with ORT in 2019, the same year it was ranked as northern Holland’s number one school.
ORT Netherlands’ fundraising initiatives have supported major programs, including the Future Leaders Program, the ORT school in Sofia, and the installation of smart classrooms in Israel and Ukraine.
After the Second World War, ORT Netherlands provided training for refugees from Eastern Europe and Dutch survivors, including many hundreds of orphans and Jewish children with learning difficulties. The number of students grew quickly across the Netherlands and ORT organized courses in woodwork, bookbinding, and clothes cutting and sewing. For most of these early students, the Netherlands represented a short stop on their way to other destinations – mostly in Israel.
From 1948, with the increase in emigration to Israel, the number of ORT students in the country started to decline.
From the mid-1980s until the early-1990s, ORT briefly supported teacher training programs in robotics, establishing a high-tech robotics laboratory at the Technology Institute of Eindhoven and translating some of ORT’s learning materials for use within Dutch schools.
Latvia
The Dubnov Jewish School in Riga is the only Jewish school in Latvia. It joined the ORT network in 2010.
Israel
World ORT operates in Israel as World ORT Kadima Mada (WOKM), implementing programs that have raised standards of STEM education in underprivileged communities throughout the country’s northern and southern peripheries.
Switzerland
ORT Switzerland is a fundraising organization supporting ORT programs in Israel, across Europe and other continents.