HAIFA, Israel—“You’re from the Jewish school?” the French Ministry of Education official quizzed the teenage girl who had come for her post-high school baccalaureate exam.
The examiner began firing off the most difficult questions on the physics test, seemingly seeking to trip up the high school senior, but Noa Uziel, 18, who was at the top of her class at Paris’s Yabne school, stood her ground.
“Are you going to cry?” the Education Ministry official pressed her. “I am the one who chooses the questions.”
A life journey changed by Oct. 7
It was more than a year earlier, after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, that Uziel had already decided she wanted to move to Israel, abandoning her previous plans to study in France.
“At that moment, I felt that it was no longer the same,” Uziel recounted in an interview with JNS in the northern Israeli port city of Haifa, where she is currently studying in a new Israeli educational program aimed at helping students gain admission to one of the world’s leading engineering schools.
The intensive nine-month preparatory program in Israel, Prépa MAT, is designed for outstanding French-speaking high school science graduates. It aims to prepare international students for admission to—and academic success at—the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
“I knew that even if I wanted to help Israel from Paris, it would not be the same as living here,” she said, recalling her fear of taking the one-hour train and metro commute to her Jewish high school in the months following the Oct. 7 attacks.
The Jewish high school senior went on to pass the national exam, albeit with a lower score than her grade-point average. A complaint filed against the official—who, it later emerged, had repeatedly singled out the handful of Jewish students taking the test—went unanswered.
A new beginning
Last October, Uziel was one of 21 French teens selected from 50 applicants to join the new program in Haifa, which is run under the auspices of Masa Israel Journey and includes intensive training in mathematics, physics, psychometric exam preparation and a Hebrew-language ulpan.
Since its founding in 2004, Masa Israel Journey has brought more than 220,000 young Jewish adults from over 60 countries to Israel through a variety of educational programs aimed at immersing Diaspora Jews in Israeli society.
The wartime launch of the new program comes at a time of growing uncertainty for Jewish communities abroad, particularly in France, home to some 450,000 Jews and the largest Muslim population in Europe. A recent survey found that nearly four out of five French Jews feel unsafe.
Even the air-raid sirens that sounded this winter during Iranian missile and rocket attacks—which participants said offered a different perspective on Israel than previous visits during peacetime—left them largely unfazed because of the unity they encountered.
“Despite the hard reality of the war, I found here a family,” Uziel said.
‘I feel freer here’
“I feel freer living here as a Jew,” said Shani Allal, 17, who told JNS she previously felt compelled to hide both her Judaism and her visits to Israel from classmates at her public high school in Paris, where “Free Palestine” stickers covered the walls.
“I didn’t tell anybody except my family and close friends that I was coming to Israel because I was afraid there was going to be a reaction,” she said.
The teenager, whose older brother moved to Israel several years ago, said she always knew she would eventually make the move herself.
“The only question was right after high school or later on,” she said.
She ultimately chose to come last fall despite the regional turmoil, leaving behind rising antisemitism in Europe and embracing new challenges, including rocket and missile alerts during the war.
While participants in the program arrived in Israel on their own, Allal said her parents plan to join her this summer.
“Here we are free,” she said.
