“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.
Read more at jns.org.
