Dr. Maro Gete, an ENT resident at Jerusalem’s Shaarei Tzedek Hospital by day, returns to his childhood home-away-from-home, the Boys Town Jerusalem Dormitory, at night.

Boys Town Jerusalem, founded in 1948, is one of Israel’s premier institutions for educating the country’s next generation of leaders in the fields of technology, commerce, education, the military and public service. With over 900 students and an 18-acre campus, Boys Town Jerusalem pursues its mission of providing young boys from limited backgrounds with an education that can provide them with a limitless future. With classes from junior high through the college level, Boys Town Jerusalem’s three-part curriculum of academics, technology and Torah transforms disadvantaged youths into productive citizens.

Maro Gete, 32, one of 11 children, was born in a small village in Ethiopia; his family later immigrated to Israel in 1991. At the age of 13, Maro attended Boys Town Jerusalem, a school known for its strong religious and academic education. Maro lived and studied at school, where he graduated in 2001 with a major in physics and computers. He credits his teachers at Boys Town Jerusalem with enabling him to develop into the person he is today. “They helped me acculturate and feel at home as a Jew in Israel,” he said.

Maro Gete was later accepted to Ben Gurion University Medical School, where he completed his medical degree. He is beginning his residency at Shaarei Tzedek Hospital. The hospital is quite far from Dr. Gete’s home in Beer Sheva and he knew that he couldn’t commute daily. “Then I thought of my ‘home’ in Boys Town Jerusalem,” Dr. Gete explained. Boys Town Jerusalem immediately provided him with a room in the same dormitory he lived in as a student there. His wife and four children will be joining him this summer, and they plan to move closer to Jerusalem. But for now, “Boys Town, which was always my home, is now my haven,” said Dr. Gete.

By Esther Hirsch