W. Hempstead grad links aerospace and aliyah

West Hempstead’s Chayah Rosenblum was spending the year at seminary in Jerusalem when she received a life-changing email. She was accepted to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. “I wasn’t sure what time it was in the U.S., but I immediately called my parents.” 

Rosenblum would withdraw her acceptance from the University of Maryland, she told them, attend the Technion and make aliyah to live permanently in Israel. “I was so excited!”

Raised Orthodox in West Hempstead, Rosenblum attended Yeshiva University High School for Girls where she was a member of the school’s Torah U’Madda Accelerated Scholars Circle, wrote articles for a Biblical studies review and poems for the school’s literary journal. So her decision to live and study in Israel might not be extraordinary, but what she will be studying certainly is — aerospace engineering.

Though the numbers are on the rise, women in engineering is still a rarity in the general population, and they are particularly uncommon in the Orthodox community. Women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but only one out of seven engineers is female, according to a 2011 U.S. Department of Commerce study. The same ratio holds for female engineering faculty in the U.S.

“Since I was little, I was always asking my parents how everything worked,” Rosenblum recalls. “Now, what interests me most is how airplanes work. I want to learn more, and maybe make aerospace my career.”

Chayah is currently enrolled in the Civil Engineering bachelor’s program at the Technion International School, where courses are taught in English. She intends to become fluent enough in Hebrew to transfer to the Technion Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, where she will study in Hebrew alongside Israelis. She also plans to continue her Judaic studies.