Kathleen Eligado, the 11-year-old daughter of Filipino migrant workers, has starred on a kids’ singing contest show on Israeli television. JTA photo by Keshet TV. TEL AVIV—With eyes closed, it would have been difficult to guess that the female voice with the amazing range singing a Hebrew classic was a shy-looking, 11- year-old Filipina.

But there was Kathleen Eligado performing Miri Aloni’s “Ballad of Hedva and Shlomik” before a prime-time television audience of a million Israelis. Eligado, born in Israel to Filipino migrant worker parents, is one of the stars of the popular Israeli show “Music School,” a kind of “American Idol” for kids, finishing the season in second place.

Her performance gave new meaning to the quintessentially Israeli song. Lyrics written to describe the culture shock of leaving the kibbutz for the city— “I’m alone in a strange city, as if I have no choice”— seemed in Eligado’ s rendition to be the blues of a Third World immigrant who ends up in Tel Aviv.

Yet for Eligado and thousands of other children of foreign workers from the Philippines and elsewhere, Israel is now home—for many, the only home they have ever known. Some came to Israel as children; others were born in the country. Tel Aviv alone is home to an estimated 3,600 children of foreign workers and asylum seekers, according to the city’s municipality data.

As they integrate into Israeli society, the children of foreign workers are crafting identities that are similar yet distinct from those of the country’s Jewish majority.

Of all the nationalities represented among migrant workers, Filipinos are the quickest to integrate, said Tamar Schwartz, a social worker at Mesila Aid and Information Center for the Foreign Community in Tel Aviv.

“Compared to other migrants, Filipinos usually speak articulate English, often are well-educated and have a strong family ethic that emphasizes discipline and respect for elders,” Schwartz said. “And incidents of child abuse are low. As a result, there is less of a gap between them and Israeli society, which makes it easier for them to integrate.”

But while Filipinos excel at integrating into Israeli society, the biggest challenge is avoiding deportation.

In 2006, under pressure from advocacy groups, the Israeli government—in what was billed as a one-time-only measure— provided about 900 children with permanent residency. Their close relatives—parents and siblings—received temporary residency, which would become permanent only after the children served in the Israel Defense Forces.

Among the children who received permanent residency in 2006 is Jewellri Joy, 18, now serving in the IDF Police Corps. Like many children of foreign workers living in Tel Aviv, the Israeli-born Joy, whose mother is from the Philippines and whose father is from Thailand, attended the Bialik-Rogozin School.

Most of her fellow students were children of foreign workers and asylum seekers, along with immigrants from Ethiopia or the former Soviet Union and a few native Israelis. Still, Joy said that growing up in south Tel Aviv made her “totally” Israeli.

While her family attends Mass at St. Anthony’s Church in Jaffa and celebrates Christian holidays, not Jewish ones, she said she would have no problem dating or marrying an Israeli Jew. Joy said that one of the main reasons she enlisted in the IDF was to provide her family with permanent residency.

In 2010, the Israeli government approved the recommendations of an interministerial committee to provide residency to an additional group of children and their families. To qualify, the child had to speak fluent Hebrew and be enrolled in the first through 12th grades of a state school during the 2010-11 school year. The child’s parents had to have entered Israel legally, even if they had since overstayed their work permit.

About 800 children were said to have met the criteria, but they are still waiting to receive their residency status. About 400 children were rejected and thus slated for deportation.

Unlike Joy, the majority of children of foreign workers have yet to receive any sort of legal residency status, Schwartz said.

Janelle Pancho, 16, born in Israel to Filipino parents, wanted to join her 11th-grade classmates at Herzliya’s Harishonim High School on a trip to Poland to visit Auschwitz. But without residency status, she cannot leave the country.

“I went to the local Interior Ministry office to get a special visa, but the clerk rejected my request,” Pancho recalled. “Then she asked, ‘Why haven’t you been expelled from the country?’”

Pancho said she thought that she had not received residency because of a bureaucratic mixup.

Unlike children of migrants in south Tel Aviv, Pancho attended schools where the vast majority of her fellow students were Jewish Israelis.

“Even though I am not Jewish, I feel a part of it,” she said. “I’ve been invited over to my friends’ houses for Shabbat and Jewish holidays. And we even celebrate Passover at home, though not the way it is supposed to be done.”

But without residency status, Pancho will not be able to undergo her peers’ most important rite of passage—army service.

“All of my friends are beginning to get letters from the IDF to prepare for the first stage of draft. But I haven’t,” she said.

Pancho said she respected the Israelis’ desire to maintain a strong Jewish majority in Israel.

“I understand that this is supposed to be a Jewish state and that I am Christian,” she said. “But my parents came to this country as guests. They came to work. They have a right to establish a family. And there was nothing in the law that said that they were not allowed to.”. London-based expert in Middle Eastern antiquities who has authored a 23-page report on the documents, told JTA that they emerged on the London market several months ago. Goldelman said he had been enlisted by a dealer to sell the documents on his behalf. At present, Goldelman said he was trying to broker an agreement with the various dealers to bring the collection together. Goldelman estimates their total value at about $5-million.

“They are not things that are stolen from an institution or found in a legal excavation,” Goldelman said. “At some point, everything that comes from the ground goes to the black market. The black market, this is the institution that helps to save this material. If something has, let’s say, commercial value, it gets saved. If you don’t have a commercial value for the manuscript, they go and put it in the fireplace.”

Goldelman’s involvement may not reassure skittish buyers about their provenance. In 2010, two professors reportedly accused him of trafficking in stolen antiquities and protested his scheduled appearance at a conference in Israel. Goldelman’s lawyer denied the accusations and threatened to sue for libel.

None of the experts who have spoken publicly on the matter of the Afghan documents appeared to be too troubled by unanswered questions about their origins, seeming to accept such things as the cost of doing business in ancient artifacts.

“What is important for us is that these fragments and documents don’t get buried again in some safe of a collector,” said Haggai Ben-Shammai, a professor of Arabic at Hebrew University and the academic director of Israel’s National Library. Ben-Shammai said the library was searching for a donor who would acquire the manuscripts on its behalf.

“We don’t have the means to acquire them on our own,” Ben- Shammai said. “We need some assistance in this.” .