Mekora Tarapeh would run up the steep, pine-covered hills on the outskirts of Addis Ababa for hours with friends, not realizing that his athletic skill would eventually help bring him to Israel.

Tarapeh, 19, along with several other Falash Mura teenage boys, was identified by an Ethiopian-Israeli running coach as having professional potential. Soon after, Tarapeh and his family’s request to immigrate was granted, after an eight-year wait at a transit compound for Jews in Ethiopia.

Tarapeh now rises at dawn for morning runs with a view of the Mediterranean. He’s training at Hadassah-Neurim, a boarding school near Netanya that helps immigrant students fulfill their athletic potential.

“Here I’m with other athletes all day. It helps me train. If I had, for example, been sent to study at a religious school, there would have been no time for my running,” he said. “My dream is to reach the Olympics, with God’s help. I love training. I cannot imagine a life without sports.”

The school’s new athletic stadium and track were officially inaugurated as the Marlene Post Athletic Center with a track-and-field meet earlier this month.

As a former Hadassah national president, Post had the honor of choosing a project that would bear her name, and she decided the youth aliya enterprise spoke most loudly to her.

“In sports you think differently, you approach life differently, you psych yourself up to move forward, to become a winner,” Post said. “It’s a wonderful way to build up one’s physical and mental abilities.”

As part of the inauguration ceremonies, Post donned a pair of sneakers and sprinted down the track with a student athlete.

The boarding school, known in Israel as a youth village, is funded by Hadassah and the Jewish Agency for Israel and has about 500 high school-aged students. Many come from homes that are struggling financially. Most are immigrants from Ethiopia or the former Soviet Union, although there are native-born Israelis as well.

Being an athlete can be an expensive pursuit. There’s little national funding in Israel for young athletes — especially young immigrant ones — so the school offers a rare opportunity to achieve.

Many students focus on track-and-field events, training up to twice a day with coaches, many who are immigrants themselves.

Athletes from the school have won hundreds of medals in Israeli championships, and have traveled abroad to compete.

Among the school’s top athletes is Regina Abdurashitov, 15. She was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and immigrated to Israel with her family in 2000. Her parents were both athletes in Uzbekistan who had worked as physical education teachers.

In Israel, Abdurashitov’s parents had to find other work, so her mother worked 12-hour shifts in a chocolate factory and her father became an auto mechanic. It would have been impossible for them to support her athletic training in track and field, where she is focusing on javelin throwing, Abdurashitov said.

At the school, Abdurashitov has her own coach and training regimen, which includes weight lifting, running, and technique instruction. She’s ranked first in the country in her age group for javelin throwing.

Her dorm room is full of medals, which she hangs in a long row on the wall.

“All you could ever ask for is here — friends, facilities, and lots of help. I love it here and cannot imagine being without [the school],” she said.

She trains about three hours a day, and has classes in the mornings and afternoons. She’s part of a training group of 14, the so-called “throwers,” all of whom are led in javelin or shot-put by coach Alex Grigorivker, 53.

Instruction is often in Russian: The entire group comes from the former Soviet Union and Grigorivker himself is from Ukraine, where he taught at an athletic academy. Methods were perhaps more rigorous there, but in Israel he has tried to be more flexible while not giving up on standards.

“I feel like a father to them,” Grigorivker said of the students. Like them, he lives on campus during the week and returns to his family on weekends.

Grigorivker has to deal with a heavier load than your average coach — dealing not just with issues of physical training and performance but often helping the students work out issues in their complicated home lives.

“They know that here they study and train, creating a very full schedule, and this helps. The training is intense and they learn through it that they can rely on themselves to accomplish things, and this will help them also later in life,” Grigorivker said.