Months into the war, young Israelis take on new emotions and new responsibilities

Editor’s note: The Bronfman Fellowship is an educational program for Jewish high school students from North America and Israel. This is our fifth installment of pieces showcasing the experience of some of Bronfman’s Israeli fellows and alumni since the Oct. 7 terror attack.

‘The teenagers who come here are amazing’

JERUSALEM — Oct. 7 shook our very foundations. Banal terms received a new, frightening, threatening meaning: Home. Family. Holiday. Morning. A heavy shadow hovers over everything. Not just terms relating to our personal lives; communal terms also lost their familiar meaning in this earthquake. Leadership. Army. Education. The breakdown of our public sector led to the flowering of civil initiatives, and I was blessed with the opportunity to be part of one of them.

In normal times, I am the Youth Coordinator at Beit Avi Chai in Jerusalem. One week after Oct. 7, when Jerusalem was in the process of absorbing thousands of teenagers without a sufficient educational response, the educational staff at Beit Avi Chai welcomed teenagers staying at the hotel across the street to a learning center that was set up in the building. The learning center began as a place to take a break, to breathe and gain strength, and slowly turned into a school framework with the Ministry of Education now involved in managing the school. School days include lessons from the highest quality teachers (experienced staff, some of whom are retirees who were called upon to return to teaching in a reality when many teachers have been enlisted, and there is a very serious shortage of teachers), as well as experiential workshops led by Beit Avi Chai (carpentry, karate, baking, art, theater — spaces for creativity, for physical work, and for multidisciplinary expression). Around 40 teenagers, who were evacuated from the communities around Gaza almost two months ago, come to this learning center each day for four hours which serve as a break from the hotel and the intensity of life crowded into rooms without privacy.

Learning together — the personal relationship to each student, the experiential break times that give space for personal expression — enables teenagers to have a little stability in the midst of an unstable reality. I feel like we are in an educational laboratory, establishing a school that is adapted precisely to the characteristics of a shifting reality with all of its challenges.

How is it possible to encourage routine learning during this time of unbearable loss of friends and family and classmates who are hostages in Gaza?

How do we relate to smartphones in a class of teenagers for whom a smartphone represents existential security, because smartphones warn them of the need to go to a safe room within seconds?

How do we bring parents back into the educational picture of their children, in situations where the parents have lost their livelihood, their homes and their families? Especially at a time when living at a hotel, without home or stability, often leads to the breakdown of parental authority.

The teenagers who come here are amazing. They are brave and love life, and they are restoring a sense of control and stability to their lives, taking advantage of any opening that reality allows them. It is a privilege to be part of a team working on this crucial task — creating a beneficial educational routine in a temporary reality.

— Shira Rosenak30

‘The source of our strength’

JERUSALEM — This year, I am learning in a beit midrash (seminary) for women, Migdal Oz. Some of the women who learn here just finished high school while others have already completed their army or national services.I will be enlisted to the army in the summer, and until then I am here. I believe that learning Torah is not just for one year but is integrated into all of life. Now, I am trying to gain tools for learning Torah for the rest of my life, through the teachers and content that I encounter here.

After about a month of educational work in my neighborhood, I returned to my midrasha (seminary), and I started volunteering in the mornings at a hotel in Jerusalem which houses evacuees from Sderot and Kiryat Shmona. I work in the fifth and sixth grade classes, part of the temporary elementary school the hotel has set up.

The kids at the hotel are restless. It is difficult to find several minutes of quiet or any kind of continuity in learning. The attempt to create an educational framework for these kids, whose lives were turned upside down in a single day, is not always successful despite the good intentions of the volunteers and teachers.

One moment of hope from the last few days was when the teacher showed the students some cards that were sent to them from kids living in the center of the country. In these sweet cards, with their sweet drawings, were questions about how our students are feeling and what they are going through at this time.

The teacher invited our students to write cards back. The children were very touched by this gesture and wrote in their cards notes like “we are a bit scared,” and “you are also brave, not just us, and you are keeping us strong, so thank you.” They described how “it is not fun for us in the hotel, and we are waiting to go home.” Our students have gone through so much in the last month. These moments of honesty and openness, when they were writing to their peers from across Israel, were moments when it was hard to hide my tears. These days, this is the source of our strength in this land.

— Or Dembitz18

‘My heart was totally crushed’

ZIKHRON YA’AKOV, Israel — Since Oct. 7, I have had feelings and experiences that are new to me. I never thought I would hear about such horrors. I never imagined that these kinds of events would be etched in my heart at such a young age. I could not have imagined I would feel such a great concern for people whom I never met, but feel so close to.

Since Simchat Torah, I have slowly gotten back into my routine. At first, each day was different. My friends and I volunteered with different projects and agricultural work. But with time, I went back to work, while everything that happened remains in my head.

I want to share with you a particular moment when I went into Tel Aviv, to the place where the families of the hostages were gathered, because I wanted to express my support. I sat there and held pictures of three children who were hostages, all from the same family — the Brodutch family, who were taken captive with their mother to Gaza, while their father remained in Israel. Suddenly, two men arrived and stood in front of me, looking at the pictures. One of them began to cry, and only after several minutes did I understand that it was the children’s father, Avichai. He said a few words to me and laughed, “They will kill me when they come back and see their pictures everywhere.” My heart was totally crushed — from worry, from pain, from looking him in the eyes and seeing his helplessness.

This morning, as I am writing about this moment, is the morning after Avichai’s children and wife were freed from captivity and returned to him, after 51 days of pain and anxiety. My heart is with all of the people who have not yet been reunited with their families.

I am full of anxiety regarding the situation of my dear friends from Bronfman — such sensitive, gentle, good-hearted men, who are fighting evil, who are fighting with tremendous self-sacrifice in Gaza, already for a long time. I miss them so much. I am also full of worry for all of the hostages who have not yet returned to us, to my great sadness. May they all return already.

I want to ask whoever is able to join me to pray for the souls of the survivors of the massacres at the kibbutzim and at the music festival, for the families of the survivors, for the families of the soldiers who have fallen and who have been injured. May we all send them light and love.

I also pray that all of us, men and women from all over the world, will soften our hearts, will free ourselves of hatred, and will never harden our hearts against the suffering of those who are different from us. Now, I see how much it hurts to experience the lack of recognition of the pain and suffering that our people are going through. I know that all people harden their hearts to the pain of the “other.” But I want to pray that it will be different.

— Rona Gerzon21