Afula’s largest high school marks official day of mourning with somber yet hopeful ceremony
With a nod to the Hebrew calendar, schools around Israel hold official events marking one year since the Hamas onslaught on southern Israel that sparked the ongoing war
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
The official ceremony marking a year to the Hamas onslaught on southern Israel got underway promptly at 10:15 a.m. Sunday at Ort Ben Gurion High School in the northern town of Afula. With students, staff and other attendees largely dressed in white and sitting outside in 31° C (88° F) heat, the event, which lasted about an hour, was a somber return to the school routine after the break for the Jewish High Holidays.
“The holidays are over and a new year has come,” said pedagogical director Ayelet Yishai as she opened the event, but there is still the “painful vision of the past year, which was absolutely terrible.” The morning’s ceremony marked “a rest stop within an ongoing current… Going forward, along with the mourning, we will also engage in rebuilding, alongside the pain,” she said.
The ceremony, she explained, would center around the lighting of seven candles, each symbolizing a central educational theme relating to the October 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 and abduction of 251 to Gaza that sparked the ongoing seven-front war. The chosen themes included: memory, pain, bravery, social cohesion, healing, peace and hope. The first candle was lit, dedicated to the memory of the fallen, as the nearby Israeli flag was lowered to half-staff.
Individual educational institutions produced their own events utilizing a set of broad guidelines released earlier in the month by the Education Ministry. Many schools had independently held smaller assemblies marking the year according to the secular calendar, on October 7 itself.
The guidelines included pedagogical material and suggestions on how to approach the difficult subject according to grade level. The events are to “focus on stories of heroism and courage of the hundreds of citizens and members of security forces” who lost their lives on October 7, the ministry said.
Most schools modeled the October 7 events after the ceremonies held on Israel’s Memorial Day or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which fall in the spring, and asked students and staff to wear white on Sunday.
The official government date to commemorate October 7, the 24th day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, was decided in March. The 24th of Tishrei, usually the first day of school following the Sukkot holiday break, fell on Saturday this year, so the government and school system officially commemorated the October 7 events a day later on Sunday, the 25th of Tishrei, or October 27.
A ceremony for all
Ort Ben Gurion High School has some 1,100 students in grades 7-12, most of whom were present on Sunday, school officials told The Times of Israel. It is the largest school in Afula, a working-class city of some 65,000 in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel.
Several graduates of the school have fallen in the fighting, but the Sunday ceremony was dedicated to the dozen-plus Afula residents or former residents who were killed during the war, including at the Nova festival massacre on October 7, school principal Iris Krel told The Times of Israel.
Ort Ben Gurion, which has strong science and art programs, is “a complicated school, like all high schools in the State of Israel, with students of all styles and colors… this last year was very challenging for everyone. We have a lot of work around rebuilding resilience,” she said.
Because of the “circles of communities” in Afula, and because many students have family outside the city, nearly every pupil knows someone who has been directly affected by either October 7 or the ongoing conflict, Krel said.
As the ceremony went on and more candles were lit, interspersed with short speeches and student musical or dance performances, the assembled students, under the watchful eyes of staff members, were remarkably quiet. A small stream of students, hot from sitting in the sun, were permitted to move their chairs to one corner of the yard, where there was some shade.
Several former students currently serving in the IDF or Border Police were present in their uniforms for the ceremony, as were a handful of staff members currently in reserve duty who were allowed to return for the event. The facility, part of an educational complex containing several schools, was ringed by new duplexes and multistory apartment buildings, and the amplified speeches echoed loudly in the concrete surroundings.
During a speech for the fourth candle, dedicated to “Jewish communities and social cohesion,” teacher Anat Lalush, in addition to praising the “diverse, complex, scattered and united Jewish people” who volunteered in various ways over the last year, made special mention of “the team of teachers and workers who all mobilized, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Circassians, Bedouins… everyone together lent a hand for one strong nation.”
Ort Ben Gurion has staff members from all these communities, and, unusually, a number of non-Jewish students as well, Krel said.
“These communities are critical to the State of Israel,” she stressed, as is the ethos of volunteering, which the students have been “deeply engaged” with since October 7.
High school seniors face the future
Sunday’s ceremony was “the high point of a process” of learning about October 7 the students have been engaged with for some time, noted Netzer Maoz, who as vice principal in charge of the high school is responsible for the education of the 10-12th graders at Ort Ben Gurion.
All of the themes and texts used during the ceremony had already been studied, he said, and the school’s art students had been working for weeks on several displays set up around the school grounds, including pieces dedicated to Gaza Envelope communities ravaged during October 7 and an exhibit dedicated to the remaining hostages still held in Gaza.
The current group of 12th graders are in a “very complex situation” as they have to decide what to do next – whether to enlist in the IDF, or go to a pre-army program or do a service year, Maoz said. The school, and Afula in general, he noted, had a “very high” rate of IDF enlistment.
Some of the 12th graders were due to go on a trip this week to concentration camps in Poland, a journey long considered a rite of passage for Israel high schoolers but something that has deeper resonance these days, he added.
“In the meantime, we try to make things as normal as we can,” he said, but noted that was not so easy personally as he had spent much of the last year in reserve duty. “I am due to go back in two days, for another two and a half months,” he said.
The ceremony ended on an upbeat note, with the final candle symbolizing “hope and faith.” All the 12th-grade students were invited to the stage, holding yellow balloons, as everyone stood for a prayer for IDF soldiers, similar to one that is recited in many religious Zionist synagogues. Students then performed a rendition of Israel’s national anthem “Hatikvah,” after which the balloons were released.
