Golan Buchris, a resident of the northern city of Kiryat Shmona, was on vacation with his family in Eilat last year on Simchat Torah, the Jewish celebration that marks the end of the high holiday season. They had planned to leave the hotel and return home in the coming days — but that never happened.
That day, October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas-led terrorists launched an onslaught on southern Israel, butchering 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 251 to the Gaza Strip.
On October 8, the Hezbollah terror organization attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the northern border with Lebanon, drawing swift reprisal from Israel.
The Buchris family decided to stay a bit longer in Eilat, hoping to ride out the storm, but on October 20, the government officially ordered the evacuation of Kiryat Shmona. They have lived in Eilat ever since.
Now, with the new school year beginning on September 1 and northern evacuees still unable to return home as Hezbollah continues with what have become near-daily assaults, the Buchris family, like many in their situation, are unsure if they will ever return at all.
‘It’s a huge crisis. To say the situation isn’t simple is an understatement’
“It’s a huge crisis. To say the situation isn’t simple is an understatement,” Buchris said, speaking to The Times of Israel by phone.
According to data recently released by the Taub Center, some 68,500 Israelis have been evacuated from northern communities, settling around Israel in rented apartments, hotels or with family members. Of these, about 17,000 are school-age children, according to the Education Ministry.
Most of these students joined pre-existing schools in their new locale or enrolled in what the ministry calls “temporary educational frameworks” — a series of schools opened in various locations around Israel to accommodate evacuees.
Since the beginning of the conflict, Buchris, the head of the Kiryat Shmona Parents’ Association, has worked to keep tabs on the city’s children and help where he can.
“When this all started, no one thought it would continue for so long,” Buchris said, adding that many families from Kiryat Shmona have several children, and “each has different needs. One kid has a strong spirit, but another is afraid and they can’t handle it. One is stronger academically, and the other is less.”
“It’s a problem. It’s been a year, and they haven’t learned as they needed to, so there are large gaps,” he said.
The temporary schools opened by the Education Ministry just “aren’t as good… those who joined already existing schools have had it better,” Buchris said.
New K-12 schools were organized for Kiryat Shmona residents in Eilat, Tiberias and Tel Aviv, but these opened only in November of last year, and, given the unexpected and traumatic circumstances, were at first primarily concerned with providing activities, safe spaces and psychological services, Buchris explained.
“The students weren’t learning” and the schools only began “dealing with pedagogy” a few months later when it was understood that students would not be returning home in the near future, he said.
Now that these schools will continue, the ministry, teachers and parents should “stop looking at this as a temporary solution” and do better to provide a proper education for evacuee children, Buchris said.
A place for all, but no place at home
The main challenge the education system faces this year is ensuring that each of the evacuated students “will have a place” to learn properly, said Dr. Orna Simchon, head of the Education Ministry’s Northern District.
Her purview includes the evacuated communities directly along the northern border, but also 81 local councils “who are learning as usual, no problem,” she said, even as the pattern of strikes and retaliations between the IDF and Hezbollah has continued unabated since October.
“For the new year, we built 13 more temporary schools… to concentrate communities scattered in many places around the country,” Simchon said.
Whenever possible, the ministry has tried to create educational frameworks for evacuee children that provide for some continuity with their former situation, she said. For example in Acre, three new schools have been created for students from Shlomi, one of the evacuated communities, since a good concentration of evacuees had ended up there and in nearby locations.
“The students came there, and we bring them from the Haifa area so they can continue to learn. It’s still temporary, but it is a complete school,” Simchon said.
In another circumstance, two branches of the Danciger High School in Kiryat Shmona were opened, one near Tiberias and one in Tel Aviv, to serve the evacuee students who had already concentrated in those locations, she said.
Especially this year, it’s important to provide a sense of “continuity for students so they can learn and receive their education… creating this regularity is our primary task,” she stressed.
Calling the situation “very complex,” Simchon noted the difficulties in bringing staff to work in the northern schools since they in many cases are also scattered around the country, and the coordination required in adjusting activities due to sometimes daily rocket attacks.
Many of the students, parents and staff are also dealing with various psychological issues and fears relating to the war or the possibility of escalated hostilities, something which has hung over the north since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, she added.
‘If we build a good education system and security returns, I am optimistic that everything will be okay’
For the upcoming year, the Northern District has an operating budget of NIS 140 million ($38.2 million), with a further NIS 140 million provided for constructing temporary schools, additional bomb shelters and other infrastructure, according to Education Ministry figures provided by Simchon. The budget for all of last year and the summer was around NIS 200 million ($54.6 million), she said.
Simchon noted that plans are now being drawn up to create an organization for “the rebuilding of the north,” akin to Tekuma, the government-funded body created earlier this year to oversee the reconstruction of southern Israel.
“It’s complicated to manage the Northern District each day under fire,” Simchon said. “I myself am an evacuee. If we build a good education system and security returns, I am optimistic that everything will be okay, even though some in the community are thinking about not returning.”
130 students, 35 locations
One northern resident who may not return is Rabbi Ariel Frisch, principal of Hamatmid Ort Kiryat Shmona, a boys’ religious middle school.
“When I saw that the army wasn’t initiating any real attacks on the north, I knew there was no chance of coming back,” he said, speaking of the early weeks of the war.
Frisch also serves as second in command of Kiryat Shmona’s kitat konenut, the civilian armed security response team, and so even though he and his family have evacuated to Jerusalem, he still spends quite a bit of time in the largely empty city, and often quickly returns when there is a security incident or rocket strike.
Kiryat Shmona, normally a city of some 23,000 residents, has seen the majority of its population dispersed during the conflict, although some have stubbornly remained even as the city has been struck repeatedly by Hezbollah attacks.
“Kiryat Shmona was evacuated on October 20. It was not planned, so we scattered all over the country, from Eilat to the north. We have almost 6,000 kids in the municipality,” Frisch said.
The biggest group is in Tiberias, which has about 5,000 Kiryat Shmona residents and around 1,300 students, he added.
“We need to rebuild and provide educational services in every location where there is a resident. My students are in 35 different places, and I am one of the smallest schools, I have only 130 students,” Frisch said.
Some student bodies are much more dispersed: Danciger, Kiryat Shmona’s large high school, has around 1,300 students, and, despite the two temporary schools set up in Tiberias and Tel Aviv for concentrations of students there, Danciger students are still scattered in “about 200 locations,” Frisch said.
Despite the circumstances, Frisch said he is “making every effort to be relevant and stay in touch” as a school principal, which includes communication with parents and regular discussions with administrators at various schools where his students ended up.
He has also organized occasional meet-ups that draw students and families from all over the country, something he plans to keep up as his students, still nominally his responsibility, begin their second year of learning in other places.
‘People are afraid of rockets, of a Hezbollah invasion. People aren’t ready to be slaughtered’
Frisch said that he takes very seriously the idea of “helping them overcome their hardships. I can’t prevent them from becoming damaged from the war, but I can make it easier.”
For now, like other evacuees interviewed for this article, Frisch and his family aren’t sure about returning, despite their ties to Kiryat Shmona. “We did a survey, and 50 percent of residents said they aren’t coming back. People are afraid of rockets, of a Hezbollah invasion. People aren’t ready to be slaughtered,” he said.
Trauma with no end
“From my house in Metula, I would see Lebanon from three directions,” recalled psychologist Yoram Schleyer, who as the chairperson of the Israel Psychological Association lived for 20 years in Israel’s northernmost community before moving to the center of the country six years ago.
But since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, he has been in miluim, he said, rhetorically using the Hebrew word for reserve duty, as he was asked to become “responsible for the psychological health of Metula evacuees.”
The last year has been extraordinarily difficult and the children are in real danger, Schleyer said bluntly. “There is a rise in behavioral problems, concentration problems and incidences of self-harm. We are all in trauma, and the worst part is, we can’t see the end,” he said.
‘We are all in trauma, and the worst part is, we can’t see the end’
Schleyer’s assessment is bolstered by the results of a survey released on Thursday, which found that a full 82.5% of parents evacuated from the north said “their children are expressing more concerns and difficulties” about their situation, as compared to last year, and 65% said their children are “expressing higher levels of anxiety and fear.”
Metula, a small town of about 1,700 residents, was officially evacuated on October 16, 2023. At first, most residents went to hotels in Tiberias, and although “not all the children were there, a lot were, and there were students from other places. So there was a school there for almost a year,” which provided at least some continuity, Schleyer said.
But living long-term in hotels is “a pressure cooker,” which caused “very difficult situations” for many families, so “little by little, people left the hotels, the population changed, and the school became a train station,” Schleyer said.
Now, going into the new school year, Schleyer said, the students are scattered and miss their homes and friends.
Once it was certain the residents wouldn’t be allowed to return by September 1, in an effort to keep the community together, there was an attempt to open an elementary school for Metula evacuees in Rosh Pina which would have necessitated more families moving nearby, but the project didn’t take off.
“There won’t be an elementary school from Metula this year. The impact of that is very hard, especially in regards to a return,” Schleyer said.
Firing line
Since October 8, 2023, some 8,000 rockets have been fired from Lebanon into Israeli territory, plus hundreds of drones and anti-tank missiles. So far, the skirmishes have resulted in 26 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 20 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria without any injuries.
The attacks, many of which are blocked by the Iron Dome defense system, have also caused damage to buildings and homes, and started fires that have burned some 147 square kilometers (56 square miles) of vegetation.
The question of whether to ultimately return to the north, stay where they are or relocate to another location with more opportunities are “the central questions” evacuees are dealing with, Buchris said.
Now that the school year is upon them, most families are simply continuing in their current circumstances, he said.
“There are so many difficulties,” said Buchris. “In the end, the State of Israel needs to win this war. We don’t have a choice.”
