As northern evacuees begin school in Zichron Yaakov, some find a silver lining
At the Horesh combined primary and middle school in the northern town, displaced kids absorbed into the general student body are starting their second school year away from home
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
During the 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath, a weeks-long IDF action against Hezbollah, 7-year-old Hadas Daudi was temporarily evacuated along with her family from Moshav Za’arit, a small community along the Israel-Lebanon border.
Fast forward to 2024 and Daudi, now a lawyer and mother of four living in Moshav Ya’ara, is about to begin a second year school year in a Zichron Yaakov hotel as an evacuee.
“They evacuated us and we spent two months in Sdot Yam. I really remember that experience. So I tell my children we have to make lemonade from lemons and make the best of it,” Daudi told The Times of Israel on Sunday as she brought three of her children to the first day of school at Horesh, a combined elementary and middle school.
Since northern communities were evacuated following Hezbollah’s commencement of rocket barrages on October 8, the school has absorbed a community of some 50 to 60 evacuee students, mostly from Ya’ara, according to school administrators. The school has a student body of more than 700.
Daudi’s husband has been in reserve duty since the beginning of the war, first serving in Gaza and then as a member of the civilian armed security response team at Moshav Ya’ara, so she has essentially “been alone with the kids,” she explained.
Last year she “fought” to have her son enroll in the school after he was first placed in one of the temporary schools set up for evacuee communities.
“I felt that being with only evacuees wasn’t good for him. There is a feeling that he wouldn’t develop, going around with other evacuee kids as a group,” she said. “When he came here, he joined a class, and he is flourishing, he really feels better.”
“It’s still difficult to open up, and he always tells me that his good friends aren’t here. He is waiting for the moment we will return to our home,” Daudi said.
Daudi’s entire family are also evacuees, she noted. “My parents and sisters went to Tiberias, and they opened a new school for evacuees there. But they really didn’t like it,” she said. It’s much better, she added, in a school with “an order to it, a good academic level, not something created hastily.”
A bubble in white and yellow
The Horesh school welcomed the returning students and parents in a festive manner, with a red carpet at the entrance, classic Israeli songs blasting from a speaker and parents and children lining up to have their picture taken.
The school sits near Zichron Yaakov off of Route 4, where a small group of demonstrators wearing yellow clothes and waving yellow flags called for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. In the distance, the Mediterranean Sea could be seen.
Many of the students, teachers and parents wore yellow as well, something planned to show solidarity with the hostages, Idea Tzachi, head of the Horesh parents’ association, told The Times of Israel.
The start of the year is “exciting, but it’s a mixed feeling” due to the situation, Tzachi said. The previous evening, news had broken that six bodies were recovered in Gaza by IDF forces, and in the morning, as parents and students were arriving, their identities were revealed.
Zichron Yaakov, a picturesque town south of Haifa, has about 24,000 residents and a reputation as a prosperous city of tech workers and artists.
“We very much live in a bubble,” said parent Tami Rich, but people in the city are “very aware and active in the political process,” she added.
Rich has had three children attend Horesh – “My oldest is still in bed” because of the high-school teachers’ strike, she said wryly – and noted that the school “has done a good job” in absorbing the evacuee students.
Horesh might be in a bubble, but it’s a forward-thinking school “functioning in a 2024 bubble” instead of being stuck with pedagogies and techniques “from 1984,” Rich said. She credits the school’s vitality to principal Ronen Weiss, whom she called “the most extraordinary educator I’ve ever encountered.”
Tradition gives hope
Weiss is a youthful, charismatic man with tattoos and multiple earrings who wouldn’t look out of place at a Tel Aviv nightclub. On hand to meet the returning students and parents, his enthusiasm was evident as he greeted everyone with a smile, a hug and a short exchange of words.
During these times, the celebratory opening of the school year “is a tradition that brings hope,” Weiss said.
Shadowed by this reporter as he went about the early part of the morning, he explained that he had just turned 40 but had been a school principal for a decade, and at Horesh for six of those years.
“I love it,” he explained simply.
After most of the students had arrived and were in their classrooms, Weiss made his rounds, quickly visiting each group, who all stood at attention when he entered. He seemed to know the name of every child, especially in the upper grades, but if he forgot, he simply asked and promised that he would remember it.
“There is no doubt that there is a high-quality population” at the school given the location, he said as he strode between rooms, but stressed that the student body “contained all types” with different socioeconomic levels and backgrounds, as well as several special education classes.
“In the last decade it has become more complex and challenging to work in education,” he said, citing the difficulties caused over the last few years by the COVID lockdowns and now the current war, as well as the preceding years of political gridlock and inconclusive, multiple elections.
Despite all this, when the passion for education “comes from within, then it works,” Weiss said, moments before he began the morning assembly to start the year, which was held in the shaded central amphitheater.
The ceremony featured a short speech by Weiss, a few cute, short skits and dance performances by some of the kids, and then the traditional welcoming of new 1st graders, who gathered and passed under a flower-adorned arch.
“Now that school has started, to tell you the truth, when we are allowed to go home, it won’t happen so quickly,” said evacuee mom Daudi after the ceremony ended and she had dropped off her daughter at her new first-grade classroom.
“We got settled — and now to return, and start to build ourselves again, I don’t have the strength, it’s difficult,” she said.
Continuing to live in a hotel is challenging, and what was a large group from Ya’ara has dwindled to about 40 people in total as families moved to rented apartments nearby or away from Zichron Yaakov entirely, she said.
“We are a nation of survivors,” she said. “We do what we have to. And I don’t have complaints. All in all, it’s good for us here, it’s good for the children and that is what is most important.”
