Israeli Town and School for Ukranian Refugees

Video Of The Week -Ukrainian Orphans Rescued, Evacuated to Israel - https://tinyurl.com/2732u37b

For the Full Article by By Cnaan Liphshiz/Jta go to: https://tinyurl.com/4mcjcnwz

More than 600 Ukrainians have come to Nof Hagalil since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, setting off a massive migration of Ukrainians to whatever country can give them safety. About 4,000 Jewish refugees have already arrived in Israel, with potentially tens of thousands more expected.

The Ukrainian children who have landed in Nof Hagalil and at Shuvu Renanim were living safe, stable lives just over a month ago. Now they have wound up in a foreign land, usually without their fathers because of Ukraine’s ban on letting men younger than 60 leave the country, and often after experiencing trauma during the war’s early days and their flights from Ukraine.

“It’s horrifying to see a student shuddering in fear whenever a door is slammed too hard or an ambulance wails by,” said Sara Neder, who has been Shuvu Renanim’s principal for 12 years.

Tetiana Denysenko, 36, stayed in Kyiv for as long as possible together with her 10-year-old son, Sasha, and his father in Kyiv.

 “But it became impossible. The constant thud of bombs gave Sasha a trauma, and we saw our happy boy changing before our eyes, one sleepless night at a time,” she said. So they left without Sasha’s father, who expects to be conscripted into the military shortly.

Now she and Sasha are staying in Nof Hagalil’s posh Plaza Hotel, where the city is temporarily housing new immigrants for up to a month as they look for apartments to rent. Buses bring Sasha and other children back to the hotel from the Shuvu school each day, part of a sweeping effort to make the city welcoming for the new arrivals.

At school, the staff talk and devote extra attention to the new arrivals to “try to make them feel as welcome and safe as possible,” said Neder. The school has not offered dedicated trauma counseling, but the newcomers are “doing better than when they first arrived,” she added.

That’s in part because of Shuvu’s experience educating children who have immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. The school is part of a network of 75 schools serving 6,000 students in more than a dozen Israeli cities that was established in the early 1990s specifically with the aim of inculcating Jewish values in children from the former Soviet Union.

Shuvu’s founder was Avraham Yaakov Pam, a Litvak rabbi from Brooklyn who was born in the former Soviet Union and who had lobbied for providing religious education to as many Jewish children as possible from the wave of mass immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Having been raised under communism, those children — and their parents — had not had access to Jewish education.

In recent years, as immigration from Russian-speaking countries waned, the schools had shifted to enrolling children from other countries as well as the children of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Now, the war in Ukraine is renewing the network’s original mission.

Shuvu schools are able to choose whom they admit and what they teach, because the schools occupy a category designed for haredi Orthodox schools that allows such institutions to receive state funding while departing from the standard Israeli curriculum.

Formally, Shuvu schools are classified as haredi by the Israeli education ministry, and they have some things in common with yeshivas attended by Orthodox Jews. Female staff members, if married, wear wigs, as is the convention in haredi Jewish communities. Among the students, the girls wear long skirts, and all the boys are supposed to cover their heads with kippahs. The network also accepts only children whose mothers were Jewish, in keeping with Orthodox Jewish law.

But the schools are different from traditional yeshivas in significant ways. “They are not haredi schools because there are boys and girls in the same classrooms and we have students here whose parents don’t keep Shabbat,” Buterman said.

“Look, we don’t force anything on anyone here,” Neder said. “There’s a dress code, sure, there are extra lessons on Judaism, but at the end of the day we accept and love all our students the way they are.”

Some of the parents of the children attending Shuvu attended synagogues — mainly affiliated with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement — prior to their immigration to Israel. Others, however, send their children to Shuvu for reasons unrelated to the school’s focus on Orthodox Judaism.

For a tuition of about $62 a month, parents at Shuvu get a school day two hours longer than state schools’ in classes 30% smaller than at public schools, as well as a warm meal and busing from their homes.

Many secular parents are convinced to send their kids to Shuvu because of these benefits, coupled with how hospitable the schools are to Russian speakers.

“Frankly we don’t care too much about all the religious stuff, we don’t keep Shabbat, my husband doesn’t wear a kippah,” said one mother, a woman who immigrated to Israel from Ukraine in 2010 and asked to be quoted anonymously because of her children’s preferences. “But this school is just excellent, nothing comes close.”

Shuvu Renanim does have some serious credentials in the scholastic excellence department.

Last week the Nof Hagalil school won a national math and computers contest for the fourth straight year — a record that Neder, who does not speak Russian, attributes to “the work and study ethics of the homes of most of our students,” she said. Another Shuvu school from Petah Tikva also made it to the top 10 list.

The Nof Hagalil school’s 16 refugees watched with interest as the other students celebrated this feat at a school event featuring balloons, loud music and medals presented to the winning team by a beaming Neder, who came to the school on her day off for the party.

The Shuvu school is only part of the attraction of Nof Hagalil for Ukrainian refugees.

The Plaza hotel and city center offer a stunning view of Nazareth, the predominantly Arab neighbor city, and the lush forests of the Galilee, which have been shrouded in mist from unseasonably late rains this month. (Ira Kapustenyenko, a 9-year-old from Kyiv, said the view is “the best thing that’s happened” to her since leaving Ukraine, where her twin sister Katja said about the early days of the war, “We were so afraid we thought we’d die from fear.”)

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