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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