Story 145

The two weeks before the war started I spent in Germany. In Mannheim, I visited my friend Andreas Breunig and taught at his school, the Lessing Gymnasium. My school, the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, has worked for more than 15 years with Andreas and his school, both on Centropa projects and with student exchanges. Together with the head of my school, Rabbi Ofek Meir, I also visited different schools in the Stuttgart area, within the framework of the teacher exchange program between Leo Baeck and the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Stuttgart. We met teachers and school principals, and I taught there as well.
In my lessons in Mannheim and Stuttgart, I spoke with the German students about daily life in Israel and about the differences between schools, students and teachers in Germany and Israel, and we did some fun activities based on the Hebrew alphabet and on English fluency. Some of the topics that I spoke about were what it is like to have children in the army, religious and ethnic diversity in Israel, how the vast majority of our students go to the army after they finish high school, and how small and big events affect all Israelis, since this country is such a close-knit community, where everybody knows everyone, through the army, school, youth movements, or family ties. In Israel, you can easily play the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (just google that game) as the Two/Three Degrees of….
On Friday evening, 6 October, I flew home from Frankfurt, via Amman, Jordan. Less than seven hours before all hell broke loose in southern Israel, I landed at Ben Gurion Airport, near Tel Aviv. My son, who is about to finish his army service as a journalist for Army News Radio (though he will continue straight away after his release, with an emergency call-up), came to pick me up. At around 1 AM, we were eating pancakes in a 24/7 pancake joint somewhere along the highway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. After we arrived home, I had a shower and went to bed. My wife didn’t wake me up when she heard the news, but when I woke up on my own, around 10 AM, she said: “Welcome back home, turn on the news.” Like everybody else in Israel, I was in total shock. And to be honest, I have not been completely out of some sense of shock ever since. This is the worst and the longest war that Israel has ever known. In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, Haifa was under constant rocket attacks from Lebanon, but the horror and surprise of October 7th make this war much worse. That summer, because my wife was pregnant with our third child and we had to stay 24/7 in the safety room (a room made of reinforced concrete, with steel doors and windows, a standard part of every new house built after 1991, the Second Gulf War) with two young children, we fled to my parents in the Netherlands after one week, and stayed there for 5 weeks, until the war was over. That is not an option now, because of my and my wife’s jobs (we are both teachers, because two of our three children have responsibilities at work and in the army, and because most airlines stopped flying to and from Tel Aviv very soon after Israel started hitting back at Hamas.
This horrific war has affected everyone in Israel. See the Two/Three Degrees… game described above. Three former students of the Leo Baeck Education Center were murdered on October 7th. One of them, Shani Kupfervasser z”l, was a lovely bright student in the first ever class that I taught. She had just finished a master’s degree in economics and was only 27 years old when she was brutally murdered at the dance party in a kibbutz near the border with Gaza. The names of those three students will be added to the pictures on the wall in the remembrance room in the school library, where all our former students and teachers who were killed in Israel’s wars or in terror attacks are honored.
At school we now have a so-called hybrid schedule, whereby every day one of the three grades (10th, 11th, 12th grade) works at home through remote learning, so that, in case of a rocket attack, there is enough room in the bomb shelters for all teachers and students who are at school. Haifa is still quiet, and as long as Hezbollah, the Iran-backed army in southern Lebanon that attacked us massively in 2006, does not decide to participate full-scale in the war, we should be o.k. But things can change any minute, the northern border is volatile. In any case, family members, friends, colleagues, and former students are in the army, either in mandatory service or as reserve soldiers. Most of them are now based either at the northern border or in and around the Gaza Strip. We hope and pray for their safe return home. We also hope and pray for the safe return home of the more than 240 hostages that Hamas terrorists kidnapped to Gaza on that Black Saturday. That number includes men and women of all ages, and more than 30 young children, including babies. You can hardly imagine the anguish that the hostages and their loved and loving ones are going through. I also feel terrible about the destruction and horror that has been brought upon the poor people in Gaza, but I am only human, my first instinct is to care most about the safety and survival of ‘my own side’. Cries like ‘From the river to the sea’, shouted at rallies in Europe, the US and elsewhere and taken directly from the Hamas manifesto, show that this war is not a war against Israel’s settlement policy (which I abhor, condemn, and see as contrary to our security and interests) but against the very existence of Israel. That also becomes clear when we see the worldwide rise of violent, often deadly, attacks against Jewish individuals, organizations and symbols.
In ‘normal’ times (the ‘new normal’, that is, post-COVID) I have been active in various shared existence projects, with Jewish and Arab colleagues and friends. One of the projects, which is almost finished, is a trilingual (Arabic-Hebrew-German) translation of a Dutch children’s book that deals with sharing, accepting those who are different from us, and the dangers of greed and materialism. I’ve reached out to my colleagues, and especially the Arabs among them were surprised that I contacted them, because tensions between the various communities have once again risen. During and after this war, this cooperation is becoming and will remain even more diffult, but also more important, than it was until a month ago.
I have been in touch with my German friends and colleagues, keeping them updated about what we are going through here. Their continuous interest and support, and that of my friends and colleagues at Centropa, means a lot to me and my school. I never realized how vital it is to know that people abroad have not forgotten about and given up on us. Only four months ago, during the Centropa Summer Academy in Vienna and Prague, Ukranian colleagues (all female, since the men are fighting the Russian invasion) told us about their work in times of war. It was impressive and moving to see how they do their best to keep some sense of normalcy and routine, how they have kept teaching their students, and also how Centropa has stayed in touch with them, to encourage and help them in every way possible. My Israeli colleagues and I recognized some elements in the Ukrainians’ presentation, all of us already had some experiences from previous wars and rounds of heavy fighting. None of us could imagine then, however, that soon we would be in a very similar situation, and that the beautiful, sometimes haunting but mostly uplifting website that Centropa created with stories from Ukrainian teachers and studies would get an Israeli sister-site. I thank everybody at Centropa, and all my educator-friends who have stayed in touch with me, for their support and friendship, and I can’t wait to meet y’all in better times for Ukraine, Israel and the rest of the world. Much more than just friendship and our passion for stories, history and education binds us. As King Solomon says, in Proverbs 17:17: “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.”