Tzivia’s Second Blog – Cheshvan ’85 – November ’24
Hello everybody,
I can’t believe I’ve only been back in Israel for less than two weeks, it certainly feels like longer.
As I had to rush home before Rosh Hashana due to a heavy bombardment of Hezbollah rockets to Tzfas, my return flights were all cancelled as well. Instead of flying ElAl direct, I had to go via Frankfurt. My flight left from Manchester very early on Tuesday morning, so early that most of the Duty Free shops were only just opening. The first leg was ok, but due to bad weather in Frankfurt we were delayed for 45 minutes. This was not particularly fun, as anyone who has been to Frankfurt Airport will know, that it is Germany’s largest in terms of passenger numbers, and I kept on being redirected and told to go somewhere else.— with Nachi Lewis.
I finally found the ElAl desk and had to go through security again, as although my luggage was sent straight through (spoiler alert: it wasn’t!), it was in essence two separate airlines and I needed a new boarding pass and, it seems, a third degree interrogation. The Mossad agent really wanted to know why a 17 year old girl was travelling to Israel for school (and not for a Sem), when her Ivrit was not up to scratch. I must say that I have gotten better, and whilst I understand more than I can speak, I do try my hardest and in spite of many mistakes I do manage to make myself understood. The only real way to learn a language is through speaking it.
I finally got through security, but they decided that they needed to check my shoes. No, I have no idea why either. The majority of the people for this flight were also transfers from other locations and the flight was delayed, officially because they needed to check all the luggage (spoiler alert, not all the luggage got checked!) I must say that in spite of the delay, once we got going the flight was quite entertaining. We may have been flying from Germany, but the vast majority of passengers were French or English. I had booked a window seat, and I was surrounded on all sides by a very large and very loud family from France. No practising of Ivrit for me!
Half an hour before we landed in Ben Gurion the stewardess came over and told me that, in spite of the delay in checking the luggage etc etc, my suitcase (and indeed all of the ones from Manchester) had not made the connecting flight as there was not enough time to check them. Brilliant! I guess there were two upsides; I had no delay in the luggage hall and I did not have to unpack that night after a long day’s travel.
I met an old classmate of mine from Manchester, Chayale Pink from Leeds, who was now in the class below me in Tzfas, and we shared a taxi together. She was meant to have landed nearly a whole day earlier, but had had multiple delays. Tzfas is under a partial curfew and we had to get special permission to arrive after nightfall. Due to not having much luggage to unpack, I was finished shortly after we arrived at school at 8.00pm. It had been a long day, and school started the next morning at 8.15. I could have slept in, but I really don’t like missing school so I got up and was ready for class on time.
I mentioned that Tzfas is under a partial curfew, which is actually more like martial law; with the Government and the Security Services dictating the rules for establishments like schools etc. At that point, due to the number of students and the danger of us all needing to quickly get to the bomb shelter – Tzfas is a “30 Second Zone” – only half the students were allowed to be in the classrooms at once, with the rest having an online school. That day I had face to face lessons, but at around 3pm there was a siren, so off we all ran to the shelter where we had to stay for the required 10 minutes. It gave me a chance to say hi to those friends I had not seen since we were all evacuated 6 weeks earlier. But then it was back to the classroom, although Hezbollah had other plans as three minutes later the sirens sounded again, and it was back to the shelter. Who needs PE lessons!
One of my friends was actually flying in during that rocket barrage, and her flight was diverted and she is currently back home in Brazil and can’t get another flight back to Israel.
On Thursday I was doing online school, albeit in the school building (don’t ask), and it brought back memories of 2020 and covid times!! Although as that Shabbos was an “off Shabbos” we really only had one lesson before everybody started leaving. Again, due to the security situation, we are really only supposed to travel during the daytime. As I had just arrived a few days beforehand, and my luggage had literally just arrived that day, I decided to take the option to stay in Tzfas for Shabbos. It was a truly different experience, with the dorm emptying out and just 19 girls staying: from my class there was just me and one other and I was the only one in my room who had stayed behind.
The regular counsellors had the Shabbos off, so two girls from the Seminary (the one Chaya learnt in two years ago) came instead. On Thursday night they arranged a typical Israeli take-out of falafel and chips and then the biggest treat of them all: we got our phones back for an hour. Yippee, I managed to video call home and catch up on all the news, check my WhatsApp etc etc. We then had movie night, don’t worry it was a nice Kosher Jewish film, and then at midnight we called it a night.
In the morning a group of us went along to the city to a lovely little cafe, and even though there was nothing there that I could eat, I still enjoyed the little trip out. We got back and cooked some extra food for Shabbos, I called home on my Kosher phone and daddy gave me my Erev Shabbos Brocha and then the next thing we knew it was 3.30 and only half an hour to Shabbos. There is something special about lighting Shabbos candles in the holy city of Tzfas, it just feels holier.
As I mentioned there was only one other girl from my class who had stayed for Shabbos: Devorah Leah Lazar from Rome (her family have been Chabad Shluchim in Italy for over 70 years), and we had been invited to our dorm counsellor’s house for Friday Night Dinner. Her parents were American, so they spoke English (well sort of!) and it was a really fun evening.
Once we got back, I reassessed my decision to sleep by myself in my room which was four floors up from the bomb shelter, so I moved along to the day room on the main floor and snuggled up on the couch. The only problem is that everyone was using that room to chat in, so in the end I didn’t get to sleep until after 2am. The beautiful Tzfas sun woke me at 8.00, which was good as less than 5 minutes later the rockets began and the sirens went off again. A sad fact: since the war began over a year ago, there has not been a single Shabbos in Tzfas without an air raid siren!
I was shattered, so after the mandatory 10 minutes in the bomb shelter, I did fall back asleep again until around 10am. Back home I would have already been in Shul by then, but I guess there are some advantages to being a teenager away from home. There was some yummy cheesecake for breakfast, and best of all it was gluten free so I could enjoy it.
The head of the Naaleh program (that’s the Israeli Gov department that oversees this and over 200 other educational institutions catering specifically to Diaspora students learning in Israel) and her family joined us in the school for Shabbat lunch. Her husband, like most of the Chabad men in Israel, works in the IDF. He is in reserve duty and was carrying his gun; many of the other male teachers and husbands of the female teachers are also in the army, although not all are in fighting units and there are not that many guns around the school.
After Shabbos we got a message that all lessons would now be face to face with no more online school, but they would stagger the classes with half the school in the morning and half in the afternoon. And we hit the jackpot; our classes were only going to start at 11.30, the best news ever for a bunch of teenage girls. Unfortunately our joy was short lived, as after a Gov inspection of the school building, it was decided that the roof was solid enough to allow us all to have lessons at the same time, as long as we could all get into the main building within 30 seconds, and then safely make our way to the bomb shelter. Monday morning would thus start at the regular time of 8.15am.
Hezbollah once again decided to interfere, and at about 12.30 am on Sunday night/Monday morning, the sirens went off again. If I am honest, I pretty much sleep-walked to the shelter and if not for the crowd of girls in front of me, I would have fallen down the 3 small steps at the entrance. 10 minutes later we were all back in bed, and everyone went straight to sleep because, you know – school in a few hours.
Monday was technically my first normal day back in school, but we had been moved from our usual classroom in a static caravan into the safer science room in the main building. Tzfas is very small, but with all the stairs it takes forever to get anywhere, so I was pretty annoyed that my after-school trip to go and buy some new school shirts was a waste of time as the shop was closed. And then when I got back to the dorm, we had two back to back sirens. It has become normal but crazy at the same time.
I went to a sewing club, but the machine was noisy and to be honest I was a bit scared of it, so I didn’t do too well. It was alright though, as we did practise first on paper so I got the hang of it eventually. The club was out in one of the static caravans, which meant that even though there were no sirens, the whole place shook every time an interceptor was fired. I mentioned in a previous blog that the main Iron Dome battery for the North of Israel is just outside of Tzfas, so we get a very clear view of all the interceptors being fired.
Tuesday the school tests began. In Israel they do a three year baccalaureate system, which as I mentioned in my first blog, is the reason why I wanted to drop a year to start from year 1 (the equivalent of the GCSE year in the UK), but as I am the oldest in my class, I was not allowed to and now have to try and cram three years of lessons into two. And in a foreign language as well! Baruch Hashem it is going well so far, but time will tell.
On Wednesday I had a special treat. One of my classmates, Yehudit Herzl lives in a small village in the Golan Heights called Chad Ness (It was established in 1982 and is named after three villages in the Sinai Desert that had to be dismantled after the withdrawal in 1979). Her father is the Rabbi of the village and also Ministers to the local army base, and every week Yehudit and her family volunteer there, giving food to the soldiers. She invited me to go with her, and after I got permission from the Head Teacher, mummy and daddy as well as the Dorm Mother, I set out with her after school.
First we went to buy a load of bread, cheeses, cookies and milk and then we got a bus which besides for the two of us, was entirely made up of soldiers. As we left Tzfas the bus suddenly stopped and we all had to get off, because yep you guessed it, there was a siren. We sat by the side of the road and watched the sky as the Iron Dome interceptors shot the Hezbollah missiles down and then it was back on the bus. Remember that phrase from Covid: a new normal. Well this is my new normal.
Anyway before long we got to the base, and we walked straight in together with the soldiers. Yehudit and her family have been volunteering there since Sunday October 8th and security knows them all, although her father was questioned when he came to pick us up a few hours later. Over the next few hours we helped on a food truck serving cheese and chocolate toasties, (two separate things, it was not a cheese and chocolate toastie!), popcorn, cakes and a favourite of many Israelies, a lemon mint slush called “lemonana”.
Now here is where I have to apologise, because I am no expert in the IDF uniforms, but I think it was mainly a base for soldiers from the Golani Brigade. Many of them had the word Golani on their upper arm patches and there were quite a few yellow and green flags, which I think are Golani, but I am just a teenage girl from England, so I don’t really know for certain. I mean, who would have thought that I would actually spend hours volunteering in an active army base a mere few miles from the front line.
I was told this was the forward base for all the soldiers going into Lebanon, and it also has a hospital which unfortunately receives a lot of those injured there. It is a pretty major base, and Yehudit was telling me about when they came here at the start of the war last year, although at that point Israel had not gone into Lebanon in spite of the constant barrage of rocket attacks and the threat of a second front being opened up by Hezbollah. A number of the soldiers who had been rotated round from their time in Gaza and were now about to go into Lebanon remembered the food truck from when they had been here at the start of this terrible war. Many of them knew Yehudit by sight, and greeted her warmly. She told me how one day when she was walking to school in Tzfas, a car stopped and a soldier leaned out of the window as he had recognised her from his time in the base.
We were still setting up the food truck when a soldier knocked on the window and asked if she could please have a toastie; she had just come off duty and was starving. And that was just the start, for the next few hours there was a constant flow of soldiers stopping by for food and also for a chat. As soon as they heard I was from England they started speaking in typical Israeli English (you know what I mean and are probably reading this sentence in that unmistakable accent!), but I told them it was more important for me to practise my Ivrit. Although one of the soldiers was French and we let him speak to us in English, which he did quite well, although it was funny.
The food was obviously important, but it was clear that they really enjoyed being able to chat about normalcy and not soldiering. You could see that for many this was a highlight of their day. And for me, it was really special being able to speak to them, to offer a bite to eat and to do a little bit to brighten up their day after all that they are doing to keep the rest of us safe. One of these brave young soldiers told us how he had just been called up for a further 6 months of reserve duty: unfortunately this war does not look like it is going to end any time soon. In fact it is already the longest war in Israel’s history.
It was an incredible yet surreal experience, and one which my friend has been doing week in and week out for over a year. I think I will be back. By the time we left at 8pm we had been there for over four hours and had pretty much run out of food except for two chocolate toasties which we gave to the two soldiers in the watchtower. An hour later was the shift change and a whole new group of soldiers would have been returning to base, tired and hungry, I just hope they all returned safely and found some hot food.
Yehudit’s village, which has less than a 1000 people living there, is a picturesque place in the middle of the Golan Heights. The views are incredible with the nearby hills of the Golan and the distant lights of Tiberias reflecting off the waters of the Kinneret. With so little light pollution there was a purity to the nighttime darkness making the stars shine so much brighter. The reality of war also meant we saw many man made objects like drones and helicopters criss crossing across the night sky. Unfortunately many of those helicopters were there to transport injured soldiers to the Ziv hospital in Tzfas. Yehudit told me about a soldier from her village who was eating in the mess hall of his base and as he got up a drone struck the spot he had been sitting in moments before, killing the soldier to one side and severely injuring the one on the other. The miracle of his survival was overshadowed by the sadness of his friend’s tragedy.
After October 7th, the Yishuv was given extra funding to upgrade their security, and the gate around the village is fully lit with soldiers guarding the entrance. It sits between the Lebanese and Syrian borders and unlike Tzfas they only have 15 seconds to get to a shelter when the sirens go. The Hezbollah rockets aimed at Chad Ness don’t have to go so high so the Iron Dome struggles to shoot them down.
After a busy and somewhat emotional day, we went for a walk in the Yishuv park, which is named for the first child born there back in 1982, who was then unfortunately killed whilst fighting in a previous war. On a path in the park, the village founders had made sculptures which added a cute dimension. Once we got back to Yehudit’s house it was quite late so we went straight to bed as we had to be up by 6.45 to catch a bus back to Tzfas and another day of school. I recognised one of the soldiers on the bus as I had served her food the day before. By 8.45 we were at our desks and here my mother tongue of English was very useful as that day’s exam was on……English. All of the English speaking girls completed it very quickly and then had an hour’s break, which is why I now find myself in the computer room writing this blog!
Everyone is here for this Shabbos and I am sure I will have to write about in my next blog,
So Shabbat Shalom and L’hitraot.
Tzivia