On an unseasonably warm November day in Jerusalem, the lobby of the Leonardo Hotel in Jerusalem is buzzing with activity. Children are racing through the large open area, mothers are pushing babies in strollers, and many of the chairs in the lobby are occupied by hotel guests. In a typical year, most hotels in Israel are relatively quiet in November. High Holy Day visitors have returned home, colleges and schools in the United States are in session, and the rainy season is about to begin.
But this is anything but a typical year.
In the wake of the Hamas terror attacks and rockets in the South of Israel and Hezbollah shelling of the North, some 200,000 Israelis have been displaced. The evacuees have been placed in hotels throughout the country at the government’s expense in Eilat, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and the Dead Sea.
The hotel guests at the Leonardo Jerusalem are from Sderot and the moshav of Yakhini, located 42 km. to the south of Sderot, in addition to several families recently arrived from Kiryat Shmona in the North. These families are being accommodated in the hotel until the war ends and the IDF determines that it is safe for them to return to their homes.
Opening a school for those fleeing Hamas
For the people who had to hastily pack their belongings and leave, how their children would spend their days in the hotel was not uppermost in their minds. However, those were the very thoughts of Tzahi Lev-Ran, dean of Student Placement and Fieldwork at Herzog College for Teacher Training in Israel.
Lev-Ran, who has extensive educational experience, spent 10 years teaching high school, nine years as a high school principal in Beit Shemesh, and serves as an instructor of principals at the Israeli Institute for School Leadership.
The families from Sderot arrived at the Leonardo Hotel on Wednesday, October 11, four days after the war started. On Sunday, October 15, Lev-Ran approached the leadership of Herzog College, one of the country’s leading institutions in teacher training and pedagogical innovation, with the suggestion of creating a school for the Sderot children at the Leonardo Hotel. The institution agreed, and with the encouragement of the Sderot municipality and the Education Ministry, Lev-Ran embarked on his ambitious plan.
Starting any school is a daunting task, and creating a school in a hotel in less than 24 hours seems impossible. Lev-Ran enlisted the assistance of Limor Riskin, director of international projects at Herzog College and director of pedagogy and global initiatives at UnitEd (an organization that develops and empowers Jewish educators in teacher training and preparation of pedagogical materials), together with Noga Shukrun Gal of the Amit Educational Network.
The Leonardo had rooms available on one of its lower levels that could be used as classrooms, and Lev-Ran arranged for several students from Herzog College to serve as teachers on a voluntary basis. He succeeded in finding additional volunteer teachers from among teens in the Gonenim branch of Bnei Akiva who had completed 12th grade and had put their post-high school study plans on hold.
On Monday morning, October 16, the trio of Riskin, Lev-Ran, and Shukrun Gal opened the school, dubbed the Sderot Leonardo School, for 50 children, accompanied by their parents.
Early on, says Riskin, the school was inundated with volunteers.
“It was more like a community center (matnas) than a school,” she says, adding that it was primarily providing relief to the parents who needed babysitting more than an actual educational program.
“After two weeks, we said, ‘That’s it.’ We started talking to the volunteers, and they said we needed to start a real educational program.”
When the school began three weeks ago, it started with kindergarten and went through eighth grade. Most of the middle school students were transferred to local schools in Jerusalem; today, the school numbers 90 students in grades one through six, plus 30 children in the nursery. Riskin is in charge of the staff at the school, is part of its management team, and fills in when the heads of the school are not available.
In addition to Lev-Ran and Riskin, two other Herzog College staffers, Shira Rafaeli and Orit Lasser, are working at the school. Rafaeli heads teacher training and coordination at Herzog College and the hotel school, and Lasser is in charge of pedagogy support at Herzog and the school.
ON THE day of my visit to the Leonardo, I meet with the energetic Riskin and several of the teachers in the school, who explain what the school is and how it works.
We take the elevator from the hotel lobby down to minus-2, and as the door opens we see a group of students sitting cross-legged on the floor with their teachers, talking animatedly. Many of the students have been on a field trip to the Biblical Zoo earlier that day.
Outside the large room which is used as a synagogue, a printed schedule of times for prayer services is posted, with a note saying that three chapters of Psalms and a special prayer for the IDF soldiers will be recited at the conclusion of the daily services. Another sign outside another room proclaims: “Girls Grade 5-6.” A colorful poster with the words for the “Asher yatzar” blessing (that is recited after using the restroom) hangs outside the hotel bathroom near the school area. The makeshift school even includes a pinat morim, a small teachers’ corner with coffee and cake, for the staff.
In the rooms that we visit, children interact excitedly with teachers, and the kindergarten is akin to any other one that might see in Israel, notwithstanding the fact that it is being hosted in the hotel’s safe room.
Classes meet from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., Sunday through Thursday, and the primary subjects taught are math, English, Jewish studies, arts, and sports. The school is operated as a state-run religious school (Mamad, which stands for mamlachti dati), with separate classes for boys and girls. Class sizes range from eight to 17 children per class. The adjacent Grand Court Hotel, explains Riskin, hosts a public school for the Sderot children.
She adds that the Sderot Municipality played a significant role in the establishment of the school and gave Lev-Ran permission to proceed with the project. “They are very involved in everything that has gone on,” she says.
Riskin and the team also received assistance in setting up the physical space from Motti and Hyndi Mendelowitz and their three daughters, a family of American olim (immigrants) living in the nearby Arzei HaBira neighborhood. They cleaned an area on the hotel’s lower level, stocked it with games and supplies for the children, and gave gifts from Fox to the volunteer teachers in appreciation of their efforts.
“It is very gratifying to be able to do something for the people of Sderot, who went through incredible trauma,” says Mendelowitz.
Riskin is particularly impressed with the dedication of the volunteer teaching staff.
One such volunteer is Liam Lewis, 19, of New Rochelle, New York, who came to Israel in August after finishing high school. Lewis was scheduled to begin his studies in mathematics at the Hebrew University after the holidays. When the beginning of classes was delayed because of the war, Lewis learned from his cousin (whom he was staying with in Jerusalem) about the school program at the Leonardo.
“Someone on one of the group chats said that they needed helpers at the hotel to set up the school,” he says. “We came to help set up, and we were more like counselors when it started. But as the days went on, real teachers came, and we got teaching materials, and the rooms became classrooms – not just circles of chairs.”
Lewis teaches English to boys in grades three to six and math to an eighth-grade student who stayed to study with him, although other older students have already transferred to schools in the city. Though he acknowledges that the students can be challenging to deal with at times, he enjoys teaching.
“They are happy to learn when you get them to settle down,” Lewis smiles.
HE ACKNOWLEDGES that the children from Sderot have difficulty dealing with what they encountered before leaving the city.
“Every few days while I am teaching, or if we are sitting,” he says, “what happened when they had to leave Sderot comes up. They talk about how they were in the safe rooms and heard noises and gunshots. When that happens, I just let them continue talking and pause whatever is happening, and they tell stories. That sometimes starts a whole chain of stories, and when that finishes we go back to teaching. What these kids have gone through is unimaginable. If talking about it is good for them, I let them continue. If it’s bad, I stop it. It depends on the situation.”
When asked what is most important about what he is teaching, Lewis recounts the goal espoused by Tzahi Lev-Ran, the principal. “The most important part of the school is not to teach them English or math. It is establishing a routine and getting them back into a groove. If we are babysitting them and they are just doing puzzles with them, they feel pity. But if it is a school and they don’t necessarily like it, and they are learning, they are in a learning environment, and it is back to normal.”
Esther Hen, 21, is studying special education and literature at Herzog and working as a volunteer teacher in the school. She serves as a homeroom teacher for girls in the first grade and as a substitute teacher, filling in to teach subjects when needed.
She echoes the words of Riskin and Lewis and mentions that at the beginning, during class the students frequently asked for their parents (who were upstairs in the hotel), and they couldn’t concentrate. “Slowly, these issues have lessened, and now they can listen in class,” she says.
She adds that the parents’ interest in what their children are learning has also increased in the several weeks that classes have been operating. They are much more interested in what their children are learning than they were at the outset.
What has Hen learned from her teaching experiences in this most unusual learning setting?
“The first week that I was here,” she smiles, “I said that everything that I had studied for my degree doesn’t compare to what I have learned here.”
The unusual circumstances of teaching students outside of their normal environment in challenging circumstances have taught her about the educational process.
“I have learned about education itself – not just how to teach but how to see children – what situation they are in and how to bring them to a situation such that they will want to learn. When they want to learn, everything interests them.”
Unlike Liam, Hen had to be careful in how she presented the retelling of the students’ experiences in Sderot.
“We wanted to go around the class in which everyone would say something about their experiences, but then we realized that many of the parents had not told their children that terrorists were in Sderot. They asked us not to tell them, but there were some children who knew what had happened from their parents.”
NETANEL LEV, who came to the school two weeks ago, like Riskin and Lev-Ran, represents the professional side of the educational experience at the school. Lev, 35, was the head of the Neriah school in Sderot; before going to Sderot, he served as an assistant principal of a large school in Ashkelon. Together with Lev-Ran, Riskin, and the rest of the staff, Lev admits that operating a school in a hotel is not easy.
“The main task,” he says, “is to remove the feeling that it is a hotel and change it to a school. It should look like a school, with classes, books, and teachers.” In recent weeks, the school has received donations of books and materials from the Center for Educational Technology, book publisher Bonus Yavneh, and the Education Ministry.
Lev says that the most important thing he has gleaned from the educational experiment of the Sderot Leonardo School is the remarkable flexibility and teamwork of the administration and staff.
“We all work together. It is amazing,” he says. “We took a collection of people, put them all in one place, and it worked.”
He adds that, in his view, the most significant skill gained by the students is resilience. Living in Sderot, he says, students would receive psychological help only after the event had concluded.
“Now, we are doing treatment in the midst of it, so when they return to their regular routine, they will be okay.”
Most traditional schools, says Lev, are run in a hierarchical manner, with instructions and guidance coming in a top-down format from the principal. “Here, in this case, it comes from the bottom and goes up.” The inner motivation possessed by the teachers permeates upwards to the administrators themselves, say Riskin and Lev.
Lev adds that the partnership that was formed by Herzog College to create and guide the Sderot Leonardo School can be a model for future cooperation between the world of academia and education.
“The pedagogical resources and the organization that academia provides can greatly promote education,” he says.
The Sderot Leonardo School, housed in the Leonardo Hotel, has been a most unlikely educational venue. Lev-Ran says the school is now in a transitional phase, pointing out that “it is not proper to have a school in a hotel for a long period of time.” The Sderot Municipality, the Education Ministry, and the staff feel that the best solution is to find a location outside the hotel that can serve as a proper school until the families can return to Sderot. He adds that the school would prefer to rely on professional teachers from Sderot who will work on a salaried basis to enable the students to keep pace with other students around the country.
Soon, it seems, the cacophony and controlled mayhem of over 100 children learning, playing, and racing through the Sderot Leonardo school will fade from memory.
But the remarkable efforts of a team of dedicated educators and plucky and enthusiastic volunteer teachers will live on, and perhaps inspire them to productive and creative careers in education. ❖