The siren went off at 8:17 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 28, in the northern Israeli city of Safed—a nationwide alert warning Israelis of the start of “Operation Roaring Lion/Epic Fury,” the joint Israel-U.S. offensive against Iran’s current regime.
Julia Marzouk, 15, from Chicago, woke in a panic. She couldn’t find her shoes. So she ran—barefoot, heart pounding—down to the shelter.
“I felt completely confused,” she said. “I asked questions in my head about what was going on. I had never experienced anything like this.”
It was her first time in Israel. It would not be her last siren.
There are currently 81 American teenagers—ages 15 to 18, in grades 10 through 12—enrolled in semester and mini-semester programs at the Alexander Muss High School in Israel (MUSS), a Jewish National Fund–USA affiliated program that brings Diaspora Jewish youth to Israel for immersive academic study.
They arrived believing, as MUSS director Steve Kutno put it, “that the most intense phase of the war was behind us.”
Then “Operation Roaring Lion” began. Suddenly, the students were not watching a war unfold on their phones—they were living inside one. Not a single student has gone home.
More than a headline
For many of these teenagers, Israel before this trip existed the way it does for much of Diaspora Jewry: as an idea, a chapter in Hebrew school or a subject that ignites arguments at dinner tables and on college campuses.
Israel was something important and contested—but crucially, somewhere else.
“What I knew about Israel was based a lot on what people told me and what I saw on the news,” Julia said. “I thought it would be a lot scarier.”
Sheina Stesin, a 10th grader from San Francisco, had been following the geopolitical situation closely enough to anticipate trouble.
“I expected a war to happen at some point due to the protests in Iran in early January,” she said. “But actually experiencing a war for the first time in my life has been surreal.”
What neither expected was how quickly surreal would become routine—and how much that routine would teach them.
Life between sirens
The MUSS campus in the central Israeli city of Hod Hasharon has four bomb shelters. During several nights of frequent sirens, the students slept in them. Recently, the situation has quietened down enough for them to return to their dorms.
In the hours between alerts, they have developed their own shelter rituals: food deliveries, Instagram stories and games. Julia and her friends even keep a running tally of every siren they have experienced, occasionally joking about the count.
“We continue our conversations from before the sirens as if nothing has happened,” Sheina said. “We’ve gotten used to it very quickly.”
What Kutno and his staff have watched happen—gradually and organically—goes beyond simple coping.
David Deutsch, a teacher at MUSS, said the students have shifted from being passive participants in the program to actively shaping the experience together, helping one another through difficult moments.
“There is no panic,” Kutno said. “Just a group of teens supporting one another and drawing strength from being together.”
Some of the most meaningful conversations of the semester, he added, have taken place inside the shelters.
Questions students might not have thought to ask in a classroom suddenly feel urgent.
He overheard one discussion about why Iran cares so much about Israel, which turned into a conversation about Hamas and Hezbollah. In another, a student asked whether Israel and the United States were morally wrong to carry out preemptive strikes.
“That opened a deeper discussion about the realities of national security and the ethical dilemmas that leaders face,” Kutno said.
These are teenagers processing geopolitics in real time—in a basement—waiting for the all-clear.
Lost in translation
A particular gap sometimes opens between these students and the people who love them most.
Parents back home follow the news with a different kind of dread than their children feel on the ground.
Julia said her parents are surprised by how calm she sounds.
“When I try to explain it to them, they are so surprised by how relaxed I am,” she said.
Sheina said her parents have matched her tone.
“My parents have been completely calm, which has helped me stay calm,” she said. “I speak to them every day and share stories.”
But both acknowledged that parts of the experience do not translate over the phone—the smell of the shelter, the silence after Israel’s missile-defense system intercepts a missile, the frightening yet reassuring sound of an interception overhead.
Nor what it means to be a Jewish teenager from America sitting with other Jewish teenagers from America somewhere in the middle of Israel and realizing that the country has suddenly become part of you.
“In the U.S., my Judaism was mostly connected to my family and the holidays we celebrated together,” Julia said. “Here it feels more tied to community and history. It’s a culture.”
A circle in the dark
On the first day of the escalation, the students were in Safed when the sirens began. They boarded buses for the long ride back to campus in Hod Hasharon.
Somewhere along the road south, another siren sounded. The driver pulled off the highway and into a tunnel, letting the students out.
Standing there in the half-dark, mid-journey, they formed a circle and began singing spontaneously.
“That moment of unity will truly stay with me forever,” Sheina said.
It is the kind of moment no curriculum can engineer.
For Julia, the experience has done more than forge friendships.
“Being away from home, being in Israel, being at MUSS—and then experiencing the war—has definitely helped me grow up and prepare for the future,” she said. “I feel more mature to handle life’s challenges, because there have been so many in the short time we’ve been here.”
Going back different
When these students return to the United States, they will reenter schools where Israel is often discussed as a political issue or a source of social tension.
They may be asked to take sides in arguments by people who have never run barefoot into a bomb shelter.
What will they say?
“I won’t talk about how annoying it was to go to the shelters, or that I was scared,” Julia said. “I’ll tell them how amazing it was to be here. How incredible the community feels. I’ll tell them about all the memories I made—around campus and, yes, in the shelters.”
Sheina put it simply. “I want to show people that life in Israel goes on. It’s not an apocalypse. We are resilient.”
She paused before adding, “Before coming here, I already knew it was a strong and resilient country. But actually experiencing it—personally witnessing the resilience of Israelis—is truly unique. It’s something I’m eternally grateful for.”
Kutno knows the reality these students will return to. Part of his job, he said, is preparing them to hold two realities at once: the Israel they experienced and the Israel that will sometimes be described to them harshly when they return home.
“At MUSS, we create the space where they can grapple honestly with both realities, even when the emotions and conclusions feel complicated,” he said.
He watched his students carry their games and food orders into the shelters and emerge, night after night, intact.
“When they return home, Israel will be more than someplace they’ve read about in a book,” he said. “It will be a place where people they know and care about live their daily lives—laughing and crying, facing challenges and triumphs together.”
The glue of everyday life
Julia Marzouk, who ran barefoot into a shelter on the first day of the war, is not ready to leave.
“I’ve made so many great friends here, and we’re going through this experience together,” she said. “Even though we’re stuck on campus, I’m making so many memories. I love being here. I love Israel.”
Then she added, “I feel more connected because of what we’re going through.”
For Sheina, the semester clarified something she could not have learned any other way.
“MUSS provided me with an amazing opportunity to experience for the first time what being part of the Jewish people really means—both in peace and in war,” she said. “It’s the glue of everyday life, both happy and sad, that brings every Jew closer to another one.”
She added: “I realized that Zionism is not just an idea, but a reality—now my reality of being with my people in both good and trying times.”
