Several months after being evacuated from her home in an agricultural community near the border with Gaza, Israeli schoolteacher Tamar Eyal went back to her abandoned school which had been turned into a military base to recover the school textbooks that the teachers had prepared for their pupils long before the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.
“It was really eerie,” Eyal told JNS in an interview last week at a Jerusalem award ceremony for excellence in Jewish education, recounting her return to the school under cover of darkness with explosions from the nearby fighting ringing in the distance.
It was the peak of a months-long journey for the 47-year-old teacher, unlike anything she had experienced in her two-decade-long career.
The day after the massacre, Eyal, a resident of Kibbutz Sa’ad, had been evacuated with her family and the rest of her religious agricultural community that miraculously had escaped unscathed during the attack despite its location just over a mile from the border with Gaza and down the road from two other especially hard-hit kibbutzim, Be’eri and Kfar Aza.
“We had a true miracle,” she said.
After being relocated to a Dead Sea Hotel, the mother of six was quickly charged with setting up two makeshift schools for the scores of children in her 7th-9th grade classes, one of which was set up on the premises of Masada’s visitors’ center.
“We needed to get the children back in the routine of learning,” she said of the five-month period before they were slowly allowed to return to their homes, which occurred in stages as residents began to trickle back over the last year.
A year and a half later, Eyal was one of six Israeli school teachers from the state’s religious sector who were bestowed an award for excellence in innovative Jewish education by the Tzemach David Foundation at a Wednesday night event at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum.
The second annual award, which seeks to “recognize and honor the visionary educators who are transforming the landscape of teaching in Israel,” comes with a 25,000-shekel ($7,150) cash prize. The recipients, all women, were selected among a pool of hundreds of male and female applicants in the religious school sector who applied for the award.
Set up in 2022, the foundation supports various Israeli educational initiatives, after initially focusing on integrating English-speaking immigrants into the educational system.
“At a time when Israel faces so many challenges, it’s especially powerful to celebrate the creativity, resilience and excellence of these teachers,” David Magerman, founder and president of the foundation, told JNS. “We feel privileged to honor their achievements and to help shine a light on the future they are building for their students and their communities.”
Last year, Magerman donated $5 million to institutes of higher education in Israel, after deciding to re-route his philanthropy from U.S. colleges in the wake of the often violent antisemitic wave of protests that have swept American campuses since the war against Hamas in Gaza began.