With public school doors wide open, will these Ukrainian refugee children get locked out of a Torah education?

Photos: Menachem Kalish

Walk into the Plaza Hotel in Nof HaGalil, a small town in northern Israel, and you can see the misery of the Ukraine war up close.

The large venue, which normally hosts Christian pilgrims who visit adjacent Nazareth, is now home to a group of refugees. Sitting quietly amid the faded ’90s décor of the lobby, clutching documents and new Israeli IDs, their status is unmistakable.

The meager possessions make a mockery of a luggage cart standing around. The menfolk are noticeably absent — left behind fighting or unable to leave. But it’s the refugees’ expressions that really give them away, a certain resignation, and an intense sadness about their eyes.

“We never thought that Putin would actually invade — he’d been threatening Ukraine for years,” says Dima, a young software engineer from Odessa, and due to his eye problems, one of the few men allowed to leave. “It all began so suddenly.”

The scene is being duplicated at hotels and absorption centers across Israel, as hundreds of refugees arrive daily, in the largest wave of immigration since the fall of the Soviet Union.

It’s not only the numbers that bring to mind the mass aliyah of the ’90s. There’s a quiet struggle around the future of the children who’ve come to Israel. It’s reminiscent of the similar effort three decades ago as Communism collapsed — and this small town is in the center.

The battle is focused on children like those chasing each other round the hotel’s lobby. One or two look religious, the majority far from it — but all are offered the same default schooling option.

“Twice over the last weeks, children who were in Jewish schools in Ukraine were directed to nonreligious schools here, because the mayor sees an opportunity to raise the number of Jewish children in the public schools, which have a large Arab population,” says Rabbi Chaim Mikael Guttermann, director of Shuvu, a veteran network of schools for Russian-speakers. “It was only after intervention that we managed to get the children transferred.”