Orchard of Abraham\u2019s school<\/a>, and, despite its ideals of peace, let me start with the difficult reality they must navigate in Israel in 2024: the first spaces Ora wanted to show me were their new bomb shelters.<\/p>\nThey cost $400,000, but her primary mission is to ensure that the children are safe, and now they will be.<\/p>\n
The shelters are located throughout the school\u2019s buildings, and as we walk to see one, I ask where the idea for this place came from.<\/p>\n
Their firstborn child.<\/p>\n
They named him Nur, and realized that, the world being what it is, no matter how hard they worked to teach acceptance of the other, it wouldn\u2019t be enough if their son didn\u2019t live it. The idea was to send him to a mixed school in Jaffa, except there were none there, and few in the country.<\/p>\n
So they decided to start one, and today, it\u2019s K-2, with an astonishing 55 staffers and 220 kids \u2013 60% Jewish and 40% Arab.<\/p>\n
And now we\u2019re in its newest shelter, a prefab metal one lowered here by crane the day before. It joins a retrofitted kitchen space that they recently hardened with 30 extra centimeters of cement and metal window covers.<\/p>\n
I ask how many kids can fit inside each.<\/p>\n
Ora smiled. As many as you can and still shut the door. When sirens go off, there is no such thing as being at capacity.<\/p>\n
I tell Ora it\u2019s an amusing contrast to see a peace-and-love person so proud of a bomb shelter.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want a war,\u201d she explains, \u201cbut our children need to be safe.\u201d<\/p>\n
That gets me asking if things have gotten harder for her mission since Oct. 7. There\u2019s so much hatred now. Has it affected the kids?<\/p>\n
No, she says \u2013 if you start young, they accept each other, no matter what\u2019s happening around them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t give up,\u201d she tells me, \u201ceven when there\u2019s so much pain. We don\u2019t have a choice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then she says simply: \u201cThese are our children.\u201d<\/p>\n
I ask if the shelters have been used often.<\/p>\n
Oh, many times, especially their older shelter. Early in the war, there were missile attacks on Jaffa every day. The car of one of the teachers was hit.<\/p>\n
The war has touched them in many ways. A Palestinian staffer lost her uncle, his wife and their three children in Gaza. Ora\u2019s husband, Hab, lost the son of a cousin there. And Orchard\u2019s Jewish families have friends among the Oct. 7 dead, as well as sons serving in the war.<\/p>\n
In my weeks here and on the West Bank, this is the first community I\u2019ve found that includes, within it, people on both sides mourning losses, and you sense there is bonding over that.<\/p>\n
With the tour finished, I sit with Ora and Hab and ask how they met.<\/p>\n
It was at a retreat with a 1960s sensibility \u2013 a Zen-like space in the Sinai when Israel still controlled it, unfancy bungalows by the water with few amenities.<\/p>\n
The two noticed each other at a nightly bonfire, a Jewish woman and Arab man. As for what happened next, it sounds like an exaggeration, but they really did get married the next day.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy father didn\u2019t speak to me for two years,\u201d says Ora. \u201cIt took him 10 years to be ready to meet Hab.\u201d<\/p>\n
What happened when he did?<\/p>\n
\u201cHe saw Hab didn\u2019t have a tail. He met the person instead of the label.\u201d<\/p>\n
As she tells me the story, Hab, sitting next to her, smiles serenely. I ask about his long, white robe, which gives him the look of the kind of guru the Beatles studied under. He says it\u2019s called a jellabiya, and its tranquility reflects who Hab is.<\/p>\n
Their son Nur \u2013 the one they founded the school for \u2013 is now 16. They have two other sons, 14 and 9.<\/p>\n
I ask what they\u2019re raising them as. Ora answers simply.<\/p>\n
\u201cHumans.\u201d<\/p>\n
I assumed Hab had been raised in an accepting Muslim household, but it was the opposite.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up in a family that taught us to hate Jews,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
His father lost two brothers in the 1948 war, was in a refugee camp at age 14 and was deeply angry. Hab absorbed the same.<\/p>\n
How did he overcome it?<\/p>\n
A very long journey, he said \u2013 which is why they do the work they do. Bridging the Arab-Jew divide is a process.<\/p>\n
Since the school is about unwalled spaces instead of closed classrooms, we were talking near a gathering of kids. Ora brings me over to them to speak with Amal Siksek, in hijab, one of the original teachers who helped them found Orchard 16 years ago.<\/p>\n\n