You can take the woman out of the Upper Galilee, but you just can’t take the Upper Galilee out of the woman. Even on a trip to San Francisco, force of habit compels Ruth “Ruti” Calvary to scrutinize every building, bus or public area she enters, for an escape route — just in case “something happens.”
“I don’t think people from other countries come into a building and look for somewhere they can go if something happens,” said Calvary, a school principal from Kibbutz Hagoshrim. “I always look for somewhere I can run, especially if my kids are with me.”
The Upper Galilee includes the North’s major development town near the Lebanese border, Kiryat Shmona, also the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation’s sister region.
Calvary, the federation’s new volunteer with the Upper Galilee Amutah and Orna Rayn, the region’s new JCF program coordinator, were in town last week for their first meeting with local leaders. And though a sight such as a mound of suitcases at the airport struck them as odd (“In Israel, no way! You can’t leave your bags like this!” said a laughing Rayn), the two reported their home region is experiencing something new — a little peace and quiet.
“Last year, the Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanon, so it was a hard time for us. All last year with Katyushas [rockets] and shelters,” recalled Calvary. “I can tell you as a school principal that we couldn’t ever finish one full year without sitting in the shelters and closing the school for some days. So this was the first time we finished a full year of learning, and that was really something new.”
Lebanon has contributed more to the northern Israeli makeup than Katyusha craters, however. Roughly 1,600 former soldiers in the South Lebanon Army and their families now reside in the north, and come September their children will attend the same schools as ethnically Jewish Israelis.
While some Israelis opposed the mixing of the Christian and Muslim children into the mainstream, Calvary and Rayn, who lives in the border town Metulla, say the students’ parents were the driving force behind the move.
“I asked a father who came to my school last year. I said, ‘We’re going to learn tanakh [the Bible] and Jewish holidays,'” recalled Calvary, who expects 10 of the Lebanese children at her school next year. “He said ‘that’s OK. I’ve connected my destiny with Israel and it’s going to be that way forever.'”
In addition to the incoming Lebanese population, 600 new Ethiopian émigrés arrived at Kibbutz Ayelet HaShachar in May.
“A lot of the kids don’t have anything in their houses, even toys and things we see as natural for kids to grow up with,” said Rayn. “We’ve found out that one of the big problems is they don’t have anything to do in the afternoons. So the federation funded three local playgrounds near where the kids live.”
The Upper Galilee’s vacation from continuous attack has been bittersweet. With the rest of Israel subjected to a taste of what Rayn, Calvary and their neighbors lived through for years — only this time from Hamas and Islamic Jihad — the region’s experience dealing with daily uncertainties from Hezbollah has become a source of knowledge for the rest of the country.
Officials from the West Bank city of Ariel, an urban settlement housing roughly 17,000, called school principal Calvary.
“They asked, ‘what do we do with our children?’ They are frightened, worried,” recalled Calvary. “We have a program to deal with tense situations, and we told them what we are doing.”
In the Upper Galilee, children are instructed even in the shelters. Teams of social workers and psychologists can be quickly deployed to the site of a traumatic incident, as was the case earlier this year when a kibbutz security guard in Menara was slain and the collective’s armory was cleaned out. Finally, the region has an overall evacuation plan in the case of a severe emergency.
Yet life there is more than just a constant fear of the next rocket attack, insist Calvary and Rayn. The two point out that their region’s emergency preparedness isn’t all that can serve as a model to the rest of the nation.
“We felt that it was all the time boys getting sports fields, football, basketball, all the time boys. What about girls? We went to the Knesset and got money,” recalled Calvary. “Now the girls are first place in basketball. Now we are an example for other areas in the country.”