Tears and sirens as Gaza envelope rebuilds
Nir Kedar for Jewish News Life mag November 2024
We are only a few minutes into our Zoom interview when Professor Nir Kedar’s screen goes dark and, apologetically, he says there are sirens and he needs to run to a shelter.
This is the sad reality of life in Israel today — but the remarkable upside is that Kedar, the president of Sapir Academic College in the south of the country, remains relentlessly positive — and even more than that, determined to rebuild and extend the institution.
For most people it might be an uphill struggle, but Kedar is not most people. A law professor who has been president of Sapir for just over two years, the 56-year-old is a blizzard of facts and figures, whose content, I am left in no doubt, he has made clear to the government in the first chaotic days after October 7 2023.
Sapir, whose campus is less than four kilometres from the Gaza border, is not just the only academic institution in the surrounding area, but also the region’s biggest employer.
But on October 7 2023, Kedar was nowhere near. In fact, he was in Quebec and had only been due to return to Israel five days later. Something woke him in the middle of the night and he began to look at his phone and discover the disaster that had overtaken the country.
He couldn’t get a flight back from Montreal for two days and spent that time in a frantic series of phone calls and texts, trying to find out what had happened to his staff and the faculty, many of whom lived in the Tel Aviv area.
“I also wanted to know about my students. So I called the head of the student association, but she was in Sri Lanka”. The two Israelis put together a first desperate list of all those who lived in Student Villages in the nearby kibbutzim, and began calling, one by one, to find out how they were.
Kedar had contact details for most of his faculty members. “Some of them didn’t answer me: some said they could not talk, but only text, since they had to be silent as there were still terrorists outside. Some had already been murdered. And we [Kedar and the student leader] had to create some kind of information centre in the chaos of the first two or three days”.
Kedar was shocked to learn of the death of a close friend and colleague, Ofir Libstein, who had been the mayor of the Sha’ar Hanegev regional council, the area in which the college is situated. “He was a member of the Sapir board, he came to weekly meetings…” Libstein had been killed in fighting at Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7, but his was only the first name that Kedar recognised, as more and more bad news came rolling in, of deaths and kidnappings.
In those first terrible hours, Kedar sat in his Canadian hotel room and made hundreds of phone calls and sent texts in an effort to understand what was going on. Some people were still observing Shabbat and Simchat Torah and did not respond, others were hiding in shelters.
Eventually Kedar learned that 270 staff and faculty members had been evacuated and 1200 students had been evacuated, too. “It was awful”, Kedar says, simply, “and we had to figure out how to deal with it.”
In total, in “normal” times, Sapir had about 7,000 to 8,000 students on a variety of different courses, ranging from a thriving engineering faculty to a well-regarded film school, and, of course, a law faculty.
Kedar finally got back to Israel on October 10 and realised he had a monumental task ahead of him. As bodies were still being identified from the kibbutz and Sderot attacks, more and more names were added to the Sapir database — who had been murdered, who kidnapped, who injured and who evacuated.
Not the least of the problems was the fact that Sapir had been placed in a no-entry military zone by the army and that there was no electricity on the campus. Kedar had to send staffers in to start generators in one of the buildings so that he and his colleagues could continue with the vital work of creating a definitive database of what had happened to everyone connected to the college.
“The news kept coming” about the dead and casualties, says Kedar. One member of staff, Lishay Miran Lavi, is Sapir’s director of pre-academic programmes. She and her husband Omri lived with their two small children, now aged three and 18 months, on Kibbutz Nahal Oz. For hours on October 7 she and her family were held at gunpoint, but Omri was taken to Gaza where he still, at the time of writing, remains a hostage. Lishay has become a passionate advocate for his release and that of all the hostages.
In all, Sapir lost 47 members of its community, from staff to faculty to students. The survivors were scattered all over the country and Kedar faced new problems, such as how to pay 1300 salaries with a largely suspended teaching system, and what to do about the hundreds of students called up to do reserve duty in the military.
Like the rest of Israeli universities, Sapir’s academic year, which would normally have started just after the 2023 High Holy Days, was postponed until December.
Kedar and his colleagues then had to make a lot of decisions which they knew would affect the long-term future of Sapir. To his great consternation, he found himself dealing with “lots of red tape and bureaucracy” from the government, which, to be fair, had also never had to face such distressing chaos before, either.
Visiting the evacuated staff and students, Kedar began to make lists of what they needed, from clothes to basic toiletries; and then to raise money for other vital services, such as phones and laptops, mental health sessions for the survivors and finding enough therapists to provide treatment.
Tel Aviv University helped by opening an emergency centre which Sapir students could use; and ultimately, at Sapir itself, Kedar and his team have created a “resilience centre” inside the college. Not long after its launch, Kedar says, “We ran two huge Zoom meetings for staff and faculty. So many of them live near Sapir and very many of them were inside shelters for 10-12 hours. Most of them came from communities in which dozens of people were murdered. I began the meetings by being thankful that we were there, but then people started crying. And they were crying for five minutes, 150 people — and each telling their stories. I have tears in my eyes now, just thinking about it.”
Because Sapir “is a symbol for the area”, Kedar’s first pledge was that the college would continue, whether in different spaces initially, but definitely “the vision was, from the beginning, that we would return.”
And then the funerals and shivas began, and Kedar had to draw himself a literal road map as to what he could attend, from the north to the south of Israel, and where was en route to the next heartbreaking occasion.
Law faculty graduates at Sapir College 2024
“Even now”, says Kedar, “I get up every morning and I say, no, it’s too much. But I have no other choice. I told the students, I promised them, you will have your degree. I don’t know how, but you will have it. That was the promise”.
He likens Sapir to a small town and reckons around 10,000 people enter the campus on a daily basis. So he and his colleagues began drawing up plans to make Sapir work in a new, post-October 7 reality, bearing in mind the economic and social impact of the college on the region. “Look,” says Kedar, “we can’t continue as though this were an academic ivory tower”.
Instead, and remarkably, Sapir, rather than drawing its horns in after the massacre, is expanding. “We need to build back better”, says Kedar.
Accordingly, next year, the college is opening two new faculties — one for medical sciences, in a joint programme with the Hebrew University, and another in engineering and advanced technology. And Kedar also hopes to have a third faculty which will offer courses in environment and water climate studies.
After a year of upheaval in which students were being taught remotely, it’s now hoped that most subjects will be studied face-to-face.
If he has one wish after dealing with such unthinkable challenges, Professor Kedar would love there to be a British Friends group, to help the regrowth of the Gaza Envelope. Slowly but inexorably, with Sapir College at its heart, the wounded region is bouncing back.