18.08.26, Or Kashti, Haaretz
In a radical experiment, Shahar Feinstein Gavriel put children from Israel’s wealthiest families and children of asylum seekers in the same classrooms, side by side. Did it work?
“On the first day of school I saw Shahar hug all the children,” Gonatz said. “I went to the municipality and told them that I wanted him [Manaseh] to be transferred [to Shapira]. I insisted. I don’t have a mother or grandmother here. The hug was more important than the studies.”
On the small stage, fifth-graders performed an abridged version of the iconic song “I Am a Guitar.” “Maybe I was once a tree / And in the sound box / I remember everyone who played on me / And I say thank you,” they warbled.
“Look at him,” Gonatz said proudly of her son. “He’s there at the end of the row, with the friend who’s hugging him.”
The Shapira school is a magnet for tensions: between secular and religious families, between Israelis and foreigners, between newer, relatively liberal residents (“gentrifiers,” as some call them, or “housing upgraders,” in another formulation) and longtime residents, who tend to be more traditional and less affluent. Reality does not stop at the school gates. Every national crisis lays these conflicts bare once again. Everything simmers beneath the surface.
Did the experiment succeed? The conclusion of Feinstein Gavriel’s tenure allows him to sum it up in his sober-eyed and modest way. There are no absolutes here in terms of good and bad people, but rather a more grounded viewpoint that shifts constantly between fantasy and reality.
“I didn’t manage to close the gap in learning disparities, no matter what we did or how much money we invested,” the outgoing principal says candidly. “The strong remained strong, and it’s the same for the weak. I can point to a lot of failures. We’re walking amid the ruins. But between them, in the cracks, are many moments of meaningful relationships, and room for identities and encounters with people who are different from us. I tried to extend that scope as far as possible. I didn’t always succeed.”
The division among the school’s 400 students has been the same from the start: 70 percent are Israelis and 30 percent are Israeli-born children of migrant parents, most of them of Eritrean origin; others come from the Philippines, Ivory Coast, Ghana, India and Turkey. Of the so-called sabra youngsters, about 45 percent are new residents of Shapira, 10 percent are from the neighborhood’s veteran population and 15 percent are special-needs children from all across south Tel Aviv.
Feinstein Gavriel kept the number of children of foreign nationals down. The 30-percent figure reflects the prevailing estimate of the “tolerance threshold” that well-off parents have for classmates from a disadvantaged background. If that proportion is surpassed, those parents will likely seek a different educational framework for their offspring, far from the latter group – a local version of the phenomenon known internationally as “white flight.”
“Honestly, how many well-to-do parents will send their children to a school with a mixed student body?” Feinstein Gavriel asks rhetorically.
There is no limit to the disparities, both outside and inside the school walls. A case in point was the weeks of war with Iran. The “strong” families have a safe room in their homes, or a place to flee to outside the city. The refugee and migrant families, most of whom live in unprotected dwellings, preferred the thick walls at school. During air-raid sirens many also huddled in the bomb shelter in the yard.
In the course of the temporary arrangement Feinstein Gavriel made at the Shapira school during the recent fighting, which kept getting extended, segregation was maintained: families from Eritrea in a number of classrooms, those from India and the Philippines in other rooms. Some Israeli families from the neighborhood, whose children attended the adjacent religious school, also showed up.
“We arranged for mattresses and food, and we saw to it that they would not quarrel with one another,” Feinstein Gavriel relates. “I immediately asked the better-off parents what they could do to help, and within a short time they donated 10,000 shekels [about $3,300] for buying food coupons. That’s not the school’s job, but it’s part of the community story.”
But the weeks of fighting against Iran exposed the class differences once again: The better-off families left.
Feinstein Gavriel: “I have nothing to say. I don’t judge anyone who chose to live here, or those who chose to leave school. That may be why the school is so important: In a terrific way, with a lot of hard work and also mistakes – it’s somehow holding the neighborhood together.”
I tell Israeli-born parents that inequality has a smell and a color and a taste – in the clothes children wear or the food they bring: a pathetic-looking croissant, on one hand, or a meal with trimmings and a note, ‘Have a great day, Love, Mom,’ on the other.
Shahar Feinstein Gavriel
Did the Israeli-born parents grasp the challenges from the outset?
“Even if an Israeli family were to take an interest, they are incapable of understanding what life is like when parents and children sleep in the same bed in the living room, because there’s no room in their cramped apartment. At the orientation meetings before first grade, most of the families look the same. The meetings are very pleasant, there’s usually lots of enthusiasm – and then comes the stage when I say that we also need to talk about the parents who aren’t in the room, either because the municipality hasn’t yet decided which of the foreign-born kids will attend my school and which will be assigned to one outside the neighborhood, or because they didn’t get a notification in Tigrinya [the Eritrean language] or because they were notified but are working and couldn’t get away. I don’t hide anything. I tell them there are big challenges ahead.”
What do you say to them?
“I talk about the families from Eritrea, what the mothers endured on the way and what the fathers had to do, about prolonged posttraumatic stress disorder and the constant awareness of being a refugee. I tell the Israeli parents that inequality has a smell and a color and a taste. For example, in the clothes the children wear or the food they bring for breakfast – a pathetic-looking croissant, on one hand, or a meal with all the trimmings and a note, ‘Have a great day, Love, Mom,’ on the other hand.
“I explain that there will be big disparities between the students in their ability to understand what the teacher is talking about or in reading a Hebrew text. And also that their children will not be living in a bubble, but will be exposed to violence and to inappropriate content.”
You tell the parents that their children will get beaten up at school.
“Yes, but to trust us to handle it. But I also don’t tell them to grit their teeth and bear it. In the second year of the school a ‘strong’ family left. They were active on the parents committee and were the first to leave. When he came in to say goodbye, the father said he had hoped that I would put more emphasis on achievement. That perhaps diverting attention and resources to other children, who were more in need, affected their son’s achievements. He said that life here is hard enough – so why also at school?
“I remember that meeting well, and not only because I really liked the boy and I thought the parents were real partners. I was afraid that others would start to leave.”
That didn’t happen. Although families from a solid background occasionally left, it wasn’t a phenomenon. The principal devotes considerable energy to this.
Students in the advanced English program during an activity organized for the school. “They find it difficult to express themselves in regular classes,” one teacher explains. Credit: Tomer Appelbaum
Feinstein Gavriel says he realizes that “without such strong parents the school cannot really exist. There is no chance that integration of this sort will succeed without their help. I owe them. I checked out what’s happening in the north of the city and I brought in projects for gifted students and special programs from the [Tel Aviv] Museum of Natural History. I don’t want them to think that they are getting less than their friends in the north. So I also offer robotics and chess – I want it all to be worth their while.”
The daily encounters between groups of youngsters from different backgrounds have a potential to flare up, the outgoing principal explains. A minor argument a few months earlier between some girls prompted one Israeli-born mother to call the principal and complain that the Shapira Squad gang was harassing her daughter. The gang, locally referred to as the SSQ, consists mainly of seven- to 16-year-olds who come from families of foreign workers and asylum seekers from African countries, and who threaten local residents and sometimes engage in criminal activities.
Another incident Feinstein Gavriel mentions involved Israeli girls from one of the older classes who saw their foreign classmates’ preference for speaking English as patronizing and snobby. “Why don’t they speak in Hebrew? They do it to upset us,” they complained. The teachers tried to explain that it wasn’t a provocation, but simply stemmed from the other girls’ desire to express themselves in a language in which they were more articulate and comfortable.
There was also the time when, during a tour of the neighborhood, some fifth-graders sat down on chairs while their classmates made do with mats on the ground. When the teacher, realizing there were not enough chairs to go around, asked an Israeli-born student to get up from his seat, he demanded to know why she hadn’t asked a classmate from a migrant family to get up from hers. Within seconds an argument broke out. “Within a reality of so many needs, disparities and differences, every argument becomes very identity-based and deals with questions of belonging and inequality,” says the teacher, Carmel Hartman.
During breaks when snacks or meals are eaten in the classroom, students tend to gather in separate groups according to skin color. “At first I was panicky about it,” Feinstein Gavriel admits. “I thought the integration wasn’t working. I would ask myself: Who am I kidding here?” Gradually he realized that insularity – being drawn to and connected with others like yourself – stems from a natural need: “I learned that it’s wrong to break it all up. At the same time, in an educational framework it’s possible to meet and get to know the Other, and then my consciousness can develop to the point where I learn that I also have things in common with people different from me. You can imagine relations in a broader way.”
Hartman: “As a resident of the neighborhood, I started to work in a school out of a community-based conception. For a long time I had this fantasy of teaching within the great social complexity in Tel Aviv, of ‘getting my hands dirty,’ of changing the world. It took me a few years to understand that perhaps my most important task is not to correct reality, but to encourage recognition of the Other precisely at the most trivial moments.”
For a long time I had this fantasy of teaching within great social complexity, of changing the world. It took time to understand that perhaps my most important task is not to correct reality, but to encourage recognition of the Other at the most trivial moments.
Carmel Hartman
Thus, the differences between the students aren’t denied, rather they constitute an opportunity for discussion and for a few moments of empathy. One morning earlier this month, the children said goodbye to two Eritrean girls who were leaving for Canada with their families, Feinstein Gavriel says. “They would have liked to have gone on living here, but very unfortunately, Israel isn’t willing to give them citizenship,” he told the class. “What is citizenship?” one girl asked.
“They don’t have rights like you have,” he continued. “For example, they don’t have a passport and they can’t go abroad. And their father can’t get a driver’s license. Their parents want them to go to university when they get older and so that they’ll be able to do whatever they want. So even though they love Israel, they can’t go on living here.”
It’s because of moments like these, he says later, that we can hope that “children will take a complex view of reality and will challenge it.”
Another recent incident occurred in a first-grade class at the end of lunchtime, when the teacher asked the youngsters to clean up after themselves. The immigrant children complied, but some of the Israelis were less eager. “Not everyone likes to clean up,” one of them said. “And then there’s Marina, and it’s her job to clean. She loves cleaning.”
That sparked an unusual discussion, at which Feinstein Gavriel was present. “Do you think that Marina wants to clean at school?” he asked the girl. “First of all, I want you to know that cleaning is hard work. Not everyone is free to choose what they want to do. Your parents have all sorts of work opportunities.” One of the mothers of a girl in the class, he added, is a cleaner “because she has no other choice. Many parents here don’t have official status, so the father works as a delivery person for Wolt and the mother is a cleaner. And Marina [the school’s cleaning person] will go back to Azerbaijan at the end of the year. She came here because she has a son there and she needs to work so she can send him money.”
Sometimes, he adds, you can see the spark of understanding, the small shift toward awareness of the Other. For example, in activities that outstanding fifth- and sixth-grade students in English – almost all of them children of foreign nationals – conducted for other children at school. Options included a competition to identify words in English, seeing a short play, playing Simon Says, drawing monsters and participating in a ball game. Students were also invited to write their names in English on a large poster, which declared, in large letters: “We all belong here.”
“These are top students in English who find it difficult to express themselves in regular classes,” explains teacher Adi Drori-Avraham. “They conduct an ongoing dialogue with the Israelis and with Israeliness. We wanted a new way of framing their own abilities and their encounter with other students.”
There are also spontaneous moments. An Israeli father who participates in the school’s extracurricular learning center, which is run by volunteers in the afternoon, joyfully hugging an Eritrean girl who succeeded in solving a problem in Hebrew. Or three little girls, a migrant and two Israelis, dancing at the end of the hall to singer Noa Kirel’s song “Panthera.” “They say I’m weird, I say they’re ordinary,” the girls sing.
Feinstein Gavriel arrives from recess and observes from the side. “For moments like these, when a child can imagine friendship or something in common with someone who’s different from them – that’s what this school exists for.”
Maintaining the stipulated ratio of 30 percent students with foreign-born parents to 70 percent from native-born families leads to rejection of many of the offspring of immigrants who live in the Shapira neighborhood. Internal data obtained by Haaretz show that the number of such students who are assigned to schools outside the neighborhood is more than double the number of those who attend Shapira Neighborhood School. The students at the Bialik, Keshet and Gvanim schools in Tel Aviv are all from migrant or asylum-seeker families; those youngsters meet only other children from other foreign families. According to Feinstein-Gavriel, that is the common denominator of members of the so-called SSQ gang, which originated in Shapira.
“They attended satellite schools and in the afternoon returned to a place with which they had no connection,” he explains. “There’s no framework, no youth movements, no ‘involved’ parents. There’s no one. They have nothing to lose and no future. And then they started to roam the streets. A child who feels wanted won’t join a gang.”
Despite the financial and educational investment, the disparities between children of Israeli parents and those with foreign-born parents have not been closed at Shapira, Feinstein Gavriel admits: “The vast majority of sixth-graders can read Hebrew, but we haven’t been able to close the tremendous gap in vocabulary and fluency. Their reading comprehension is very flawed. We haven’t overcome the statistics.”
Some of the teaching staff, he adds, have a hard time with the inevitable frustration that accompanies them every time they step into the classroom or administer a test: “During the second school year we were in operation, after I saw that we would not succeed in closing the large gaps, I changed the terminology to one of equal opportunity. I told the teachers that, with all due respect to what they are doing, we will not be able to change things fundamentally. But we can try, every morning anew, to give each boy and girl an equal opportunity to advance from the place they’re at.
“I can point to many failures, but I know for certain that this school is an anchor and a form of stability for each child and family, amid all the chaos that’s rampant here. They can rely on their being wanted here – knowing that they will be looked after, that ties will be maintained with them, that there will be an apology when needed. There is certainty in having ties, something that characterizes this school. We are adamant about it.”
To put this revised approach into practice at the school, every teacher is required to become familiar with each child’s environment. They need to know the parents personally, to visit the homes, hear what the students do after school and, if needed, to help organize enrichment activities at the community center.
What sort of connections with youngsters can be expected from staff who teach in crowded classrooms and are not well paid?
Feinstein Gavriel: “I tell them that there is nothing more important. Drop everything, but don’t forgo this. It may sound presumptuous, but in parallel we have succeeded in bringing many older figures into every classroom: students from the Seminar Hakibbutzim Teachers College, assistant teachers, people doing National Service and also local parents who come after school to help out. The presence of so many people makes it possible to distribute the load and to strive to forge personal ties. And the teachers also know that such is my own level of acquaintance with every one of the 100 people who work here.”
Shahar didn’t acknowledge that he first needs to be a mouthpiece for people who don’t have money and are being pushed out. Even if you have the best intentions, if you go along with the strong you’ll trample the weak.
Yael Ben Yefet
Do you know the names of all 400 students?
“And also of the parents and what they do for a living.”
Feinstein Gavriel says he particularly realized the importance of maintaining personal ties and of seeing each youngster’s world as comprehensively as possible during the decade when he worked with special-needs children in Givatayim, east of Tel Aviv. It’s not by chance that many of the teachers in Shapira Neighborhood School come from the realm of special education (others have training in art). But perhaps his realization goes back to an earlier stage.
“My parents were divorced when I was 10,” he says. “My world collapsed, my home fell apart. A teacher from school, Yardena, came to visit. I don’t remember any details, but I can show you where she sat on the sofa. She came because she felt she needed to. And something became whole – between Shahar who goes to school in the morning and Shahar who returns home afterward. She crossed some sort of boundary and enveloped my whole life. She could see all the parts within me. I remember that one day I cried in class. Yardena didn’t say anything, she just came over and comforted me with her hand. She knew what I was going through.”
Yael Ben Yefet, a social activist originally from the Kiryat Shalom neighborhood of south Tel Aviv, was one of the parents who advocated for establishment of the Shapira Neighborhood School, where her children study, but is disappointed at the result.
“We dreamed of a school that would be a home for the longtime residents of the city’s south. That dream did not come true,” she says. “Shapira is the eye of the storm of the gentrification taking place around Israel. There are wonderful teachers at the school, but Shahar didn’t acknowledge the disparities in status and power in the neighborhood – that first of all he needs to be a mouthpiece for people who don’t have money, status or connections, and are being pushed out of it. Even if you have the best intentions in the world, if you go along with the strong you will trample the weak.
“It’s true that children belonging to the foreign community who attend this school are treated better compared to other institutions, but it’s not really a multicultural school. It’s not enough to say ‘Happy holiday’ in English. Why, for example, don’t the texts in language classes refer to Black figures? We have remained with the same hegemonic culture.”
According to Ben Yefet’s partner, Amir Butboul, the school silences “anyone who tries to question the institution’s supposed success story,” the attempt at fundamental integration of the children of the foreign community and the narrowing of gaps in the student body. “Every question is perceived as reflecting embitterment. The liberal community won’t allow anything to interfere with the story it [the school] tells itself.”
Feinstein Gavriel is not surprised by this criticism. “I failed in the attempt to get Yael and Amit and parents in a similar situation to feel that they belong to the school – as opposed, for example, to Eritrean and Filipino families. We didn’t speak the same language. They dreamed of a traditionalist, Mizrahi school, but gentrification and market forces are stronger than I am, and families of veteran residents are gradually disappearing. They found themselves alone in the field many times, in the face of parents who didn’t identify with them and didn’t understand what was hurting them.”
Dania Vaknin’s two children are in second and fourth grade at the school. Vaknin, head of its parents committee, does not idealize the encounters between different groups there – not just between the children of Israelis, whether longtime residents or relative newcomers, and the foreign-born community, but also in terms of the children in the special-needs classes at the school.
“These three populations create something akin to chaos,” Vaknin notes. “But that diversity is one of the reasons I send my children there. The school has strength and uniqueness and it educates children.”
This school is an anchor and a form of stability for each child and family, amid all the chaos that’s rampant here. They can rely on their being wanted here – knowing that they will be looked after, that ties will be maintained with them, that there will be an apology when needed.
Shahar Feinstein Gavriel
Are you aware of the possibility that the so-called stronger parents could pull their kids out if the proportion of children of migrants and asylum seekers exceeds 30 percent?
Vaknin: “I’m familiar with that viewpoint of Shahar’s, and I trust him to grasp the situation correctly. I can’t say whether I would send my child if it were 40 percent. I don’t deal with numbers, but it is important for me that this school has something to offer in terms of the level of studies there.”
“There are children here from the uppermost percentile [of wage-earners in Israeli society] together with children from undocumented families,” says Dudu Rotman, from the Department of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has a son in second grade at the Shapira Neighborhood School. “Multiculturalism demands hard work, and it has a price that everyone must take into account and to pay daily. I am ready to have Shahar and the staff invest a great many resources in children who need them more, even if it is at the expense of resources that might be invested in my son. I do so because I believe that heterogeneity in education constitutes a tremendous opportunity.”
That heterogeneity is made possible by sending most of the children of foreigners in the neighborhood to schools elsewhere.
Dr. Rotman: “I say this with immense pain: Without proper oversight, the neighborhood school would become a framework for children of refugees and labor migrants. Still, we need to bear in mind the urban picture. The default in Tel Aviv is segregated schools. This school has an almost miraculous ability to mobilize strong parents, for instance, in the form of its extracurricular learning center that serves a few dozen migrant children.”
What about the students from the veteran population?
“The narrative of a ‘war’ between the newcomers and the longtime residents is a partial one. There is genuine complexity here because the veteran population is aging, and the few children they are still having have opted to go to the religious school. I would be happy if they were to come to us, but that didn’t work out. That is a painful thing, but it’s apparently too much to ask.”
Indeed, one of the focal points of tension with respect to the Shapira Neighborhood School lies precisely here. It sprouted from within the same premises as the state-religious Shorashim (Roots) school, literally next door. On the day the new facility opened, the guard asked the principal when a fence was going to be erected between the two institutions.
“What fence are you talking about?” Feinstein Gavriel asked.
“Between us and you,” the guard replied.
“And like many left-wingers,” the principal recalls now, “I said that no fence would be needed. Everyone would live as they wished – religious there, secular here. Why should there be a separation? For sure we’ll get along. Today I wouldn’t respond the same way. I have understood that people need fences and boundaries.”
During his school’s first year, all the students entered through one entry gate. The wing on the left housed the new, secular school; the one on the right was home to the longtime religious institution. During the second year, in the wake of protests by parents of Shorashim students over the way the secular mothers dressed, Shapira Neighborhood School students began to enter through a small side gate. During the third year, its student body grew to some 80 students.
“I didn’t agree to their coming in from the side, like rats,” Feinstein Gavriel recalls. “The Shorashim people accepted that, but demanded a new, separate gate.”
During the fourth year a row of large flowerpots was placed between the schoolyards, shielding religious eyes from the secular diversity and the foreign children. A year ago, because of the crowded conditions at Feinstein Gavriel’s school, the municipality decided to allow it to use the third floor of the wing that once belonged to Shorashim, which could be accessed by a separate staircase with no possibility of entry to the two lower floors.
Over the years, the religious school rejected every proposal for joint activities with the secular school – between either the students (who share a gym and a yard, with different times for recess) or the staff. The main reason, according to Shapira Neighborhood School staff, was the presence of children of foreign-born parents and the “danger of assimilation.”
During the period of the protests against the government’s judicial coup three years ago, political disputes between parents – roughly divided between antigovernment “Kaplanists” on one side, Bibi-ists on the other – didn’t exactly help the atmosphere in Shapira. A person who knows the Shorashim school well offers a different explanation: “The new neighborhood school didn’t seek to live alongside us but to take our place. So relations between them were constrained. No one wants to cooperate with their executioner.”
A few weeks ago, the municipality announced that Shorashim would close its doors. Its 200 students, only 60 of them local residents, will attend the religious school in the nearby Kiryat Shalom neighborhood. Since that announcement, the level of hostility between the two student bodies has risen: Bicycle tires were punctured, objects were thrown around and there were taunts along the lines of “stinking seculars.”
Feinstein Gavriel is saddened by the closure of Shorashim. “I thought it was possible to build a different model here that would contain both schools,” he says. “But my idea doesn’t have enough buyers, among parents in both schools. I failed. I can also understand the perspective of Shorashim. They were here first, and for many years they had quiet and plenty of space.
“Suddenly a few lefties and refugee children showed up and were given a wing of their building. We grew and after a few years we also received the structure in the yard that had been used as a synagogue. We continued to grow, and we got the third floor. The city wanted to shut them down a few years ago. What community can live with the sword of closure hanging over them? Why would they like us?”
We go out to the schoolyard. It’s recess time for kids at Feinstein Gavriel’s school. Children are playing with a ball in a corner of the partly fenced-off yard, some from the religious school. A few minutes later a student shouts to the principal: “Shorashim took the ball!”
“It saddens me that we have reached a situation of us or them,” says Vaknin, the parents committee chair at the neighborhood school. “Our school is crowded, but we never asked for Shorashim to leave. It’s sad, because it leaves a really bad feeling in the neighborhood. We are seen as being responsible for the closure of the religious school.”
Some people, however, are happy that the school will close. “We have serious overcrowding and we also prefer less friction,” one parent says candidly.
Feinstein Gavriel, who grew up in Rishon Letzion and lives in Be’er Yaakov, southeast of Tel Aviv, with his wife and three children, admits that he is often asked by parents in Shapira why he doesn’t live there.
What do you reply?
“I don’t have a complete answer, but I don’t feel that I’m selling an ideology that I’m not willing to implement. There is a disparity here. I’m not sure that I would raise children in Shapira, but I do know that after many hours of conflicts and huge investment, at the end of the day I need to chill out a little in a sterile, homogeneous place – a 14-story building, Mizrahi middle class – without a lot of deep connections there. I need that disconnect, otherwise I would have no air.”
Next year, Feinstein Gavriel will be principal of a new junior high school of the arts, named for the late actress Ronit Elkabetz, which is now under construction in the Kfar Shalem neighborhood of south Tel Aviv, at a cost of 200 million shekels (currently about $67 million). It will be a sharp transition for him: from a primary school of intimate proportions to a middle school with six classes in the seventh grade alone.
In mid-June we visited the site. Construction is moving ahead. It’s an imposing, multidimensional structure with lots of hallways. Feinstein Gavriel is leery of using the word “monster.” He searches for a different way of describing the vast structure, which is also a stark contrast to the array of old buildings that characterizes the surroundings; from the third floor the view is one of solar heaters and shacks. “Maybe a ‘spaceship’ that was plunked down in the middle of the neighborhood?”
He’s concerned that local residents will feel alienated from the arts school. “In Kfar Shalem I don’t speak the language of the majority,” he admits. “On one hand, that’s frightening. On the other hand, I’m sure I’ll learn it.”
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