Tender Loving Care, Now and Always

Neta Kessler was on a high mountain pass in Nepal on October 7, when terrorists invaded his kibbutz. A second-year Sustainability & Government student at Reichman University in Herzliya, he reached home an exhausting five days later, volunteered immediately for the IDF's Armored Corps reserves and spent the next three months driving a tank in Gaza.

Guy Assor, 28, studies Law & Business Administration at Reichman. Called to the IDF reserves on October 7, he was posted to Gaza's teeming Shejaiya neighborhood, in jolting sight of his home, a scant kilometer across the border.

Ido Felus, 24, who is enrolled in Business Administration & Entrepreneurship at Reichman's Adelson School, was in the Gaza Envelope area when Hamas attacked. He survived the invasion and was recruited into the civil guards.

Shani Birnbaum, 23, studies in Reichman's Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology. She returned to Israel on October 3rd after visiting her family in Munich, and awoke to sirens on October 7. She was called for 72 days of reserve duty in the IDF Home Front Command's Search & Rescue unit.

Jewish and democratic values
"Reichman probably has a higher ratio of students called to fight in this war against Hamas than any other institution of higher learning in Israel," says Jonathan Davis, Reichman University's Vice President for External Relations and head of its Raphael Recanati International School. "Of the 8,200 young men and women who comprise our student body, more than 4,000 were mobilized. And although 85% have since been released, there are repeat callups."

These numbers will not surprise anyone who knows Reichman University (formerly IDC-Herzliya), Israel's first private, non-profit institution of higher education. "Our university was founded 30 years ago by Prof. Uriel Reichman, an Israeli legal scholar and former Dean of the Tel Aviv University Law School, who modelled it after the US's Ivy League schools," says Davis. "His intention was that it contribute to the State of Israel, the Jewish people and the wider world. Its student body is pluralistic, and its orientation is humanistic Zionism, built on Jewish and democratic values from Herzl and Jabotinsky through Ben Gurion and Begin. With an innovative, pioneering approach to interdisciplinary higher education, it equips its students for leadership roles in society, and our 34,000 alumni are found in prominent professional, business and public service positions. Our motto is 'freedom and responsibility,' and we're adamantly not 'woke' and firmly anti-cancel culture."

Embracing reservists
The University's response to the horror of October 7 and the war that followed was immediate and comprehensive. It at once offered its newly built Ronson dormitory complex to house 100 evacuees from the savaged kibbutz of Kfar Aza, three kilometers from the Gaza border. Among them is the family of Rotem Koren, a third-year Law & Business Administration student at Reichman. He had woken up in his Tel Aviv apartment on October 7 to desperate WhatsApp messages from his parents and "went into autopilot." Eventually, he got hold of an IDF unit at the kibbutz and "directed them to my parents' home. They told me it was on fire, and I begged them to go to the safe room window and shout my name. They found my parents there alive, and got them out through that window. And then they came to live in my university..."

Reichman is also embracing its 4,000-plus reservists. "As a Zionist university, we've always given preferential treatment to those who serve the country – from our acceptance process, through academic credits for those in elite IDF units, through making up classes and extending deadlines for reservists," says Davis.

Since October 7, Reichman's staff, both junior and senior, academic and administrative, have been keeping firm fingers on the pulse to identify post-trauma in students and make sure they get help, as needed. Kessler, for example, is one of several students who lost close friends and neighbors, "murdered or kidnapped from their own homes, where they should have been safest," as he puts it. Six of his friends remain hostages. Assor, who saw his home from where he was stationed in Gaza, experienced not only "a great sense of mission, but also of continuing shock," as he realized that the terrorists who murdered his friends had been watching his home and planning its destruction. Felus is still processing the fact that he and his family barricaded themselves in their safe room in Kfar Aza while Hamas terrorists sprawled in their yard and operated command and sniper posts from the roof of their home. They spent 24 hours without food or water, until IDF forces came.

As well as its vigilance to the psychological coping of its students, the university provides scholarships to those experiencing financial hardship resulting from their service, and it encourages students who were not mobilized to tutor those who were – "though we well know that however much we do, they'll still have to work hard to catch up," says Davis.

We're all with you!
"The university has been amazing," attests Birnbaum. "There was never a single moment that I felt they didn't have my back. The heads of my Psych program and of the International School and many of my other teachers messaged me all the time to check if I was OK, and ask whether I needed anything, either personally or study-wise. The Students Union sent me care packages. It meant everything to know they were thinking of me and were there to help me."

"When school started again in November, I met with the heads of my program on Zoom to work out a study timetable," she continues. "I tried for a while to combine school and army duty, but I couldn't do it. My teachers were endlessly patient, and constantly gave me extensions for missed assignments. They even gave me reserve duty credits."

During her first furlough, only 36 hours long, the first place Birnbaum went was Reichman's campus. "It's the place I feel most at home," she says. "I got the most tremendous welcome there. That told me: 'We're all with you!' which was exactly what I needed to hear."

Birnbaum is an international student – one of more than 2,500 from 90 different countries which makes Reichman's International School Israel's largest. She's also among some 300 students who came to Israel without their families and served as lone soldiers before their studies. School head Jonathan Davis feels a special bond with them.

"I was myself a lone soldier in an IDF Paratroopers Brigade reconnaissance battalion, 50 years ago," he recalls. "I fought in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, and so have some understanding of what they're going through. Their welfare was a priority for me before the war began, and remains so now more than ever."

Injured, killed and taken hostage
To date, dozens of Reichman's students have been injured in the fighting, eight have been killed and one, Environmental Sciences student Idan Shtivi, 28, is held hostage in Gaza. He was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from the Nova rave, which he had volunteered to photograph. Within an hour of arriving at 6 am on October 7, he called his girlfriend to say there were rocket barrages and he was getting out of there. His car was found full of blood and bullet holes, and inside were the bodies of two friends. Security forces later confirmed he had been abducted and dragged into Gaza.

"It affects the whole school," say Birnbaum. "Overall, it's a really tough, intense time. Almost everyone I know was or is serving, many of them in Gaza. Like everyone else, I suppress how I feel and get on with things. I'm really proud of how many of us from Reichman are serving and deeply grateful for the university's support.

She applied to Reichman, she says, blessedly unaware of this future. "It had the best options for me, the best teachers and the best campus opportunities, and it allowed me to live in Israel and take a degree that I love in English. I never expected it to become my mainstay in a time of crisis. I've been in Israel five years now, but until last October, I'd made no decision about whether I would make my life here. And while I can't know what the future holds, I'm certain of one thing at least: I'm not going anywhere!"

Felus is Israeli-born and has a large family in the country, but his sentiments are equally positive. "I'm so grateful to be back studying in the embrace and support of the university," he says.

And this, notes Davis, is exactly how it should be. "These young people have served their country and, on this campus, they have every right to hold their heads high and expect the very best we can do for them."

For more information, visit www.rris.idc.ac.il or contact 09-9602700.

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