In the teachers' lounge at the Ulpanat Lehava girls' school in the Samaria community of Kedumim, Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel and Victims of Terrorism takes on a particularly personal, chilling significance: 10 of the school's teachers are from bereaved families, having lost husbands, sons, parents or brothers to war or terrorist attacks. In a row sit Pnina Abramov, the daughter of Rabbi Binyamin Herling, who was murdered in a terrorist attack during a family hike on Mount Ebal near Nablus; Rivka Shapira, the widow of Rabbi Elimelech Shapira, who was murdered in a terrorist shooting west of Ariel in 2002; Shoshi Adelman, the sister of Roi Arbel, who was murdered in a shooting attack near the settlement of Talmon in 2004; Rachel Sandovsky, sister of Cpl. Moti Feuerstein, killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War; and Elisheva Hai, the widow of Rabbi Meir Hai, who was murdered in a terrorist shooting in Shavei Shomron in 2009. Aside from these five, bereaved faculty members at the school include Naama Miller, the widow of Maj. Avraham Gavish, who was murdered in a 2002 terrorist attack in Alon Hamoreh along with his parents and grandfather; Avigail Bamberger, the mother of Cpl. Yehuda Bamberger, who was murdered in a terrorist shooting at Yeshivat Otniel in 2002; Bat-El Kosovsky, the sister of Maj. Benaya Rhein, killed in the 2006 Second Lebanon War; Noa Mandel, the sister of Ido Zoldan, who was murdered in a terrorist shooting in 2007. Zoldan's widow, Tehila Dvir, is also a member of the teaching staff. "We try to leave our sadness outside the school gates, and inside, there's a lot of joy. Despite everything, our teachers' lounge is a happy one." Hai, who remarried, stressed that "the night of the murder, I gathered my children and told them that we weren't pitiful. That we would be sad, we'd cry, and we would miss [him], but we were not pitiful and that was not my attitude toward life. At the school, we have a heightened sensitivity to the issue of grief, but that's not the character of the school." School principal Einat Vallach says that every year at this time, the collective wound is reopened. "We have a wall [with pictures of] the casualties of terrorist incidents from the school's various circles. Every picture on it is a huge wound. We also had a student named Keren Shatsky who was killed in the Karnei Shomron shopping center [suicide bombing] in 2002. This is a teachers' lounge that's one big family. There is sensitivity not only around the national days of remembrance, but also the individual memorial days," Vallach says.
"I think that women in general and the women in Samaria in particular are very special," says Shapira, who teaches eighth-grade math.
