JNS
“These are more than schools; they are hubs of resilience, hope and renewal,” said Talia Tzour Avner, chief Israel officer of the Jewish National Fund-USA.
Kibbutz Yiron, Israel—In an Israeli farming community in the Upper Galilee adjacent to the border with Lebanon, a new Israeli agricultural boarding school is opening this fall, combining education through agriculture and breathing new life into a battered region following the war with Hezbollah.
The strategic educational venture, which seems like a blast from the past in the 21st-century world of high-tech and artificial intelligence, will be the seventh in a network of agricultural high schools to have opened in the last decade nationwide. Two locations near the Israeli border with Gaza were inaugurated following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in the south on Oct. 7, 2023, after a generation when it seemed like old-fashioned agricultural work was quickly going out of vogue.
“We are bringing back the spirit and the meaning of the pioneers,” Yizhar Barak, 50, a farmer turned educator who will serve as the principal of the Adam V’Adama (Hebrew for “Leaders of the Land”) School at Kibbutz Yiron, told JNS. “We are revitalizing this border region.”
How to raise our children here’
The Israeli agricultural community, just half a mile from Lebanon, where the new agricultural boarding school will be inaugurated in September, was evacuated for nearly a year and a half after Oct. 8, the day after the atrocities in the south and when Hezbollah to the north bombarded Israel with rockets and missiles for more than a year.
A ceasefire went into effect on Nov. 27, 2024, and life for northern Israelis became much calmer. The vast majority of its 400 residents returned to their homes in March.
“It was very clear that we would be back, although there was a discussion about how to raise our children here,” said Yitav Schwartz, 48, a mother of four whose grandparents were among the founding members of the kibbutz from the Palmach. That elite strike force associated with the Haganah—the pre-state underground defense organization that became the Israel Defense Forces—established the borderline farming community in 1949.
Schwartz’s teenage son, Ma’ayan, is studying in one of the agricultural schools in the Galilee, which she deems crucial for the revitalization of the area after the war. “I felt that I was going back to the period of my grandmother and grandfather who fought for their land,” she said.
‘Hubs of resilience’
The network of agricultural schools—some in borderline communities from the Golan Heights on Israel’s northern front to the Gaza border and Arava Desert in the south—now encompasses 400 students in ninth through 12th grade. It is run under the aegis of the Israeli nonprofit HaShomer HaChadash (Hebrew for "The New Guardian"), which works to buttress Israeli farming communities.
The teenagers come from a mix of staunchly secular and religious backgrounds. They work in agriculture for five hours in the morning before three hours of afternoon classes for matriculation examinations, followed by early-evening extracurricular activities.
“These are more than schools; they are hubs of resilience, hope and renewal,” said Talia Tzour Avner, chief Israel officer of the Jewish National Fund-USA, which has contributed more than $4 million for the schools. “Here, high school students live with purpose.”
“The combination of agriculture and studies works best for me because I use up my energies working the fields in the morning,” said Ma’ayan Schwartz, an 11th-grader from Kibbutz Yiron who studied last year at the agricultural school in the Central Galilee.
The 15-year-old worked the avocado, grapefruit, orange, lemon and olive fields in the morning. “I’ve also learned a lot about different sectors in Israel, and you don’t feel that difference because we are all friends,” he said.
The new agricultural boarding school on the tip of the Israeli-Lebanon border will begin with 20 10th-graders, most without any background in working the land. It aims to expand each year to 12th grade.
Its emergence not only follows the war, but also a period of concern over the continuity of young Israelis working in agriculture, even as agro-tech has become a new, productive trend.
“The war was the trigger, but I believe that this would have happened here anyway,” the school principal states with confidence. “This is the right time. Something in the state of mind has changed.”
