Israel’s Minister of Education has inaugurated a new residence at World ORT’s Kfar Silver Youth Village for students from the region around Gaza’s border.

Yoav Kisch led the dedication ceremony at the block which will become home to 50 12th grade students from the Shaar HaNegev school.

They were displaced across Israel after the October 7 terror attacks, with many affected by bereavement and prolonged separation from their homes and community.

Sharing a new residence in the Kfar Silver boarding school will allow them to reconnect with each other, live and study together with friends during their last year of studies in the education system.

The boarding school’s dedication ceremony was also attended by Yossi Keren, Head of the Shaar HaNegev Regional Council; Ilana Nolman, Director of the Administration for Settlement Education, Boarding and Youth Alyah; and Amos Gofer, Kfar Silver CEO.

He said: “We consider it of utmost importance and a great privilege to host the students from close to the Gaza Strip. The whole Kfar Silver community is excited and welcomes you with open arms.”

The Shaar HaNegev school lost one student, two teachers and many graduates in the October 7 attacks. Two students – Dafna Eliakim and Agam Goldstein – were kidnapped and later released from Gaza. Dozens of the school’s students and teachers lost loved ones.

Some of the students have returned home and resumed their education at a college near Ashkelon, but the 50 12th graders moving to Kfar Silver cannot return to their own homes.

At Kfar Silver they benefit from full housing and a holistic social, emotional and academic environment. The group will study separately from Kfar Silver’s other students.

An expert clinical psychologist will accompany the students during the final months of their schooling, and they will receive group and individual therapeutic support.

Yoav Kisch welcomed the students and said: “The opening of the boarding school is an exciting moment not only for the students, but for all of us, because it symbolizes our strength as a nation and as a community and gives tangible expression to the ability we have as a people to take our destiny in our own hands, get back on our feet and reunite.”

Ilana Nolman added: “We are proud of the students, who knew how to tell us exactly what they needed – to finish their last year at school together, a year that was shattered into pieces on October 7.

“The boarding school in Kfar Silver will become for them a temporary, enveloping and loving home which will empower them to rebuild their lives and… complete an important chapter in their journey to adulthood.”