Posted on June 27, 2025
Zohar Shohat (Amitei Bronfman ’24) lives in Safed (Tzfat). She has just graduated from high school and is heading overseas for a year of service through the Jewish Agency.
Like most high school seniors in Israel, my school was shut down due to the war with Iran, and my final week of high school was spent at home, running in and out of the bomb shelter. There was no official graduation ceremony, we didn’t get our diplomas or yearbooks, prom was canceled, and most of all—we never really got a chance to say goodbye.
Even before the missile attacks started, thoughts about the end of school and parting ways were taking up a lot of space in my mind, and suddenly that whole closing chapter was just cut off. It’s pretty surreal and hard to process.
It feels like there’s a ticking clock hanging over everyone. A few of my close friends are already being drafted into combat roles in mid-July. I’m heading overseas for a long-term service program in mid-August. These are such huge and frightening changes, and I think none of us really have the tools to cope with them—so we just pretend they’re not happening.
Earlier in the year, before the ceasefire, we were hit with a lot of attacks from Lebanon. After a long quiet period, when most of the chaos was centered further south, I had almost forgotten. But just like we forget, we also adapt. It’s become a bizarre routine—waking up to a siren, scrambling to grab my dog Pistachio (who usually runs and hides when the sirens start) so we can get into the bomb shelter together, and texting all my group chats to figure out where the rocket landed this time. We’ve become numb. Today, a rocket hit directly in Safed, and just fifteen minutes after the siren ended, I had a physics quiz.
On one hand, there’s real fear. On the other, there’s a sense of helplessness—we’ve seen lately that even a bomb shelter isn’t always enough in a direct hit.
The situation is incredibly frustrating. We hardly leave the house. People are on edge. It feels like every day something else gets canceled, another opportunity missed. It’s really disheartening that this chapter in my life, for which I had so many hopes and plans, has turned out like this. But I’m holding on to a lot of hope that once this is over, it’ll really be over: the Iranian threat, the war in Gaza, and of course, the return of all the hostages.
