Or Dembitz ’22

Posted on December 15, 2023

My name is Or Dembitz. I am 18 years old, from Jerusalem.

This year, I am learning in the Beit Midrash for women, Migdal Oz. Some of the women who learn here just finished high school, some are learning following national service or the army, and some are married.

I will be enlisted to the army in the summer, and until then I am here. In the morning, we learn Gemara (the Babylonian Talmud) in “Seder,” which means that we learn together in chevruta
(pairs) and then we have class. In the afternoon, we have different classes on a variety of topics – Jewish law, Hasidism, Jewish thought, Bible, and more. In the evening, we learn in chevruta, studying Gemara, Jewish thought, or Bible. I love what I am learning: Tractate Brakhot (from the Babylonian Talmud), Bible, Hasidic thought, the weekly Torah portion, and more and more.

I believe that learning Torah is not just for one year; it is integrated in all of life. Now, I am trying to gain tools for learning Torah for the rest of my life, through the teachers and content that I encounter here.

After about a month of educational work in my neighborhood, I returned to my midrasha (seminary), and I started volunteering in the mornings at a hotel in Jerusalem. Evacuees from Sderot and Kiryat Shmoneh live in this hotel. I volunteer in the 5th and 6th grades in the temporary elementary school that was set up in the hotel.

The kids at the hotel are restless. It is difficult to find several minutes of quiet or any kind of continuity in learning. The attempt to create an educational framework for these kids, whose lives were turned upside down in a single day, is not always successful, despite the good intentions of the volunteers and teachers.

One moment of hope from the last few days was when the teacher showed the kids in our class some cards that were sent to them from kids living in the center [of Israel]. In these sweet cards, with their sweet pictures, those children asked our children from the south how they are feeling and what they are going through at this time.

The teacher invited our students to write cards back. The kids were very touched by this gesture of the kids from the center, whom they do not know, and they wrote in their cards: “We are a bit scared,” and: “You are also brave, not just us, and you are keeping us strong, so thank you,” and: “It is not fun for us in the hotel, and we are waiting to go home.” The kids in this hotel have gone through so much in the last month. These moments of honesty and openness, when they were writing to the kids from the center, were moments when it was hard to hide the tears. Perhaps in these days this is the source of our strength in this land.