“My husband recently spoke at this girl’s sheva berachos. No one there, not even her own family, had known the story behind her return to yiddishkeit. Today she covers her hair and is building a Torah home.”
Determined Change
“There’s a man in uniform standing in front of the school,” the teacher in the Talmud Torah told the principal worriedly.
“Take the boys to the park,” was the immediate response.
Turns out that the man in uniform was simply a security guard waiting for his ride to work, but the panic that his presence triggered epitomized the precarious situation of the Afula Talmud Torah at the time.
The cheder was started nine years ago by Rav Yisrael Greenstein, an avreich in Rav Gold’s kollel. It was opened to enable avreichim to remain in Afula after their children reached school age and to service local residents who had become religiously observant.
The Talmud Torah started with an enrollment of six students. For technical reasons, and out of fear of a negative backlash against a charedi institution, the Talmud Torah started off without any government recognition. That’s why the uniformed guard elicited terror.
The transformation of the cheder over the years of its existence mirrors the incredible growth of the Afula religious community.
Growth
“Come down right now, I’m waiting for you,” Rav Yosef Yitzchak Lasry, rabbi of Beit Shean, said to Avi Alkabetz, then mayor of Afula.
It was 2010, and Rav Lasry was visiting the still illegal Talmud Torah. The school was bigger then, and the classrooms were caravans that boiled in the summer and leaked in the winter.
Avi Alkabetz was the secular mayor of Afula, but he has magnificent roots – he’s a direct descendant of Rabi Shlomo Alkabetz, composer of Lecha Dodi. He has a high regard for Torah and rabbanim, especially for Rav Lasry whose bracha he believes assured his election as mayor.
Rav Lasry brought Avi Alkabetz down to the Talmud Torah and showed him the terrible conditions that the students endured.
The school’s cover was blown; its existence was no longer a secret. But the school was already a fait accompli. Its enrollment had grown considerably.
Today, the school’s first grade has over thirty students, and it has a fledgling sister Bais Yaakov. At a recent school function, the vice-mayor announced, “There will be no disparity between religious and non-religious students in Afula.”
That’s an amazing statement in light of the anti-religious sentiment in many other municipalities.
Exponential Growth
“In Bnei Brak, no one has a garden,” says Elisheva, a new Afula resident. “Space is too valuable. If they had this type of space, they would build an apartment on it and rent it out.”
The Afula religious community grew slowly on its own until its secrets were discovered.
An apartment in Afula costs less than a quarter of the price of an apartment in Jerusalem. And Afula has two outlying neighborhoods, Givat HaMore and Afula Ilit, which are quiet and rural-like – the type of neighborhood where kids can keep a goat in their background.
In 2012, a litvish-charedi community opened in Givat HaMore, and over seventy young families have already moved in. Around the same time, a Vishnitz community opened in Afula Ilit and tens of streimilich can now be seen in the landscape. Downtown Afula has attracted a Garin haTorani – a Dati Leumi community that is dedicated to social and religious outreach.
Nine years ago, Rav Greenstein’s Talmud Torah was an anomaly. But today, religious schools aren’t as uncommon: The Dati Leumi community has its own school, Vishnitz started a cheder, and Rav Reuven Benino runs a school that emphasizes Sephardic culture.