As part of their schools’ vocational tracks, high school students at the Dror Galil high school on Kibbutz Ravid and the Haifa Social High School have been keeping busy in recent days building barriers to keep bomb shelters locked from the inside. The students have built hundreds of barriers that will be sent to communities on Israel’s northern border.
"Following recent events, we’ve seen that there’s a need to be able to lock the shelters from the inside," says Yoav Linskin, a 12th grade student at the Haifa Social High School.
Last Saturday, hundreds of Hamas terrorists pulled open shelter doors to kill and abduct residents of Israel’s southern communities from their homes. Bomb shelter doors have no internal locks, as they are primarily designed to protect against rockets hitting the building.
"Educators from the school designed and built barriers to the door of shelters," explained Shahar Sagi, an 11th grade student at Dror Galil.
The schools are producing the wooden barriers using a machine. Production has not been a problem for the Haifa Social High School.
"In our discipline, there are machines and tools that we can use to build the barriers," Linskin explained. "We just bought the wood and started working."
"In the digital production workshop [at Dror Galil], we don't have machines and tools for the production of the barriers. We usually work in a more digital way,” Sagi explained. "We received donations of wood and the tools required to make the barriers."
The schools belong to a chain of schools called Dror Batei Chinuch, which operates vocational schools under the Ministry of Labor. Both schools were awarded professional certificates in the fields of digital design. The construction of the barriers was done voluntarily by the students.
Dror Batei Chinuch emphasizes finding useful technological solutions to social problems. The website of Dror Galil reads: "Our school will be a center for learning, research, development and production, based on a connection between advanced technologies and developed social thinking."
"My need to do something is stronger in times of uncertainty," Sagi said, when asked about the reason for coming to school and building the barriers even when school was officially canceled. "When my teacher Yuval called and asked if I wanted to come, I jumped at the chance, because for me it is a chance to both help in this situation as well as see my friends after I hadn't seen them since Sukkot break."
"It's better than doing nothing at all," Linskin said. "That’s true on two levels: on the first level of changing reality for the better. Also on the mental level, it’s better to do something than to stay at home and stress out."
This article was translated from Hebrew by Lily Sieradzki.
