- Alumni Story
- Israel
- Jewish Life
The start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7 hurt our community members but strengthened our community. It even grew our community, bringing families to Heilicher during the uncertainty of the first months of fighting.
The Smadja family is one such family that came to Heilicher to find safety, normalcy, and community. Dana Smadja attended Heilicher from first to fourth grade, 1987 to 1991, and brought her children to join fourth grade and kindergarten this last fall.
The start of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7 hurt our community members but strengthened our community. It even grew our community, bringing families to Heilicher during the uncertainty of the first months of fighting.
The Smadja family is one such family that came to Heilicher to find safety, normalcy, and community. Dana Smadja attended Heilicher from first to fourth grade, 1987 to 1991, and brought her children to join fourth grade and kindergarten this last fall.
Dana was born in Israel but grew up in Minneapolis, first attending Beth El Aleph Preschool, then Heilicher, and going on to Hopkins Public Schools. After graduating from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School in 2008, she visited Israel and fell in love.
“I was meeting people, and I was embracing Tel Aviv as an adult, and I just fell in love with it in a way that I had not experienced before,” Dana said. “I had this spiritual connection with Tel Aviv.”
When Dana returned to Minnesota, she knew she wanted to move to Israel. She worked at Target headquarters by day and worked on her aliyah application by night. She made aliyah in the summer of 2010.
Dana was on vacation in early October and came home to north Tel Aviv just one day before the October 7 attack on Israel. At first she thought, “We're used to this; we can do this. We're fine.”
But the schools were closed, then virtual, and then open with restricted hours. And they still didn't know what was going on. A lot of people were leaving, and she and her husband Eli decided, “I don't think it makes us any less of Israelis by taking our kids and thinking of them first.”
“I didn't even think about school at first — it was all such a blur,” Dana said. But she realized her children needed community and routine, so bringing them to Heilicher, even just for about a month, was “the obvious choice.”
Ella (Grade 4) and Daniel (kindergarten) joined Einav (4) and Noa N. (2) — whose mom, Yamit Taragan Nahmani, is also a Heilicher alum — as visiting students from Israel. A week later Eli (1) and Adam T. (K) came. The kindergarten class was over full, so Israeli teacher Orly Silidor came to ensure there was support for the new students.
“It's so beautiful seeing that at Heilicher they're incorporating Judaism, incorporating the Israel aspect and Hebrew, and then the standard curriculum,” Dana said. “They do it well. I really have no words for how amazing everyone on that staff was.”
“I took it for granted when I was a kid, but when I came with my kids, there were things like the way that Ms. Marron was teaching math. I was like, ‘Wow, she's really looking at the needs of the students,’” she said. “I just really connected with everything that Heilicher has been doing. I can see that the kids are disciplined.”
Dana also noted the incorporation of song, and not just in prayer. She recalled working on her laptop in the JCC lobby when a teacher walked past with her students, singing a song in Hebrew. They stopped to say hello and sing for her.
From her time as a student at Heilicher, Dana said she remembers the warmth of the classrooms and especially the tradition.
“I have always been a very secular person, but Heilicher gave me the desire to do Kiddush with my kids,” she said. “Heilicher really set the foundation for me knowing how I want to raise my kids. And while maybe we don't act Jewish in the typical sense every single day, we still want to maintain some of those traditions that really were first ingrained in me from being a student there.”
Dana is grateful to Heilicher but glad to be home.
“There's nothing like Israel. I feel safe here. This is where our home is,” she said. “There's the sense of unity that you don't feel any other place — it's really like we're a tribe. That's what we are, right?”