TEL AVIV — Clutching one drooling infant to her hip and racing after her toddler, Shirli Shaked noted that during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, “I went to ‘end of the world’ parties. Now I’m chasing after leaking diapers.”
Standing outside the Thau kindergarten in Tel Aviv, Shaked, who in 1991 had just finished her military duty, said that this time she hadn’t prepared a sealed room or gotten gas masks for her family.
“What’s the point?” she asked. “The chances anything will happen are so small — and besides, I honestly don’t believe [the masks] will help if, God forbid, Scuds begin to fall.”
Inside the kindergarten, things were different, as per Education Ministry orders. Cardboard boxes containing the “bubble suit” gas mask used by children rested in neat squares above the children’s boots, coats and assorted blankets.
Kindergarten teacher Ilana Schtibel, whose bun of unruly, bleached-blond hair belied her commanding sense of calm, presided over the 31 kindergartners.
“What is there to be nervous about?” she asked a reporter.
“If something should happen, which it won’t, I have this list of parents prepared to come help, and we’ll move the children to the bomb shelter,” she said, pointing to a squat, triangular concrete structure outside the window.
Israel’s Education Ministry has tried to take every possible precaution, while fostering a sense of calm by urging parents to send their children to school.
The ministry reiterated Sunday that all education facilities would carry on operating as usual, despite the U.S.-led war against Iraq.
At the peak of the Scud missile scare on March 19, hours before the war began, Education Minister Limor Livnat defiantly announced that all Israeli schools would reopen March 20, following the three-day Purim holiday.
Barely half the pupils in the greater Tel Aviv area heeded her call the next day, however. Attendance for kindergartens plummeted by two-thirds, and just half of elementary and high school students showed up.
In Haifa, attendance was slightly less than 65 percent.
Sparking the mass absentees were reports that Israeli schools were ill-prepared for war. There was insufficient space in bomb shelters, many of which had been converted to storage facilities, and schools were short of both the plastic sheeting and masking tape needed to seal classrooms.
The result was that many parents were loath to send their children to school.
Several municipal parents’ associations lambasted the government for opening schools without consulting them.
By Sunday morning, nerves were soothed and anxiety suppressed. More than 80 percent of students living in the “danger zone” — the greater Tel Aviv area — attended school.
During an interview at Tel Aviv’s A.B. Gordon School, the superintendent of Israeli elementary schools, Eti Helmer, said the 20 percent still absent “were just extending an already long weekend.” Enrollment would soon be full again, she predicted.
But not everyone shared Helmer’s confidence. As a female classmate ruffled his blue mohawk, Roy, 14, spoke candidly.
“Frankly, this whole thing scares me. The thought of missiles with chemical weapons falling in my backyard is pretty stressful,” he said.
Roy stayed at home late last week, during the peak of the threat. He returned to school this week because he missed his friends, he said, and because “staying at home with my parents was probably more stressful.”
Shiri, a female classmate whose hand was conspicuously interlocked with Roy’s, noted that for her, “an alarm would be the most frightening. That is when the hysteria would start.”
Schtibel pulled from a trash bin a two-page folder that she had drafted for the children when the war began.
“I remember another man who tried to kill us,” one kindergartner had written inside. “It was Haman the terrible, but he also failed.”