‘We just heard a boom.’ Jacqueline Englanoff ’20, Midreshet HaRova

There haven’t been any rockets to Yerushalayim since [the first] afternoon. But living in Yerushalayim, you can ask anyone here, the reality is that you’re in your bed at night and you hear explosions, and you’re not sure if it’s fireworks or gunshots or a kid moving a trash can, you don’t know. So the mentality is that it’s nothing until it’s something, and so you know what to do if God-forbid something happened, but you also live your life as normal.

The reality is stuff happens, every year there’s something — not as extreme as this but there always is stuff happening — and so it’s just kind of part of the experience. But being locked in HaRova is not something that we’re phased by. For six months out of the year that’s what happened with Covid. Now it’s just another time that we’re being locked in HaRova  — for a different reason and we have to understand that it’s for a different reason, but the reality is that everyone is used to it here.

Interviewed by Caroline Kboudi for the Boiling Point