In A Country At War, Making Children Feel Safe

An Israeli non-profit that created pre-school programs for Ukrainian, Syrian and other refugee children has turned its attention closer to home.

Treating children with compassion: About 2,000 children have benefited from ESI safe spaces in Israel since October 9.

On Sunday evening, October 8, one day after the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel, Ran Cohen Harounoff called a meeting of his Israeli colleagues, staff members of Early Starters International (ESI), to determine how to respond. The non-profit that Cohen Harounoff co-founded in 2017 provides safe spaces in emergency situations around the globe, allowing pre-school children to play and learn in as normal a setting and routine as possible.

“Within a half hour, we had decided what to do,” he told me of that night, adding: “We were the only answer.”

By the next morning the team had opened two facilities for the children of survivors of the attack – one in Maaleh Hachamisha, in central Israel, and one in the Dead Sea area. “We brought toys, tables, chairs and other furniture, and a teacher,” Cohen Harounoff said. “Our mission is to bring a feeling of safety to children.”

As of three weeks ago, when I visited an ESI site in Jerusalem, the organization had 17 different sites in Israel, staffed by professionals trained in early childhood education, resilience and in dealing with trauma.

By this week, with some families able to return home, and in some places the Ministry of Education opening pre-schools and kindergartens, the number of safe space facilities in Israel is down to six, taking care of about 200 children a day.

Since the war began, an estimated 2,000 children have benefited from the ESI sites, most of whose programs operate five days a week from 8:30 am to 1:30 pm. 

The humanitarian group, with its ability to respond to crises nimbly and professionally, is emblematic of the Start-Up Nation reputation Israel has gained in recent years. And I wanted to see it in action. 

The kids are in the house: Playhouses, like the one shown above, are a feature of every ESI safe space, a place where children can feel in control. Photo by Yuval Cohen Harounoff.

A place to call my own: Children at the Jerusalem ESI safe space have their names on their drawers, giving them a feeling of ownership.

On the day I visited the Jerusalem facility with Cohen Haronouff, we spoke just inside the entrance of a large, sun-filled room on the second floor of a handsome olders building in the center of the city. All around us were the sounds of about 25 children between the ages of 2 and 7, who had been living with their families in nearby hotels for months. Some families were displaced from the south, others from the north. Some were from religious homes, some from secular ones.  

You couldn’t tell which were which as most of the children sat at little tables and chairs working on various coloring projects while a few roamed around, looking for toys to play with.

Cohen Haronouff, a writer, artist and expert in early childhood education innovation, pointed to a playhouse in the room and noted that it is a staple of every ESI site.  “These kids have lost their homes and their familiar surroundings,” he said, “and they’re living in temporary housing solutions for an unknown period of time.” The playhouses offer shelter and a feeling of control for the children, he explained.

Under Cohen Haronouff and co-founder Sarah Wilner, ESI has had a great deal of experience these last few years, working with Haitian victims of earthquakes, Syrian refugees in Greece, as well refugees in Ethiopia, Malawi and Bangladesh. Last year, with a staff of 125 trained professionals, including psychologists, the group created 33 safe spaces around the world for 1,000 children a day. It also initiated and ran emergency training programs for educators and psychologists in several East European countries and, most recently, Israel.

Trained to deal with trauma: ESI staff members do all they can to help create “an island of safety and security.”

Currently, ESI is focusing most of its attention on Ukrainian refugees in Eastern Europe, the displaced children in Israel and the children of asylum seekers in New York. (Leave it to tiny Israel to send Spanish-speaking staff to Queens, New York, to address the immigrant crisis in the U.S.)

UJA-Federation of New York has been a significant funder of ESI’s work, contributing more than $600,000 to the group’s work with Ukrainian children in Ukraine and Israel, and since October 7, $250,000 for its work with children in Israel.

Each culture has its own characteristics, and the ESI staff prides itself on its flexibility in dealing with them. But what all the children that ESI hosts in various parts of the world have in common, Cohen Haronouff said, is that “they are suffering from  trauma, have gone through loss and are in a situation of constant stress and insecurity. 

“Our spaces offer the kids an island of safety and security where they can choose what they do – play, draw, create with different materials – and have compassionate grown-ups that are trauma-informed educators. 

“Through play and creativity,” he said, “the children can process what they went through and regain a stable, enjoyable routine.”

‘‘We were the only answer”: After years of dealing with child refugees around the world, Ran Cohen Haronouff and his team were ready to create safe spaces in Israel within 48 hours after the October 7 Hamas attack.

Cohen Haronouff said that only recently has he come to attribute his lifelong interest in making children safe to the traumatic experience his mother endured as a child during the Holocaust. At the age of three, she was saved and raised for three years by a Christian family in Amsterdam whose daughter became a surrogate big sister to her. At war’s end, she didn’t want to go back to her parents, who she had little memory of.  

“Wisely, after the war the families had my mom spend time back and forth between them for a month until she got used to the new situation,” explained Cohen Haronouff, who has written a book about the experience. The Christian family “gave my mother love, a safe space, a kitchen to play in, a routine, and she never suffered from PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome).” 

She married, had four children and became a social worker, he said. 

“If you give children a safe space like that, you can reduce PTSD.”

In updating information this week for this piece, I learned from Cohen Haronouff that ESI will be opening five more new safe spaces in the cities around the Gaza border (Netivot, Ofakim, Sderot, Ashdod and Ashkelon) “to help the children who have been evacuated from their homes because of the bombing and terrorist attacks and are now coming back and need to start their life again in the place where it happened,” he said, a poignant reminder of the long and difficult process of helping children feel a measure of security in the midst of war.