SA teachers learn to plant hope during KKL-JNF seminar in Israel

A delegation of South African educators and Jewish National Fund South Africa staff has returned from the annual KKL-JNF International Educators’ Seminar changed by what they saw and better equipped for what they teach. 

This year’s seminar ‒ attended by 209 delegates from 26 countries ‒ was built around the theme of planting hope for the future, and that idea took on real meaning as the programme moved between sites of grief and sites of growth across the Galilee, the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, and southern Israel. 

Visits to sites connected to the events of 7 October, including the Nova festival grounds, a car yard housing vehicles burnt in the attacks, and Kibbutz Mefalsim, gave participants a first-hand understanding of the scale of the massacre, one that will now shape how they teach this period of Israel’s history back in their own classrooms. 

That understanding was placed alongside evidence of a country still building. 

At KKL-JNF’s excellence centre in Nof Galilee, educators saw how high school students who need extra academic or social support are given far more than tutoring in subjects like English and maths. The centre offers music lessons, podcasting, and social skills programmes, giving students who might otherwise struggle a place to be seen and supported. At an innovation centre near the Kinneret, engineers and physicists are developing new technology, a reminder that Israeli ingenuity continues alongside its history. 

The theme found its clearest expression in the Tzipori Forest in the north, where the group planted trees and learned about afforestation and water management in Israel, work that has defined KKL-JNF since its founding. For educators who had spent days confronting loss, the act of planting something that would grow long after they had gone home carried its own quiet weight. 

Participants have returned to South Africa with more than new resources for their classrooms. They carry a fuller picture of Israel, one that holds its hardest history and its hope for what comes next in the same frame, and a clearer sense of what it means to help students plant something worth growing. 

For more than 125 years, KKL-JNF has been doing exactly that, turning barren land into forests, building the infrastructure that sustains communities across Israel, and now bringing educators from across the globe together to carry that same spirit of growth and renewal back to their own countries. This seminar was a reminder that KKL-JNF’s work is never just about the land. It is about the people who tend it, and the future they are helping to grow.