“Get off the plane so I can hug you!” Jasmine Albagli said in the arrivals area at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport when her teenager, Phio, called after her plane touched down. The Ottawa teenager was one of 200 Canadian high schoolers taking part in the annual March of the Living trek to Poland and Israel, when the group experienced a harrowing departure from Tel Aviv.
Eighteen hours earlier, the teenagers—plus 50 adults, including chaperones and Holocaust survivors—had been checking into security at Ben Gurion airport. Suddenly, an air raid siren went off. The students were directed to take shelter. Around 9:30 a.m. local time, a hypersonic ballistic missile launched by Houthi terrorists in Yemen slammed into the main access road to the airport. It left behind a deep crater and damaged the entrance to one of the other terminals.
While none of the Canadians were hurt, Israeli officials reported eight people were taken to hospitals. The airport reopened about an hour later, although many international flights were cancelled. However, the Canadian March of the Living group flew to Warsaw on chartered aircraft before landing in Toronto via LOT Polish Airlines.
“When the explosion went off, it was really scary,” Phio Albagli-Hansen, 15, told The CJN a few moments after reuniting with her mother in the airport. “The roof shook above us and, like, the dust of the roof went onto my hair. It was kind of crazy.”
According to the Grade 10 student from Ottawa’s Canterbury High School, everyone could see a “big, huge thing of smoke from the bomb” not far away from where they were. She was able to snap a photo of it on her phone.
Above: Hear the parents and Canadian pro-Israel activist Aviva Klompas describe the scene to Ellin Bessner on The CJN Daily podcast.
For the teenager, the missile attack bookended an emotional journey which began April 21 in Poland. It was the 37th annual trek of the international Jewish program that takes high school students to the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland, where more than a million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The group then continues to Israel for tours, including taking part in solemn memorial day events to honour Israel’s 25,000 fallen soldiers and victims of terror. The trip usually culminates in a joyous celebration for Israel’s Independence Day.
The March was cancelled during COVID, from 2020-2022. Canada sent a scaled-down group in 2024 with low numbers of participants, due to it being so soon after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the resulting conflict. This year, the numbers were much larger, according to Witnee Karp, the March of the Living Canada’s associate director in Toronto.
Forces of nature
Nevertheless, this year’s trip meant travelling to an area that is still dealing with the trauma of Oct. 7 and an ongoing war. Nature also added unscheduled obstacles to their itinerary, prompting Karp to describe the trip, wryly, as “historic”, and not just because of the missile attack.
At Auschwitz, on April 24, the Canadians joined thousands of marchers, including Israel’s president, nearly 80 Holocaust survivors, including nearly a dozen from Canada, and Oct. 7 survivors. But torrential rains began to fall on the ceremony, causing flooding and forcing officials to cut it short.
Once in Israel, on the day the students were visiting the site of the Nova music festival memorial, a sandstorm hit that part of the country. The tour was curtailed as students wiped sand out of their eyes and made their way quickly back on the buses.
On April 30, massive forest fires broke out in the area west of Jerusalem ahead of Independence Day. As roads between the Israeli capital and Tel Aviv were closed while Israel fought the blazes, some of the Canadians had to sleep in a hostel for a night, as they couldn’t access their hotel.
Meanwhile, the Houthis began to ramp up their missile attacks on Israel beginning on May 1, so the group noticed red alerts popping up on people’s phones over the next few days, and some air raid sirens sounded.
“I think it’s like the authentic experience, you know? This is just how [Israelis] live, on a daily basis,” said Gideon Teltscher, a student at Montreal’s Azrieli Herzliah High School, who spoke to The CJN while waiting in the arrivals lounge. “They live in fear of a rocket coming and maybe coming into the house.”
Teltscher, who was one of the 92 Montreal students making the trip this year, went to wait out the imminent danger in an airport bomb shelter, and said he felt “lucky” that the missile didn’t hit any buildings at the airport.
During the tense moments, student Jonny Finkel, also of Montreal, was sheltering under a concrete staircase. He said he noticed the Israelis in the airport were not behaving as if they were too worried about the potential danger. He was concerned about what his family back home might be thinking when they learned about the attack on the news. His mother started calling him right away, he said.
“I thought it was more scary for her than it was for us,” said Finkel, 17, who attends Bialik High School.
Observing how Israelis seem to go about their business while rockets and missiles are targeting the country also left a strong impression on Ottawa’s Phio Albagli-Hansen. The student was in a group that was herded into a very small back room, which she described as being built out of concrete. They remained there for about 15 minutes.
While she was admittedly afraid, she noticed a toddler beside her in the sheltered area.
“One of the scariest things about it is the baby was not scared,” Albagli-Hansen said, guessing the boy was about three years old. “The baby was used to it and that was genuinely terrifying, like, knowing that that baby was not fazed and it was normal to him.”
However, despite experiencing the traumatic events of their last few days in Israel, the teenager insisted she is glad she went on the March of the Living. She deepened a connection to Judaism, she said, and expanded her bracelet collection, too.
Her right wrist is now adorned by both a red string—which she received at the Western Wall in Jerusalem—as well as a second one, with blue and gold beaded evil eyes, which she felt brought her protection. (“It worked!” she told The CJN.)
“It was a really informative trip and I learned a lot of things and experiencing everything that I did, helps me understand what they go through, and what has happened in the past and why things happen today,” said Albagli-Hansen.
Her mother suggested the participants on this year’s trip would really only begin to process what they’d lived through, once they are safely back home and in their regular home and school environments.
“When you’re living it, you don’t have a chance to think about it, but when they come home and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we literally saw an explosion out the window of the airport; oh my gosh, we had to wake up in the middle of the night and go down to a shelter,’ I think that will start to kick in in a different way,” Jasmine Albagli said.
Toronto parent Adam Cohen, who was waiting to pick up his arriving daughter Eden, couldn’t help but think back to 1992 when he was a youthful participant on a March of the Living trip. Thirty-three years ago, the Israeli embassy in Argentina had been bombed by terrorists about a month before the trip, killing 29 people and injuring hundreds of others.
“Between the fires in Jerusalem and then the sirens that happened on Yom ha-Zikaron and then what happened at the airport today, [it was] scary, but also the kids seem amazing, resilient, and it shows how spoiled we are here,” Cohen said. “They really got a true experience of what it’s like to be in Israel as an Israeli.”
His daughter, who attends TanenbaumCHAT in Toronto, was undeterred.
Cohen said that when she got to Israel after the exhausting Polish leg of the itinerary, all her messages to him were that she was the “happiest I’ve ever been in my life and I’m living my best life in Israel.”
As an adult alumnus of the March, that was very special for her father to hear.
Montreal student Jonny Finkel is also glad he completed the March, despite the missile attack, or maybe even because of it.
“It’s going to give me so many memories to think back about, and it really opens up everything that you know about Judaism,” Finkel said. “Between the sadness of everything that you do in Poland and the bonding that you have with everybody on the bus in Israel, and all the activities that you do with the chaperones and everything, it’s really just a great experience.”
A Holocaust survivor’s perspective
This trip was Toronto Holocaust educator Sol Nayman’s 10th March of the Living tour. He returned home a little under the weather. However, as he left the Toronto airport, he praised the resilience of the teenagers, with whom he had shared his experiences.
“The kids were wonderful, really wonderful despite a few setbacks, like a siren and horrible rain, and fires,” he told The CJN.
Nayman, 89, was born in Poland and was a child when the Nazis invaded his country. His family escaped just days before the Germans took over his town in September 1939. They wound up in Lublin, which was in Soviet hands, and were deported to a labour camp in northern Russia for the remainder of the war, a place which he has called a “parallel Holocaust”. He later emigrated to Canada, where he became a founding partner of the Club Monaco clothing empire.
The delegation included young Jewish Canadians from across Canada, including students from Winnipeg, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal.
A recent history of emotional Marches
In 2024, the Canadian group encountered anti-Israel protesters converging near the Auschwitz-Birkenau site on the day of the actual March of the Living, who were waving Palestinian flags and yelling at the Jewish delegates as they carried out the sombre walk.
In 2023, a beloved Canadian Holocaust survivor and educator from Vancouver, Alex Buckman, who was accompanying the delegation, died in Warsaw shortly after completing the March. He was 83.
This year, the March toured areas affected by the Oct. 7 attack, and culminated in an energetic Independence Day party, with a performance by Israeli Eurovision star Eden Golan.
Days later, the March’s associate director, Witnee Karp, personally felt the reverberations throughout the part of Ben Gurion Airport where she was shepherding the participants on their homebound journey. Karp said she found it comforting to be with Israelis there, who were calm.
“[The missile attack] was certainly a memorable experience, but I spoke to the students to remember all the experiences that came before,” said Karp the day after the group returned. “We had such a momentous time in Poland and Israel.”
