When Deportation Became a Rescue Mission

When South Sudan collapsed into civil war, the consequences of deportation were no longer theoretical. They were immediate, lethal, and irreversible.

For years, South Sudanese refugees had lived in Israel, many raising children who attended Israeli schools, spoke Hebrew, and understood Israel as home. When deportations began, families were sent back to a country already showing signs of violent fracture. Within a short time, South Sudan descended into full-scale civil war marked by massacres, ethnic cleansing, famine, and epidemic disease. Civilians, especially children, were hunted, displaced, or killed simply for being identified as belonging to the “wrong” group.

As fighting intensified, communication with many deportees vanished.

What emerged instead were fragments: reports of children hiding in forests, of entire villages erased, of families fleeing repeatedly at the sound of gunfire. Some children survived weeks alone, without clean water or food, stepping over bodies, learning silence to avoid detection. Aid agencies were often unable to reach the most dangerous regions. In many areas, there was no functioning state, only armed groups and shifting front lines.

A group of Israelis, friends, neighbors, and teachers, refused to turn away. Among them was Rami Gudovitch.

Rather than accept deportation as an endpoint, Gudovitch helped organize a civilian rescue network. Together with Lea Miller Forstat, he co-founded Become (R.A.), an entirely volunteer-run initiative dedicated to restoring one essential thing that had been taken away: education. The work was carried out in full partnership with former refugees, local community members, educators, and clergy on the ground.

Working across borders and conflict zones, members of the deported refugee community searched for families and children who had once lived in Israel and had been sent back into war. These were not formal humanitarian missions. There was no institutional protection, only trust, local knowledge, and a shared refusal to leave children without options, with support from Become and friends in Israel.

Rescue efforts moved quietly, from house to house, village to village, and sometimes into forests where survivors were hiding. In some cases, children had escaped massacres on their own, surviving for weeks without food or clean water. In others, they were hidden by villagers who risked their own lives for helping children marked as outsiders.

Contact was frequently lost. Phones went dead. Entire areas became inaccessible. Weeks sometimes passed without news. When communication was restored, it could be as minimal as a single message confirming survival. In other cases, there was no message at all.

When children were successfully located and brought out of immediate danger, the focus was never temporary relief. Education became the center of the project. Not as an abstract ideal, but as the only realistic way to offer stability, dignity, and a future beyond survival. For children pulled out of classrooms and thrust into war, returning to school was a form of repair.

Over time, that commitment reshaped lives. Many of the children once rescued from conflict zones are now young professionals, activists, and university students, including at leading institutions around the world. What began as emergency response became a long-term educational community.

Public debate around deportation often frames the issue in terms of policy, security, and capacity. On the ground, those decisions translated into hunger, flight, and death. Deportation was not an administrative act. It was a trigger.

Gudovitch has consistently rejected arguments that detach policy from consequence. Political language collapses, he argues, when confronted with a child who does not know where their next meal will come from. No ideological position survives that encounter unchanged.

The political climate in Israel, as in many countries, has shifted toward exclusion rather than responsibility. The story of the South Sudanese children exposes the cost of that shift. These were not strangers. They were once classmates, neighbors, and students.

History will record the war. It will document the policies. But it will also remember the people who refused to believe that deportation ended responsibility, and who worked together, as volunteers and as equals, to make education possible when survival depended entirely on human courage.

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