Colorful sticky notes lined a glass wall in a central gathering area at Ida Crown Jewish Academy in Skokie. Each bore the name of an Israeli soldier who was known to a student, their friend or a relative.

At Universal School in Bridgeview, Amira Daoud was soliciting ideas from her students at the Islamic school for new decor for the wall outside her classroom. Fall leaves, the middle school students suggested, but the leaves would be in the colors of the Palestinian flag and would include messages to the children of Gaza.

The walls at each school carry tangible signs of a war thousands of miles away that has become a constant presence in the lives of many Chicago-area students. At some Jewish and Islamic schools the war plays a central part in students’ school days, as they seek deeper understanding of a complex, long-running conflict, navigate fear and worry about family members in Gaza or Israel.

“There’s so much racism going on and segregation,” said Ayelet Appel, a senior at Ida Crown, later adding: “The world was progressing, so why are we going back now?”

The conflict has loomed large at Ida Crown and Universal since the terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, sparking a war between Israel and Hamas that has devastated much of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas kidnapped an estimated 240 people, killed some 1,200 others and shattered Israel’s sense of security in its attack. Israeli airstrikes and a ground invasion in Gaza have killed more than 13,300 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, and women and children have consistently made up about two-thirds of those killed in the health ministry’s reports.

Some 6,000 people have been reported missing, feared buried in rubble. The figures do not include updated numbers from hospitals in the north of Gaza, where services and communication largely broke down earlier this month.

Violence also erupted in the West Bank, and attacks by Israeli settlers in the occupied territory have surged at an unprecedented rate, according to the United Nations.

A four-day cease-fire was expected to begin Friday, a day later than originally announced. Hamas was to release 50 hostages in stages in exchange for what Hamas said would be 150 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Those released first were expected to be women and minors.

Before the cease-fire, the death toll of the war reached Illinois. Six-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume, a Palestinian American boy, was stabbed to death in unincorporated Plainfield Township, and his mother seriously injured. Prosecutors said the boy’s landlord became “heavily interested” in the war after regularly listening to conservative talk radio, and stabbed the mother and son.

The rhythm of the days at Ida Crown and Universal illustrates some of the ways Jewish and Islamic students are grappling with the war and the fallout at home in Chicago.

The Tribune was unable to visit Universal because, teacher Deanna Othman said, the school is seeking to protect students after a neighboring school received a threatening hate letter, and amid concerns about media representation and the possibility of becoming a target. But the paper spoke with two teachers and a student at the school by phone.

The school day at Universal begins with morning prayers over the loudspeaker. Since the onset of the war, they have included prayers for Gaza, for the safety of those living there, that they have food and to take away their pain.

Students have raised money for humanitarian causes in Gaza through bake sales and a fundraiser allowing students who donate to show up at school out of uniform. Teachers have run into their students at some of the frequent, high-profile rallies, protests and other actions in Chicago supporting Palestinians in Gaza and calling for a cease-fire, including a recent major rally that blocked DuSable Lake Shore Drive.

Students arrive at school wearing kaffiyehs, black and white kerchiefs that can be a symbol of Palestinian nationalism, or shirts over their uniforms expressing support for Palestinians or with the colors of the Palestinian flag.

Across Illinois’ large Muslim community, the toll of the war has hit home. The state has more Muslims per capita than any other state in the U.S., and Palestinians are believed to make up about 60% of the Arab American population in metro Chicago. Some were among the thousands who attended a large rally in Washington, D.C., calling for a cease-fire, and many are experiencing overwhelming grief as the war has progressed and relatives are killed or missing in Gaza.

At Universal, Reena, a senior, has been trying to balance showing up at school each day with fear for her aunts, uncles, cousins and family home in Gaza. Her family watches the news constantly and spends most of their time trying to get in touch with the family they left behind, who they are able to contact only intermittently when there is enough electricity in Gaza to send messages. They often don’t know where, exactly, their family is.

Reena is caught between wanting to stay home all day watching the news and waiting for a message from family, and wanting to go to school and live her life.

“Probably the hardest part is just showing up every day and trying to put on a front that everything is OK, when one second you could have a family and the next second you don’t,” she said.

Navigating the scale of mourning in the community has been difficult, she said. But students have come together, sharing articles and comfort. Not every student has family in the region, but all of them feel affected.

Reena and her family requested she be identified only by her first name to protect her identity.

“It’s definitely not easy, because this is a war,” she said. “There’s a lot of feelings going around. There’s a lot of thoughts going around. Lots of preconceived notions, lots of everything. So it’s definitely difficult navigating life when a part of your identity might be accepted by people, it might not be. Or might be targeted, or it might not be. I’m sure the same goes for someone who identifies as an Israeli or a Jew.”

Daoud, who teaches seventh grade math and science, said the war has come up often in her classes. Many of her students know she is active in the organization American Muslims for Palestine and began asking questions about Gaza and the war, and what it meant that Israel imposed a siege on Gaza, severely limiting food, medicine, water and other basic supplies.

So Daoud decided to dedicate one of her science classes to a lesson about the history and geography of Gaza and why Palestinians are crammed into the small, densely populated stretch of land. When Daoud asked her students to reflect on the lesson, she learned one of them had an aunt and cousins in Gaza.

“I think it was actually more calming for (my students) because they understood (the conflict),” she said. “And I think part of the worry beforehand was maybe not understanding why this was happening.”

Othman, a high school English teacher, found it hasn’t been hard to integrate current events into her AP English literature class. They were already doing a unit on colonialism and exile on Oct. 7, reading poets and authors of various ethnicities who wrote about feeling detached from their homeland. The concepts already were relevant to her students, Othman said, then she saw them play out in real time in the media as she found representations of Muslims, Palestinians and the war frustrating, inaccurate, Islamophobic and dangerous.

The killing of Wadea al-Fayoume was one example of the consequences of inaccurate and Islamophobic media, she said. Her students were shaken and afraid. Some attended the funeral at a mosque near the school.

“How dangerous it is to be misrepresented,” she said. “Hateful language leads to hateful actions.”

Othman taught a session about media literacy for students. Other seminars for high school students have focused on the war, including spoken-word performances.

“It’s a constant presence in our school,” she said. “I can’t even say that there’s a particular time or period that it comes up in. It’s pretty much, for me, our entire day. Our entire existence for most of our staff and our students.”

Othman, who is also involved in the group American Muslims for Palestine, has family in Gaza, and her four children visited over the summer. It has been difficult for her and her students to concentrate on assignments and curriculum as the war has unfolded, and she has apologized to her students for needing longer than usual to return graded assignments, she said.

Counselors check in with students they know are connected to the war, and students have space to take a rest if they need a minute of quiet to compose themselves. Counselors notify teachers about students who might need extra time for assignments, or who are struggling with the war but don’t want to discuss it, or who are trying to help parents who are struggling with the news, she said.

Daoud and Othman both expressed concerns about media representation of the war, and Daoud worries for other students. There is comfort at Universal in knowing students and teachers are surrounded by others also pulling for Gaza and Palestinians, she said, but she worries that Muslim and Palestinian students at public schools might not have the ability to express support as freely.

“We feel that our victimhood is constantly questioned, and that we have to kind of be the perfect victims in order for the world to understand what we’re going through and what our situation is like,” Othman said.

At Ida Crown, students and the dean, Rabbi Leonard Matanky, were also concerned about representation in media. One of many events the school has held since Oct. 7 included inviting a school alumnus who leads a media watchdog group focused on coverage of Israel to speak.

Students have written letters to Israeli soldiers and students, and an alumnus who is in the army spoke to students via videoconference. History classes have been dedicated to learning about the history of the conflict, and students have raised money for Israel and emailed government officials.

The school has also taken students to pro-Israel rallies, including a mid-November “March for Israel” in Washington attended by an estimated tens of thousands of supporters. A group of seniors attended a Chicago City Council meeting where aldermen approved a symbolic resolution backing Israel. The meeting became emotional and often unruly as the council was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters, and the chamber was eventually cleared.

Some of the students who attended said it was a scary encounter. The students said they were taken to a separate space while the room was cleared and found the wait terrifying. Some of the angst at the meeting felt directed at them.

Noa Gavant said it brought her to tears, and Jordana Zwelling said it put her studies of the Holocaust into a new light.

“It’s kind of hard to understand how someone could hate someone for just being a Jew,” she said. “And then we got to City Hall, and kind of like, I understood it. I was like, wow, there’s really just a strong sense of hatred just because of your religion, and it has nothing to do with your character as a person.”

Views in the Jewish community have differed in the aftermath of Oct. 7, as pro-Israel rallies have attracted tens of thousands of supporters and others, including some in Chicago, have attracted Jewish protesters expressing solidarity with Palestinians.

Ida Crown seeks to educate students about Israel and give students an opportunity to express their solidarity, Matanky said. Nearly everyone in the school has a relative in Israel, and most students spend a gap year there after graduating.

Students said they get frequent updates from friends who live in Israel. They have brothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles there. Millo Benmelech was “very, very nervous” for his family.

In December, Matanky plans to take a group of seniors to Israel for several weeks to volunteer in the country. Some students said it felt like their duty, a place they needed to be, even if some felt nervous.

“It’s personal,” Matanky said.

In late October, Matanky led a discussion among several seniors about the conflict. Intertwining articles, texts and teachings from the Torah, they discussed language they viewed as politically charged and the threat they perceived from Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and which they viewed as wanting to wipe out a Jewish state.

The students also grappled with the idea of moral equivalency, and the ethical dilemma and pain posed by killing moral, righteous and innocent Palestinians while the Israeli military fights Hamas.

All the while, Matanky sought to instill pride in Israel in the students.

Israel is a safe haven, said one of the students, Adam Katz, and students worried about the threat of losing that. It was a home for Benjy Baronofsky’s great-grandparents, who moved to Israel after surviving the Holocaust, he said.

“That really just shows the importance of Israel to us as Jews,” he said. “It’s the one place where we know we’re safe; where we know we’ll be accepted.”

Amid fear for their families and friends in Israel, the students wondered what a conversation with Palestinian students might be like. It would be difficult in a heated environment, but it might be necessary, some said.

“Palestinians who live here, who also have family that is being affected by it, we probably share a lot of the same things,” Appel said. “Like worrying about your family and seeing all these different things in the media and being conflicted, not knowing what to believe and what not to believe. We probably have a lot of similarities. We just have that differing belief of the solution.”

The Associated Press contributed.

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