A quotation of Rabbi Zilberstein’s responsum:

An unusual halakhic ruling by the great Rabbi Yitzchak Zilberstein, rabbi of Ramat Elchanan in Bnei Brak and a member of the Council of Torah Sages, was published in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge, following questions sent to him by parents regarding sirens in the middle of the night. The main question was: should they wake the children? The parents explained that after moving them to the protected space, the children wake up, and afterward are tired in the morning at cheder.

“As is well known, the work of putting children to bed is holy work, but also difficult, and after, thank God, the children fall asleep, we are finally free to put the house in order after the previous day and prepare it for the next day. Yesterday at around ten at night there was a siren; we woke the children and took them to a protected space as the instructions require,” the parents wrote.

“After the danger had passed, a celebration began in the house. The children became unusually alert and could not fall asleep. Of course this disrupted our whole evening, but the children themselves also suffered, and the next day when they went to cheder they were very tired and could not concentrate on their learning.”

They asked: the next time there is a siren, do we need to wake them and act according to the instructions, or can we leave them sleeping in their beds?

Rabbi Yitzchak Zilberstein replied, in an answer that appeared in the collection Vavei HaAmudim, which publishes his responsa, that a woman is not obligated to wake a child and take them to a protected space. Rabbi Zilberstein gives two reasons:

A. Because the obligation of hishtadlut to enter a protected space applies to adults and not to children, since minors are not themselves obligated in commandments; therefore they are exempt from the obligation of hishtadlut, and so we too are not obligated to wake them—especially since waking them harms them and also keeps them from Torah study.

B. They are innocent children who have not sinned, and perhaps for that reason they are not obligated in hishtadlut. And the Torah of schoolchildren is without blemish, as explained in tractate Shabbat: “The world endures only for the sake of the breath of schoolchildren.” Therefore there is no legal obligation to wake them.

According to Rabbi Zilberstein, there is also no point in building safe rooms in the Torah schools and moving the children there during a siren.

Unless one says that they should be moved to the safe room under the law of “education,” to train them in the “commandment of hishtadlut,” and only at night when they are asleep is there an exemption from that educational obligation because it involves great trouble. Right?

So Rabbi Zilberstein is a childish clown. Well, fine.

With God’s help, 2 Sivan 5780

The reasoning brought by Rabbi Yitzchak Zilberstein—that children are not obligated in hishtadlut—could seemingly be rejected, because even if the children are not obligated, the parents are obligated to make the proper effort to save their children from danger.

But the practical instruction—to avoid waking the child in order to run to the shelter at every siren—is very understandable. The psychological harm of sleep loss and daily anxiety from running several times a night to the shelter is cumulative damage, and may be far more severe than the slight chance of being hit by a missile. So one really should strive for a situation in which children are protected without waking and frightening them into the shelter.

Seemingly, it would be preferable for all the families and their children to go sleep in the shelters until the fury passes. As I recall, that is what we did in my childhood during the Six-Day War. All the residents of the building and their children stayed in the building’s shelter, from Monday, the 26th of Iyar, until Wednesday, the 28th of Iyar at noon, when we were finally able to leave.

To this day I still remember Thursday, the 29th of Iyar, when we were already playing outside, as a day flooded with unusually bright light. Simply put, after two days in the darkness of the shelter, the daylight seemed extraordinarily intense.

Best regards, Feivish Lipa Sosnovitzki Dehari (author of the book Da’at Baal HaBayit)

It should also be noted that if the parents go to the shelter while the children remain at home, that is problematic because of the concern that the children may wake up from the noise of the sirens and, when they discover that their parents are not with them, panic. Because of that concern as well, it seems to me preferable that the children and their parents go to sleep in the shelter before the siren even sounds, or at least that they bring the children down to the shelter calmly and without panic, since the frantic rush of many people to the shelter is itself no small danger.

In the last paragraph, line 4
… to the shelter calmly and without panic, …