School Takes Pride in Being Named After Heroic Astronaut

For members of the renamed Ilan Ramon Day School (formerly Heschel West Day School), the name change is more than just a new moniker. It represents the life and values of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon.

The Agoura Hills-based institution hosted an event for the community at the Scherr Forum in Thousand Oaks Sunday night to celebrate the name change in conjunction with the school’s 18th anniversary.

The event featured a screening of the award-winning documentary, An Article of Hope, which told the story of Ramon’s life and tragic death. A son of a holocaust survivor, Ramon grew to become an ace in the Israeli Air Force, a great family man, and eventually a NASA astronaut who tragically died aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.

Special guests included U.S. astronaut Garrett Reisman, a friend of Ramon’s, Consul General of Israel David Siegel, space team member Yariv Bash and the documentary's producer, Christopher Cowen. Each gave words at a special reception preceding the main event.

“It’s a wonderful thing to have [the name] Ilan Ramon on your school but with that comes an amazing responsibility,” Reisman told the crowd.

During the event, a message from Ramon’s widow, Rona Ramon, was read. The school first sought the blessing from Ramon’s family and Rona before changing their name.

“The Ramon family hasn’t allowed people to use his name for a lot of things,” said Cowen. “ So the fact that Rona and the Ramon family have allowed the school to be named in Ilan’s name is really significant.”

Like the school, Cowen also sought to live up to the legacy of Ilan Ramon in the making of his film. He first knew that his film had done that after a special screening that Rona attended.

“She told us that it was the story that Ilan would have wanted to tell the world,” said Cowen. “After you work on a film for eight years, you want to do right by the people you’re telling the story about.”

Reisman emphasized that the work the school does now is continuing Ramon's mission where he left off.

“One of the many aspects of the tragedy was the fact that the space mission was only the beginning. He had a large role to play when he came back that he was really looking forward to: using his experience to motivate and inspire kids,” said Reisman. “He wasn’t able to fulfill that. So participating in an event like I am tonight, I’m helping in a very incremental and small way to fulfill a part of the mission he was on.”

The school’s name change was a very open process, Yuri Hronsky, Head of School, told Patch. Students, parents, alumni, and alumni parents were all polled to find out what values were important to them in the school’s identity.

They wanted to establish an identity that's grounded in who they already are as a school but is also emblematic of where they want to go in the future, said Hronsky. "I think finding a modern-day American Israeli scientist and astronaut, all of those things, I think, allow us to really represent some of the ideals that we strongly believe in,” he said.

“He wasn’t just a scientist, an astronaut, a combat pilot,” Siegel told Patch. “He was an outstanding husband, father, and son. When he went into space, he took artifacts from the holocaust with him as a highly symbolic message, that you could go from the depths of human misery to the heights of human achievement.”

 The children of the school appear to be taking up this new identity with pride. “He has a lot of characteristics that are good,” said fifth-grader Claudia Shemtov. “Our whole school tries to follow his example of courage, bravery and leadership.”

When the fifth graders were asked who wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up, hands shot quickly into the air.

“I’d want to be an astronaut someday,” said Ben Tene. “He risked his life for what he believed in.”

Cheyenne Assil didn’t want to be an astronaut, but she still appreciated the legacy of Ramon. “We know that he was a really brave man,” she said.

Kim Freund, an Ilan Ramon parent who has a son in first grade, said that her son has been very excited about the new name. “He is obsessed with everything to do now with Ilan Ramon, with space. He spent the last two nights looking in the sky for the satellite to crash,” she said. “He’s been very inspired.”

“His message is also universal, that if you excel, and you work hard, you can be anything you want to be," said Siegel. "There never was an Israeli astronaut, and he was the first. And he showed that by sheer will that you could.”