Cover Story
April 18, 2008
A Town With Deep Wounds
To see Sderot is the only way to begin to understand.
Phil Jacobs
Executive Editor
Our driver, resident of a Tel Aviv suburb, hadn’t been to Sderot, a development town in the Negev Desert not far from the Gaza border, in years.
In Tel Aviv, he stated, you just think of Tel Aviv.
“There’s Tel Aviv,” he said, “and then there’s the rest of Israel.”
Traveling southeast on the roads from Ashkelon to Sderot is where your transformations begins.
Perhaps there have been other trips or missions to Israel. They involve climbing Massada, floating on the Dead Sea’s waters, seeing the Western Wall for the first time, maybe taking the Old City tour, tasting wine in the Golan or taking one’s time at Tel Aviv’s Diaspora Museum or Jersualem’s Yad VaShem, the memorial museum to the 6 million.
Overhead, though, on this ride on a cool, gray spring day, there are white blimps taking their place with the clouds on the horizon line.
These blimps are warning systems, giving Sderot residents 15 seconds to find shelter before a Kassam rocket falls from the Arab terrorists calling themselves Hamas in Gaza.
One learns new Hebrew phrases along the way: tzevah adom (red alert), or as some say “red color,” and sheva shanim (seven years, the number of years that these rockets have hit this Negev area development town).
There are no gift shops along the way, no places to purchase knickknacks with an Israeli taste to take home. Instead, we ride on the road towards emptiness, where post-traumatic stress is in the air we breathe.
The CD player gives us the tunes of the British rock band Coldplay. Four Americans with their Israeli host are silent.
We pass the remains of a plate glass window on the side of the road, and it makes one wonder. Necks crane at the sky overhead, and the now larger blimps. We drive by cows grazing on what could be called crabgrass next to a tired looking gas station.
Entering town, we pull around a square, and then after a phone call or two, find the Amit Torani Madai Elementary School and Dina Huri, its energetic principal.
Our contingent, consisting of three journalists and a college student, brought here by air carrier Israir, which now competes with El Al for overseas travel, passes a bomb shelter on our way into the school. On one of the shelter’s reinforced concrete walls are painted brightly colored flowers.
The school’s main corridor was busy with art work, even a stuffed bird display. Tutors worked quietly with individual children. We were invited into a third grade class and watched the children go through the Haggadah as part of a mock seder. Here we are talking about the freedom of our people, yet these children, as we’ll soon learn, have an entirely different take on what this word means.
These eight-year-olds would love the freedom to be able to jump rope outdoors or to play soccer. They would love to be able to sleep through the night without the chance of multiple runs not to the bathroom, but to the bomb shelter.
“Kids are different here,” said Ms. Huri. “We have to give these kids tons of love, tons of attention. Some of the kids and teachers live 40 minutes away. Some of them have homes that aren’t near shelters. We don’t compromise on their educations. We don’t strive for anything but the best from them. All many of them have known most of their lives is ‘tzevah adom.’”
There are children, she said, who though eight- or nine-years old, still must sleep with their parents to feel safe. There isn’t a single kid who hasn’t had a rocket fall near their home or the home of someone he knows.
“Everyone is the same,” she said. “They are afraid. Every day is the same. Every hour, all day long.”
There is in this school at least one remarkable room. It is a room with murals in greens and blues and paintings of children resting in the grass and looking at the water. The room’s sign reads Cheder Shaalva, room of comfort.
This is one of the places where the children can talk about their inner feelings to teachers, specialists and to one another. Everything that is said in this room, stays in this room, said Ms. Huri.
There is one remarkable contrast that can sum up so much of their experience. In one corner of the room sits a three-foot poster board rocket. It is divided into numbers from one to 10 with a smiley face at one, an indifferent face at five and a sad face at 10.
Yael, a fifth grader who speaks above a whisper, is asked by Ms. Huri how on this scale she feels today.
On this day Yael is feeling chamash, or five, on this scale of fear.
She didn’t even have to think about that answer. This is, so far, a pretty good day.
Yael and her classmates had other visitors that day. They were taught the chorus of a song that is supposed to be included as part of music producers Robin and Lawrence Dermer’s album in honor of Israel’s 60th anniversary.
The kids learn the words from Mr. Dermer: “We are strong, Israel. We know that peace will come. And we’ll be one. Israel. One heart, one home, one song.”
The idea is to produce a music video similar to the 1985 Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie song, “We Are The World.” The Dermers have produced music for the Miami Sound Machine, Madonna and even a Super Bowl halftime event. So there was Lawrence teaching the children, who spoke very little English, to sing this chorus.
The song would be tried out just an hour later in a music assembly before an auditorium of elementary school children.
Here’s where we got a real life taste of the Sderot experience.
While the girls stood on stage singing with all of their hearts, “We are strong, Israel...,” the lights in the tubes of fluorescent ceiling lights flickered for just a few seconds.
Auditorium doors were closed. Teachers stood up. It was a Code Red. The girls on stage kept singing. Many of the audience screamed, cried and hugged, and smiles turned to worry.
Through the din, in between the amped-up voices from stage, leaning against the wall, the remnants of an alarm came to a blessed end. It was tough for anyone in the room to focus on music after that.
A walk back to the school, this time led by Ms. Huri, results in two stops.
She shows us a hole in the middle of the road just outside the school’s entrance. Here a rocket fell just minutes after the buses, filled with children, emptied.
Then she takes us across the street to a pretty white cottage with a hole big enough for a person to fit through at its base.
“It’s all surreal,” she said.
“People must turn off their car radios or turn them down so they can hear. And if you are caught outside, then you lay down and pray to the Lord above.”
Earlier, in her office, Ms. Huri said that this Orthodox school teaches that HaShem and prayer will protect the children.
And part of that prayer, she said, includes words such as, “May the Kassams not fall here any more. May we never hear the words ‘Code Red.’ And may we live here in harmony and peace.”
Someone in the group talks about the reality these children live with.
Another simply calls it, “the lunatic reality.”
Max and Ruth Schwartz Yeshivat Hesder
Rabbi Dovid Fendel has many solutions for the issue his town is facing. At this Hesder Yeshiva, male students will learn for a one-and-a-half-year term, serve an equal time in the Israel Defense Forces, and then return to the yeshiva for two-and-a-half more years.
He is a no-nonsense man with a no-nonsense approach. Gaza, he said, never should have been given to the Palestinians in 2005. The orgy of destruction coming from towns where Israelis used to live, calls, he said, for Israel to go back in and retake the land.
Also, for every attack in Sderot, he feels the answer is that Sderot should build another building to defiantly show the Arabs that the community will remain. For his part, Rabbi Fendel is building a new yeshiva building with 1,500 tons of cement, which is supposed to be able to withstand a Kassam hit.
But he added that the town needs a community center, a place where a middle class can grow. It needs young people to settle in town.
“The Palestinians,” he said, “are trying to make Sderot into a ghost town. What can we do? For every Kassam, we build another story, another settlement. They should see that we are not afraid, that they can’t keep up with our building.
“What we need,” he continued, “is to strengthen the people here. If we forsake Sderot, the whole country of Israel could be in great danger. We have to make Sderot a place where people want to live and give people a place where they can put their heads down.”
His school was the recipient of a large donation of Purim baskets of candy from a group of Long Island Jewish children. He had students take the candy to the area schools. He added that while everyone appreciates the chocolate, he would rather have people invest in buildings, not care packages.
“Sderot,” he said, “has a future. It is a place of Torah Zionism. We believe that the dust will settle.”
The rockets, he said, could be a blessing in disguise if they galvanize Israel and unite it against the Arabs.
“The goal of these rocket attacks isn’t really to kill anyone,” he said. “It’s just a reminder that we have you guys wrapped around our little fingers. That’s called terrorism.”
The solution: “Go back to settle in Gaza. If they can’t see us as a next-door neighbor in Gaza, then they can’t see us a next-door neighbor in Sderot. They saw us running away from Gaza. They think one day we’ll run away from Sderot. Sderot is challenged to be the beacon of light for the whole country. We believe in the country. We are not afraid. We’re here to stay.”
Makif Dati High School
Principal Eli Edri teaches us another Hebrew expression, “Ma La’asot?” It means simply, “What are you going to do?”
He asks us if we heard the Code Red from earlier in the morning. When we tell him that we were at the elementary school, he explains how one of his students, an 11th-grade girl, passes out in panic while running to the shelter.
Then we are shown a video presentation literally using his office wall as a screen. We see a security camera capture the images of a rocket falling just outside of a school bomb shelter. Later in the visit, we’ll see the bomb shelter up close and place our fingers in the holes of the reinforced concrete penetrated by shrapnel.
We see video of children following the leader in the Hokey Pokey. But after everyone’s left arm “went in,” the Code Red siren sounded. People scattered.
We see a student with sutures on his abdomen, a victim. The school has had three such wounded students. He and his family, said the principal, have left Sderot, as have some 6,000 of 26,000 people.
Mr. Edri tells the story of how a class was held up in one room because of a long d’var Torah. The students were late getting to a nearby classroom. “Code Red” sounded and a rocket fell through the ceiling of that classroom, only empty because of a longer-than-usual d’var Torah.
Every time the alarm within the school goes off, an alarm goes off in a sister school in Paris, and tehillim (psalms) are read. It is difficult, said the rabbi, for students and for teachers because they often haven’t slept a normal eight hours due to the alerts. And how can you leave a class for a “Code Red” and return for 15 minutes of class with focus on the subject?
The town, confirms the principal, is made up of a large number of unemployed and poor, who can’t afford to leave if they wanted to.
“This is their life,” he said. “No matter what anyone tells you otherwise, everyone is afraid.
“Spread the word,” he tells us. “Let everyone know.”
And by contrast from the elementary school’s posterboard rocket, Mr. Edri reaches into the corner of his office and shows us a real rocket. It’s fins intact, it’s green iron tube intact. The nose cone containing the shrapnel was peeled back. We saw shards of metal that came from the device.
Often, the terrorists were shooting the rockets in the evening when they knew Israelis would sit down around televisions to watch the news. Then the rockets started falling in the morning when children were arriving to school.
Mr. Edri takes us to a spot outside of the school. There’s a filled-in hole.
A rocket exploded there.
“The students asked us to fill it in,” he said. “They don’t want to look at it anymore.”
And then he said with sort of a sad smile, Ma la’asot? “What can you do?”
Super Dohan
Before we head back to Ashkelon, there’s a quick stop at a local grocery store called “Super Dohan.”
It is owned by Sderot resident Yaakov Dohan.
“Every single day feels like war,” he said. “We give and give to them [the Palestinians], and they don’t think for a second what this is doing to us.”
Mr. Dohan goes to his office and returns with a DVD for us to watch.
He recently participated in the dedication and writing of a new Torah at his shul, Ohel Yitzchok Synagogue.
In the face of danger, the shul marched outside and had a parade for its new Torah, singing and dancing with the Torah under a chuppah or wedding canopy. The festive contingent even took the new Torah for a walk through the “Super Dohan.” As is the custom, congregants bring out the shul’s existing Torahs to “meet” the new Torah and they all are danced into the synagogue.
Not long after the completion of this beautiful event, a rocket fell in the shul. Earlier there were some 400 people. Nobody was physically injured in any major way.
The rabbi, according to Mr. Dohan, “called it a miracle.”
On the DVD, a rabbi said, “I want to tell you that if you would listen carefully, you’d hear the heavens singing for the people or Sderot.”
Another rabbi said, “Here is where the victory is. All of you who are here. This is victory. Don’t flee, G-d forbid. We are in Sderot. Sderot is but a symbol for the whole land of Israel. And great miracles happen here. There isn’t a single Jew who is outside the protective cloud. We are all inside the cloud. We are all saved by open miracles.”
The next moment, a flash of white light and the video showed ambulances taking away the shell-shocked, the injured. A gaping hole was in the study hall, and debris littered where moments before there was a wonderful celebration.
Back in Ashkelon
We almost stumble in exhaustion back to our hotel in Ashkelon. There isn’t much to say in the car ride back.
We’ve done a week’s worth of reporting in a day.
At 6:30 p.m., Sigal Ariely, the Ashkelon-Baltimore New Partnership Coordinator, takes me to the Lyn Stacie Getz Playground and the Michael Lapides Park.
Last December 250 people came to Ashkelon as part of an Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore mission to build this playground from scratch.
As the sun was beginning to set, the colorful tiles, Baltimore crab and starfish set a different tone, a hopeful happier tone than seen all day in Sderot.
Ms. Ariely is hardly a stranger to what is happening not far away in Sderot. She knows that the people of Sderot are saying that if Sderot falls, then Ashkelon could be next.
Her husband owns a restaurant on the outskirts of Sderot. He uses the walk-in meat freezer as a bomb shelter. Business, she said, isn’t so good because of the attacks.
Meanwhile, she can remember being in Baltimore when she got the news that a “Grad” rocket fell not too far from an Ashkelon community center where her six-year-old daughter was taking a ballet lesson.
“You have to hope it will get better,” she said. “I have to believe that I’m here for a reason. But it’s not easy. When you hear the news all the time, the Kassams seem like they are always part of the news now. I never thought it would happen.”
But she said it is become more of a reality, more of an awareness even in Ashkelon.
A local hotel, she said, reported 120 cancellations for the upcoming Passover holidays. That is a jolt to the economy. Shelters, she added, are now being renovated and improved. Factories in Ashkelon’s industrial area have been hit.
She also said that the support her city is getting from Baltimore has been a constant source of strength.
“Our friends in Baltimore worry about Ashkelon, and we feel their support and their love,” she said.
Looking around the Getz Playground, it’s difficult to imagine any harm or destruction coming to this gorgeous city by the sea.
The very next day, not far from where we stand, two Hamas gunmen spray bullets at a fuel depot.
Two Israelis were killed.
The IDF killed the gunmen.
The next afternoon I was in Jerusalem with my daughter, DeDe. It took us an hour-and-a-half to get there from Ashkelon.
Our driver, from the Tel Aviv area, asked us what it was like to be Sderot.
He hadn’t been there in years.
Sderot Facts
• Over 8,000 rockets have been launched at Sderot and the Western Negev. Sderot draws 45 percent of the rocket hits.
• Over 70 percent of Sderot residents suffer from signs of posttraumatic stress disorder. Between 70-94 percent of Sderot children show symptoms of PTSD.
• Rocket fire began against Sderot and the Western Negev in January, 2001. It has wounded more than 500 residents.
• Since the disengagement from Gaza in August of 2005, well over 2,000 rockets have been fired, averaging three a day.
• The Sderot Information Center for the Western Negev has organized clown therapists for kindergartens and schools, planted palm trees in memory of victims, sponsored photo exhibits that portray trauma through pictures, distributed school supplies to children and launched a community theater for children who tell their personal stories through drama.
Sderot On-line
Learn more about Sderot by logging on to www.SderotMedia.com.