NJJN Bureau Chief/Middlesex
For participants on the Israel mission of the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County, it wasn’t the historical sites that made the greatest impression, but rather the strength and optimism of residents in the face of terrorism.
The mission, which ran from March 31 to April 6, was marked by visits to Sderot — which has been hit with a barrage of Kassam missiles from Gaza for years — and nearby Sapir College, where a student was recently killed by a Kassam.
“It was my first visit to Sderot,” said federation executive director Gerrie Bamira. “What was in my mind all the time was that we had 15 seconds at any given moment to get to a bomb shelter once the ‘red alert’ goes off. I can’t stop wondering how the people who live in Sderot and the surrounding areas live this way all the time.”
At a school for the developmentally disabled, a teacher told her of the hard choices they faced with wheelchair-bound children.
“Do they leave the child in a wheelchair to run to a shelter or do they stay with the child and take a chance a rocket will fall on both of them?” asked Bamira. “We were told it takes 15 minutes to unload each child from their van.”
While no missiles fell while the Middlesex group was there, the community was on high alert that day because of activity in Gaza.
At Sapir College they found cots set up all around campus and students being given massages and taught relaxation techniques by volunteers from Tel Aviv University.
Linda Block of East Brunswick and her husband, Monte, missed the Sderot visit because they had to join the mission two days late. Yet, they felt the tension during a dedication in Nitzan of the Yisrael Lutati Nitzan Youth Center (see sidebar). “We could hear [military] planes flying overhead,” recalled Block. “For them it was normal. For us it was not.”

njjewishnews.com


Tags: , ,