JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

At GA, JTA publisher checks out Sderot, where rocket attacks have been renewed

By Mark J. Joffe · November 18, 2008

About 35 determined G.A. participants boarded a bus early this morning headed for Sderot, the scrappy town closest to the Gaza border where rocket attacks have resumed this month, after half a year of relative calm. Before they could climb aboard, they had to sign waivers acknowledging the riskiness of the trip and absolving UJC of any responsibility for death or injury.

0 Comments | Share This | GA, Sderot

Haaretz: Gaydamak to stop giving to Israeli charities

By Jacob Berkman · July 7, 2008

Russian-Israeli billionaire Arcadi Gaydamak will stop giving charitable donations to Israeli organizations, a spokesman for his foundation told Haaretz this weekend.

Gaydamak, who last year started the Israeli Social Justice political party, first gained notoriety for his philanthropic efforts during Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, when he spent $15 million to build a tent village on the beach of Nitzanim, where residents of Israel’s northern region could find refuge from rocket attacks.

Gaydamak also paid to take residents of Sderot on a one-week respite vacation to Eilat.

Also in 2006, he pledged to give $50 million to the Jewish Agency for Israel to help Russian Jews, but he later reneged on that gift under some acrimony. He ended up giving only $15 million to the Jewish Agency.

According to the Haaretz story, Gaydamak is halting his giving to Israeli orgs because each gift is too heavily scrutinized by the public and causes him too much trouble:

Associates of Gaydamak said Saturday: “Every time that Gaydamak wants to donate, they put a spoke in the wheels in the form of complaints and police investigations. We got to a situation where they investigate the financial source of every donation. It’s impossible. If there are claims about the halt of donations, focus on those complaining against Gaydamak.”

0 Comments | Share This | foundations & funders, Gaydamak, Israel, Sderot

Kennedy promos Israel’s electric car project

By Jacob Berkman · July 1, 2008

Last night, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. used some air time on Larry King Live to give a shout-out to Project Better Place, an Israeli startup that hopes to make Israel the first country to wean itself off gasoline-powered cars.

Kennedy, who was debating Chevron Oil CEO David O’Reilly, might have overstated Better Place’s plan when he said that, “Within three years, they will be off of gasoline automobiles.” But the organization is working with Renault-Nissan to make Israel, by 2011, the first country to mass-market a fully capable electric car.

JTA’s Dina Kraft wrote about Project Better Place in May.

According to the president of Renault-Nissan, Carlos Ghosn, the car company has created an electric car that can compete with the gas-powered car in both performance and cost. His electric car can accelerate from 0-60 in less than 10 seconds, has a range of 100 miles in normal driving conditions and a range of 62 miles in extreme driving conditions of heavy city traffic with the air conditioner on.

And because the car will be mass produced, the price will be akin to that of a normal gas-powered car, he says. Over the car’s lifetime, the car actually will cost less to buy and operate than a gas-powered car, he has said.

Shai Agassi, the president of Project Better Place, has raised some $200 million in investor capital, including $100 million from Israel Corp., to build an electric grid throughout Israel where drivers can change batteries in less time than it takes to fill up a tank of gas. He envisions “converting our entire our country. We can build a virtual oil field; one that works better and leaves no footprint.”

The government of Israel already has agreed to give tax breaks to those who drive the cars.

Objectively, the Fundermentalist says this is an awesome, potentially earth-saving project.

8 Comments | Share This | Sderot, Uncategorized

Close calls?

By Jacob Berkman · June 6, 2008

The Fundermentalist is now sitting safe at a cafe on the beach in Tel Aviv as the sun starts its descent over the Mediterranean Sea, but it seems that bad luck followed in my wake the past couple of days.

I spent Tuesday night on Kibbutz Nachal Oz, 800 meters from the Gaza border and all was relatively calm aside from some rocket fire in the distance. Nothing close enough to force me into a safe room. Wednesday, the kibbutz was hit hard, injuring critically one Palestinian worker there.

Wednesday I was at Sapir College. Friday Kassams fell there.

2 Comments | Share This | Israel, Sderot

After school vo-tech training for at risk kids

By Jacob Berkman · June 6, 2008

The UJC also took its media tour to check out some programming in the Negev… As JAFI spokesman Jacob Dallal told us, in a nutshell, Sderot is pretty depressing and the Negev is the future of Israel – so they wanted our trip to end on a Zionist upbeat.

Net@ was among the more interesting programs we saw during our quasi respite.

The program is a partnership bringing together Cisco, JAFI and the Israeli group Tapuach, a non-profit funded by the Recanti Foundation, whose Hebrew name translates to “apple” – though it has no affiliation with the Apple you and I know (does the Fundermentalist smell a lawsuit?).

Net@ is a four-year-long after-school program run in lower-income areas that teaches high school students how to become computer repair technicians. When the students complete the course, they receive an internationally recognized certificate that qualifies them as IT techs. Open to “at-risk” students, the program seeks not A+ students, but those just a cut below, according to Net@ officials. The idea is to help students who might not have great financial prospects to find good-paying middle class jobs.  And, it tries to attract girls, who are normally less likely to go into the IT filed.

We met with participants and instructors from the participating high school in Beer Sheva. The program there has about 100 participants right now, with a budget of $175,000. But next year, it might have to cut the number of new students it allows by half because of a budget crunch caused by the falling dollar.

Yet another reality hits home.

0 Comments | Share This | Israel, jewish agency, Sderot, UJC

This is what the damage looks like

By Jacob Berkman · June 6, 2008

This is the home of Dovid Tourgemond, which was hit by a Kassam in March. The owner of a local stop-n-shop is waiting for government funding to come in to fix the house that he built for $300,000 about 15 years ago.

0 Comments | Share This | Israel, Sderot

Anger on the left

By Jacob Berkman · June 6, 2008

Moira Dror, left, is being squeezed by the government, the Palestinians and her own conscience

“Do I look like I need therapy?” Moira Dror snaps in an Israeli-Scottish accent when I ask the psychologist sitting next to her if she would mind showing us how she would help Dror deal with her stress.

In an attempt to avoid a libel suit, the Fundermentalist will not say yes. But the graying Dror, who moved to Israel 35 years ago from Glasgow, is certainly extremely stressed.

She’s been living on Moshav Netiva Sarah, which is closer to Gaza than Sderot is, for 26 years. The government strategically placed her on the Moshav, which produces and sells internationally agricultural seeds.

But now she is infuriated by the government that has put her on the front line. The army has pulled back soldiers from Netivah Sarah after deciding that it was too dangerous for them to be stationed there. Yet, they have encouraged her to stay. And that makes her angry.

She is angry that she has only a few seconds to prepare when Kassams and mortar shells are fired at her home. She has a radio antenna on top of her house that she says is a target.
Her home is so close to the border that she does not need a “Tzeva Adom” – the “Red Alert” siren that is sounded when a Kassam is fired from Gaza. In Sderot, the siren gives about a 20-second warning to residents to run for a bomb shelter. In Machon Oz, where I slept Tuesday night, it gives about five seconds. In Netiva Sarah it is worthless, Dror said. She hears the whiz of the rocket being fired and it lands before the alert can sound.

At times, Dror has been told that she is crazy.

A rocket recently was fired and landed less than 10 meters away from her. It did not detonate, but it buried itself into the sand in front of her house. She called a bomb squad after the incident, and they could not find the Kassam at first because it had buried itself so deep into the earth. They told her she was nuts. Until they found it.

That made her angry.

The psychologist who sits next to her preaches primarily that those who are put in stress by the rockets must above all maintain their normal routines. They must not let the fear and stress of being in the line of fire debilitate them.

At the incredulity of that idea, Dror is angry.

Beyond that, she is angry at the situation because it is turning her into a right-winger.

Dror speaks fondly of the times she used to spend in Gaza, before the first Intifada. She had close friends there. She used to shop there regularly, go there and buy ice cream and bicycles.

She said that she even understood when some of her Gazan friends voted for Hamas. And Dror said that she knows that “life on the other side is 1,000 times worse.”

But she is fed up. “I would cry for those on the other side, but I don’t care. I have gotten cold,” Dror said. “If they hit us with a Kassam, we should send them right back.”

She is angry because the government missed its opportunity to really strike back. Just after Israel disengaged from Gaza, it had international public opinion on its side. When the first rocket was fired then, Israel should have struck back unmercifully, she says. And the world would have understood. But the government did not.

And now the former peacenik is on the front line, an unarmed target with no soldiers to protect her, bomb squad police who think she is crazy, a government that has failed her, an ideology that was never her own and a psychologist sitting next to her telling her to try to act as if all is normal.

0 Comments | Share This | Israel, Sderot

Dissent from the right

By Jacob Berkman · June 6, 2008

Estee Nemeth is embarrassed by her government over the way it has treated the city in which she lives.

We met with dozens of residents of Sderot in our two days in their town and the story of this embattled town started to emerge through their frustrations.

The 25-year-old, who grew up in Canarsie, New York, is finishing a degree in filmmaking at Sapir College in Sderot, one of only two colleges in Israel that offers degrees in film. (In an effort to draw students to Sderot, Sapir is offering scholarships paid for by the UJC to students who have enrolled over the last two years.)

Her thesis is an eight-minute film that describes Sderot as she sees it.

Simply, it is the wordless story of a boy dancing by himself in different parts of Sderot. At each spot, he dances a different dance to a different type of music. In his final dance, he dances to the sound of a young man screaming violently in pain.

The pain, though, is real. The screams are genuine.

Two years ago, Nemeth who describes herself as a right-winger, was inside her home when she heard a Kassam land outside. She grabbed her camera and ran outside to shoot the scene. When she got there, her neighbor, a young boy, had been injured badly by shrapnel. “He was split open from his neck to his waist,” recalled the filmmaker, who in the shock of the real-life horror ended up recording only audio because she forgot she was shooting and ended up dropping the camera to her side as the boy’s mother tended to her son. He eventually survived.

Nemeth is at the center of another well-publicized controversy at Sapir – she filed a complaint against an Israeli-Arab professor who she claims made her cover a small Israeli flag that she had sewn onto her bag.

Despite her Zionism, she is “embarrassed” by her government, which she feels has left the people of Sderot abandoned in the town.

The people, most of whom are already poor, are trapped financially in the city, as none can sell their houses. Commerce and employment have slowed to a near standstill, she says. “There’s a chain supermarket, but only in Sderot will the store have 10 lanes and only two people working,” she said. “It’s little things like this because no one has any money.”

And they are trapped sometimes physically, she said, as only one public bus goes to Tel Aviv, and that bus comes to Sderot only once an hour. There is an internal bus line that goes through Sderot, which Nemeth uses to get back and forth to school. She refuses to walk anymore because she is afraid.

And while she likes Sderot, she said that she feels guilty that she will most likely leave the city when she graduates after this year, because there is no film work in Sderot.

“On days when there are 50 or so Kassams falling, you should see what the bus station looks like,” she said.

0 Comments | Share This | Israel, Sderot, UJC

Things you might learn about Natalie on a bus

By Jacob Berkman · June 4, 2008

The Fundermentalist has heard that reports of Natalie Portman visiting Rwanda to check out a philanthropy role with the JDC might have been exaggerated. At the same time, however, he has also heard that she may have been in Israel recently to check out Jewish Agency programs, as well as JDC programs.

Neither the spokesman for the JDC or JAFI would comment ... but I have another 24 hours with them on a bus…

1 Comment | Share This | Israel, JDC, jewish agency, Sderot

Things about UJC you can find out on a bus: Federations balking at more aid for Sderot

By Jacob Berkman · June 4, 2008

The UJC has apparently been largely rebuffed in its efforts to raise another $13.6 million from local Jewish federations in North America for helping Sderot, Ashkelon and the surrounding cities.

The organization had already allocated more than $21 million for programming in the region from its Israel Emergency Campaign, started in the aftermath of Israel’s war in Lebanon in 2006. In March, the organization approved another $13.6 million for additional programming. The organization’s leadership sent out a letter to the federations making a soft pitch for the money, according to Jim Lodge, the organization’s VP of Global Operations: Israel & Overseas. But Lodge, who has been on a bus with the Fundermentalist for three days, said that the federations have been slow to react.

As of yet, they have given roughly $2.25 million, which the UJC has allocated to five projects. Further projects are on hold until the federations pony up.

And they have not, despite one big city exec’s suggestion to federations that they pay for the new programs with some of the money that they will be saving on reductions in their UJC dues.

0 Comments | Share This | Israel, Sderot, UJC