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The thud of rockets

By Jacob Berkman · June 5, 2008

It’s 1 a.m. A rocket landing in the distance sounds like a bowling ball dropping on thick spongy carpet a floor away from you. It feels about the same under your feet.

More later after I get some sleep.

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Sderot children stretch and pet away stress of rockets

By Jacob Berkman · June 5, 2008

Forget for the moment the threat of Kassam rockets and .122 mm mortar shells that constantly hangs in the Sderot air, we on the UJC media trip are getting bombarded with site visits to see program after program paid for in part by the UJC and implemented by JDC and JAFI.

There is no way that I can write about all of them, but I will highlight those that especially catch my eye. And treating post traumatic stress in children with yoga for tots and pet therapy certainly did.

Though Sderot has been under attack for about 8 years, the outside Jewish world and the Israeli government have really only taken an interest in the people of Sderot over the last year or so. Part of the reason in the shift in attitude, say the people I have spoken with, is that the government suddenly realized that by 2007 about 25 percent of Sderot’s population had left– and came to the conclusion that losing Sderot to a mass exodus would be a political, strategic and national morale nightmare.

Or, as the newly coined slogan goes, “If we flee, first it would be Sderot, then Ashkelon, then Ashdod, then Tel Aviv.”

For the most part, those who were financially able to leave Sderot did leave, with the exception of a few idealists. Those who are left are almost all lower class, the leftovers from a huge influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union and Islamic republics during the 1990s. And they are simply too poor to leave.

They are trapped in the Sderot on one side by their poverty and on the other by the national need for them to remain in Sderot. All the while, only eight people have been killed by shelling from Gaza, but the rockets are psychologically tearing up Sderot’s residents.

Hardest hit have been children.

But, thanks to funding by the North American federation system and JDC – not the Israeli government – seven of the town’s eight elementary schools now have programs like those at the Alon Madaiim school in M-3, Sderot’s neighborhood closest to Gaza.

The school, with the help of JDC, has built a “Haven of Calm” on its first floor, a fortified room, where kids come for alternative therapy sessions that try to help them deal with the stress of growing up as targets.

For a budget of about $25,000 per year, the school can treat every one of its 300 children with the alternative therapy.

In this video, children have used toilet paper rolls to create a perfect city for domesticated mice. Playing with the mice and then letting them run free allows them to project their feelings onto the mice and is soothing, said the class’s instructor.

The toilet paper rolls give the mice a safe place to hide, the children explained.

And, yes. The Fundermentalist did get to play with a mouse as well.

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Sderot’s women watchers

By Jacob Berkman · June 3, 2008

Much of the safety of Sderot depends on a bunch of teenage girls who sit around all day watching television.

The Nachal Oz Army base, just 700 meters from the border of Gaza, is home to a surveillance station that oversees 40 square kilometers of the Gaza Strip.

While the base deploys male soldiers to do reconnaissance from the field, a number of female soldiers sit in one of two war rooms on the base, and watch via remote controlled video camera one of 10 quadrants of open fields and Arab villages across the Gaza border, looking for any irregularities. (As I type this, we are driving past an open field where a Kassam fell a half-hour ago) Each is an expert on a certain patch of land and spends four hours at a time scanning the area with a camera controlled by a joystick.

As we visit one of the war rooms, another reporter jokes to me that men simply don’t have the attention span to do such work. A female officer explains that, well, it’s simply safer for the women to be in the war room than in the field.

At night, when conventional video won’t work, the girls, 18 to 20 years old, use heat-sensing cameras to look for insurgents. They catch a couple every day, the officer says.

When they do not pick up an irregularity, people die, such as they did on April 9, when two insurgents were able to get trough the fence and attack a nearby oil tanker. Two Israeli civilians were killed.

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The Fundermentalist on assignment

By Jacob Berkman · June 3, 2008

As I mentioned earlier, I am currently on assignment in Israel, checking out how the UJC, the JDC and JAFI are spending money to help the citizens of Sderot, who have been under Hamas rocket fire for almost eight years now.

I’m with a mission that includes a half dozen or so editors of Jewish newspapers and about 10 UJC, JDC and JAFI staff. I’ll be sending dispatches whenever possible, hopefully with pictures and video if I can ever get them to work…

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