by dina kraft
jta
sderot | “There is no place where a Kassam has not fallen,” said Hanni Butbul, 36, a manager of the day care center in Sderot.
“Since I gave birth to my first child seven years ago Kassam rockets have been falling,” said Eimvet Yitao, a mother in Sderot who is eight months pregnant.
These are the complaints you hear in Sderot, the southern Israeli town bordering Gaza that has been the target of thousands of rocket attacks by Palestinian militants for more than six years.
Some residents believe Sderot has been neglected by the government because it’s a working-class town in which half its residents are immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. Many of the others are native-born, the descendants of immigrants from North Africa.
Even this week when one woman was killed by the bombings, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was reluctant to evacuate even a small number of residents, saying it was bad for Israel’s image. He then relented.
Yitao, the young mother, was one of 650 Sderot residents evacuated by the defense ministry to Olga Village, a hotel complex usually reserved for soldiers on break from combat duty. She sits with other evacuees trading their experiences.
“I’m very stressed out,” she said. “I would shout out to my children not to go outside but it was hard for them to listen. Here they are at least free to roam about.”
Yitao, who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia as a girl, looks to the wide plaza lined by park benches with a view of an azure blue Mediterranean Sea. Just down the hill is a swimming pool. A poster board at the entrance to the dining hall lists the day’s activities, including a magician for the children, a Shavuot ceremony staged by a local school and a backgammon tournament.
“We try to help in every way, even small ways like providing baby bottles, laundry, diapers, toothpaste,” said Lt. Col. Ramy Ben-Haim, the army officer in charge of the evacuees at the complex. “Whatever they did not bring from home we try to give them.”
Ben-Haim also detailed plans for a festive Shavuot meal and a dance party for the evacuees. “These people have been through a lot,” he said. “They deserve at least this.”
Several of the women described how their children have have regressed: Teenagers awake from nightmares shouting out warnings of imagined attacks; others are terrified to stay home alone and they cling to their mothers.
“There is no adult nor child who has not seen with his or her own eyes where one has fallen,” Butbul said.
Life in Sderot, Butbul says, is one of “frustration and fear.”
Many of the arrivals to Olga Village say it is their first time leaving Sderot while the city was under attack. Schools have shut down, as have many businesses. Some residents feel the government has forgotten them, and to some degree other Israelis have, too.
Some say they are angry that there have been no wide-scale Israeli reprisal attacks into Gaza, despite the onslaught of rocket attacks. Only this week has the air force struck back, launching targeted raids on leading Hamas figures that have led to their deaths as well as civilian casualties.
Sophia Aminov, 44, an emigrant from the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, was in Kfar Olga recently taking in the sea view and pushing her toddler son in a stroller.
“How long can we suffer?” she asked. “It’s not about to end anytime soon. We will go back after a couple of days, but what happens when we return and the rockets continue to fall?”
David Magmoni, a Sderot resident who is unemployed, did not hide his anger. “This is a failure by the government, which is interested more in its corrupt affairs than anything else,” he said. “I feel they don’t care about the people who live in Sderot. They don’t take responsibility for us.”
Israeli journalist Dan Margalit wrote that Sderot had seen a vital promise broken — the promise that after the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, their lives and homes would be protected.
The United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization of the North American federation system, pledged to donate $8 million in emergency relief to Sderot.
Yitao is just hoping for quiet when her baby is born. “As I told a friend, I hope there will be quiet soon so I can have a bris without Kassams falling.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California