MONTREAL — Leaders of Federation CJA visiting areas of southern Israel within range of Hamas rockets got a taste of what life is like for people living there.
CJA Federation president Marc Gold
Last Friday, while driving from Sderot, a town near the Gaza border, to Be’er Sheva in the Negev, a Red Dawn alert went off.
Federation president Marc Gold wrote on his blog that the van they were travelling in quickly pulled onto the shoulder of the highway.
“We rushed out and lay down in a ditch by the side of the road. It is hard to describe the feelings that run through you as you wait for the sound of the missile to explode, a mixture of faith, resignation and helplessness,” he wrote.
“This time the rocket must have fallen far from us because we didn’t hear any boom.”
Gold, along with this year’s Combined Jewish Appeal general chair Ian Karper, Sephardi campaign chair Moise Amselem, and David Cape, chair of the federation’s Israel and Overseas Department, arrived in Israel last Thursday for a three-day visit. The purpose was to show solidarity with Israel during the current conflict.
Just after landing, they heard that two Hamas missiles had fallen on Be’er Sheva, injuring eight people.
“We got on our phones and BlackBerries to make sure our friends were safe, and were relieved to hear that they were,” Gold wrote.
“But it serves as a sad and sobering reminder of what life is like for those living under the constant threat of rocket fire.”
The Montreal Jewish community has been twinned with Be’er Sheva under a United Israel Appeal program for many years, and CJA funds a number of facilities and services there aimed at improving the quality of life.
Earlier on Friday, the Montrealers visited a playground in Sderot, where bomb shelters are as common a sight as swings and slides.
It dawned on Gold that, with Sderot enduring shelling from Gaza for eight years, young children have never known any other reality than running for cover every time an alert is sounded.
They also witnessed children in a school attending a session with a trauma therapist, which has become a regular part of the curriculum to help the kids deal with stress.
Then Gold and the others met with Israeli soldiers in the Shaare Negev region near Gaza. They gave them gifts of socks and letters of support written by grade 5 and 6 students at Akiva School.
“The soldiers were really moved by their letters, as indeed we all were as well.”
The federation has established a relief fund for southern Israel, and hopes to raise $1 million for such projects as day trips out of harm’s way for 4,000 children and setting up a trauma centre at a teachers’ college in Be’er Sheva in order to free up beds at Sroka Hospital for those wounded in the fighting.
Meanwhile, the United Community of Russian-Speaking Jews of Quebec issued its own statement in support of Israel’s armed offensive against Hamas, which the group blames for the conflict.
“Each and every innocent death is a real tragedy. We are sorry when any child cries, no matter Jewish or Arabic. We deeply sympathize with the Palestinian mothers who lose their children, but the cup of grief and suffering of the Israeli mothers is already over-filled,” it reads.
The group’s president Mark Groysberg said there are 20,000 Russian-speaking Jews in the province, according to information he obtained from Statistics Canada.