Participants in a mission to Israel from the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County in Nitzan at the dedication of the Yisrael Lutati Nitzan Youth Center, named for a soldier killed by terrorists who had infiltrated his army base near the Gush Katif community of Morag. Surrounding the fallen soldier’s father and younger sister are, from left, Monte Block, federation president Lee Livingston, Linda Block, Brenda Tanzman, Arlene Frumkin, and Mitch Frumkin. Roy Tanzman is in the rear.
April 22, 2008
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.”
Fran Ackerman of Monroe and her husband, Harvey, had been to Israel in 1991, but this was their first federation mission trip.
Children romp in a playground at a Jerusalem shelter for battered women that was built with an anonymous $25,000 donation from two families affiliated with the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County.
Photos courtesy Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County
“Something I won’t forget is the settlers taken out of Gaza and living in temporary housing,” she said. “Just to hear about their hardships and the way the government treated them.”
Federation members also dedicated a room at the Alyn Pediatric and Adolescent Rehabilitation Hospital and visited a playground at a Jerusalem shelter for battered women. The playground was built with a $25,000 anonymous donation from two families affiliated with the federation.
Although going to the Western Wall was the highlight of the trip for Block, she also saw for herself how her federation donations are going to help others.
“When you step foot in Israel you feel like you’ve come home, you have that connection,” she added. “But it’s also extremely rewarding to see how our dollars are helping them in these times of uncertainty.”
Ackerman said she was “very impressed with the work of federation” and described the experience as “an enlightening, well-planned, over-the-top trip.”
A haven for youth
A student from Sapir College, where a student was killed in a rocket attack Feb. 27, receives relaxation techniques from a volunteer from Tel Aviv University.
The emotional highlight for many of the participants of the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County’s Israel 60th Anniversary Mission was an April 3 inauguration ceremony for a new youth center for Gaza Strip evacuees.
The center was built in part with $50,000 from a fund raised by the Middlesex County Jewish community and a matching gift of $50,000 from the Middlesex federation. Nitzan was established to house some 3,000 evacuees from the bloc of Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip.
Mission-goers had dinner with some of the residents, toured the area where their permanent homes will soon be built nearby, and attended a performance at the youth center of the Nitzanei Katif orchestra of local residents, who are mostly children.
Federation president-elect Arlene Frumkin, who is currently the president of the women’s division, said the inauguration was very moving.
“There were tears of joy,” Frumkin said. “The orchestra was great. We clapped and danced. It was a festive occasion and they made us feel very good for our part in it.”
The center is named for Yisrael Lutati, a 19-year-old soldier from Gush Katif’s Nevei Dekalim community who was killed on Yom Kippur eve three-and-a-half years ago when terrorists infiltrated his army base near the Gush Katif community of Morag. Lutati’s father and sister attended the ceremony.
The 2,562-square-foot youth center is now the largest structure in Nitzan. It will serve the 1,200 children and 230 teenaged residents of the hastily built town.
The youth center was purposely built to be portable, reflecting the temporary nature of the community.
The center is not expected to move until the last residents move from Nitzan to their new homes not far away, which could take as long as four years.
“It especially made the first-timers on our trip understand how important it is to support the agencies in Israel,” Frumkin said.
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Journalist: ‘I felt very secure’
As a Christian who had never been to Israel and a journalist writing for a secular newspaper, Rick Malwitz, a columnist for the Home News Tribune, was unsure what to expect when he accompanied the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County on its Israel mission.
What he got was a deeper understanding of the roots of his own faith as he visited locales mentioned in the Bible.
“I was very impressed by the country and what they did to the desert,” said Malwitz, whose column appears twice weekly in the Gannett-owned paper based in East Brunswick.
“I was very impressed by Jerusalem,” he added. “It felt very safe and secure. What really surprised me was the feeling of security. I thought Jerusalem was a very interesting international city with a tremendous diversity of religions. I didn’t feel any tension in the air. I felt very secure.”
That was not the case in Sderot, where the people live under constant fear of the Kassam missiles shot from Gaza. He said it looked like a ghost town in the late afternoon.
“I was very impressed by the courage of the people that stay in Sderot and go to school there,” said Malwitz. “There are a lot of reasons to abandon Sderot, but they decided they belong and are staying there.”
The journalist also went out on his own in Jerusalem, where he spoke with Arabs living in the city. One said he resented that although his family had lived in Jerusalem for 800 years, he now has to take orders from recent Russian and Ethiopian immigrants in the Israeli military. Another said that although his family had similarly deep roots, he cannot vote in national elections.
A third, a Bedouin and successful businessman, “was very appreciative of what the Jews had done in Jerusalem.”
Malwitz also posted a daily blog of his week’s activities, which attracted a range of responses, including some suggesting that his views on Israel were being manipulated by his Jewish hosts.
“What these entries did was to serve as sort of a reminder that it’s not a neat story that’s happening in Israel,” he said.
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