Do You Recognize the Name Sderot?
Do You Where It Is?
June 1, 2007
Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

This is rhetorical, so please don’t answer and don’t raise your hands. But:

           If I asked you to identify the word ‘Sderot,’ could you?

            Could you find it on the map?

            Could you tell me why I am asking about it?

            Do you know anything about Sderot?

The purpose of this sermon tonight is two-fold:

            You will be able to answer all these questions, and

            You will, after Shabbat, do something positive to help other Jews.

What you will not be able to do, is plead ignorance and use it as an excuse not to act.

Sderot is a city in Israel, which is a specific legal and corporate status. Though much smaller, it is a city just like Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa.

If you imagine in your mind the Gaza Strip, think of the north western tip of the strip. Sderot sits one kilometer, 5/8’s of a mile due east from that point on the map.

Sderot is in the news because it is being shelled daily by Qassam rockets launched from within the Gaza Strip by the Hamas terrorists. In the past five years at least 1,200 Qassam rockets have fallen on Sderot. Lately they have averaged at least one an hour. As learned in the Second Lebanon War last summer, there is no defense against Qassam and Katyusha rockets except to stop them from being fired altogether. They have too short a trajectory and flight time to be tracked and shot down. The people who fire these rockets should only be called terrorists because they are not fighting a war. They are not being invaded. Israel painfully pulled out and dismantled towns and settlements, many of whose people are still not permanently resettled. The only purpose to fire these at Sderot is to terrorize the population. There is no military objective. They are not firing them at military installations. They are firing them at civilians, at homes, at schools, at hospitals, and at synagogues. They are killing civilians and destroying the city. Hamas is threatening to make Sderot a ghost town, and then do the same to the Ashkelon and Ashdod that are major, large cities, being ports, shipping centers and refineries. Hamas is not an army. They are criminal terrorists that kill civilians purposefully, intentionally, and indiscriminately.

To you sitting here is this Shabbat, and those who will read this on the listserv or from the archive of my sermons, I have come to talk with you about Sderot.

Its history:

Sderot was founded in 1951, in the early years of the State of Israel, when it had little money and yet with a huge influx of Jewish refugees fleeing the anti-Semitism and pogroms in the Arab countries that followed the creation of the State. The first immigrants were from Kurdistan and from Iran. In 1954 it was officially termed a ma’abarah, transitory camp, like those that dotted the landscape of Israel, to at least shelter, feed and educate the flood of Jews from the DP camps of Europe and especially from Arab countries. The next wave of immigrants came from North Africa. In the early years the area languished as the State was first developing and thus Sderot was afflicted by high unemployment, many welfare cases and large turnover in population. In the 1960’s some industry began at the nearby kibbutzim and in and around Sderot. In the 1990’s Sderot again absorbed a large immigrant population from the former USSR and doubled in size to its current 20 – 24,000.

Its condition:

I’d like you to imagine any American city or town sitting under such a siege and bombardment. Can you imagine our government sitting still for one second, allowing its citizens to submit to this for days, weeks, months and years? Israel knows that the only way to stop this is to physically go back into the Gaza Strip. The current tactics are insufficient to significantly change the situation. And the world is silent.

If you were there tonight, how would it feel? Let me share parts of a report by a Conservative Rabbi who just went there a few days ago and reported his experience. Rabbi Barry Schlesinger is the spiritual leader of Kehilat Moreshet Avraham in East Talpiot, Jerusalem and president of the Rabbinical Assembly (Masorti) of Israel.

S'derot – In Mind- and Body
“Going to S'derot to volunteer has been on my mind. Last Saturday night my daughter forwarded me an email from an organization called Lev Echad which said that S'derot needs volunteers for a day or more. I contacted them and arranged to go. I arrived in S'derot and went directly to the Lev Echad center. There were many young adults and 3 older people beside myself. We all registered (I imagine for insurance purposes) and received our assignments in S'derot. Around five minutes after I arrived, there was a Qassam attack warning. The loudspeakers throughout the city of S'derot scream out "Tzeva Adom, Tzeva Adom" (the color red, the color red).  After that, one has only fifteen seconds to find a safe place to sit it out for at least another five minutes. Since we didn’t have time to get to a bomb shelter we all hugged the western wall (how symbolic) of the building we were in. Four Qassam rockets landed in S'derot and, according to the media, only one woman was wounded, very slightly.

“After receiving instructions on how to behave after hearing ”Tzeva Adom", I went with my partner Gilad,  a soldier on vacation (this is what a combat soldier is doing during his week off duty) to survey 25 homes throughout S'derot, interviewing  the residents  to determine who is  left in the city and what their needs are. All of the families we met had at least one family member with a disability and special needs. The serenity and quiet of this S'derot morning was disturbed by only one other Qassam attack. We were caught on Trumpeldor Street when we heard "Tzeva Adom". Not having a compass, we didn’t bother looking for the western side of the street and just crouched down hugging a wall until it was all over. The radio reported "no casualties".

“By the end of the day we had met many frightened, hopeless, angry and frustrated S'derot residents. We met a woman originally from the Former Soviet Union, who was just on her way out to work. She and told us how hard it is for her husband who has kidney disease and has to go to the hospital in Ashkelon 3 times a week for dialysis. They live in a third floor walk- up apartment and it is virtually impossible for him to get to a safe place in 15 seconds. When asked how we can help them, the woman asked us to help her move to a flat on the first floor.

“We then met a family of 7. When we entered, they were sitting in the living room watching TV, reading and chatting. They looked sad, almost as if it was a Shiva home. It certainly wasn’t. The opposite was the case. The 13 year old son had just been called up to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah that Monday morning. But there was no "simcha" (joy) in that house. The father who is a small time building contractor hasn’t worked in weeks and they had to cancel the Bar Mitzvah celebration, because their family and friends were too afraid to come to S'derot. The father said to me clearly that after 7 years of Qassams falling in S'derot, he is losing hope in his ability to provide for his family.

“We met another family, this time of four. The mother is blind; the father is physically disabled, having only one leg. They don’t have a safe room. When they hear the "Tzeva Adom" the best they can do is stand under a door frame.

“The stories repeat themselves over and over. People don’t leave their homes. They are literally incarcerated in their own abodes, as if under house arrest. Going shopping for food is scary for many. One woman told me that she will not leave her house and asked us for food, badly needed medicine and a psychologist to talk to.”

Rabbi Schlesinger provides many suggests that those in Israel could physically do for the people of Sderot. None of those are available to us. He concludes with the following:

“B'ezrat Hashem, S'derot will see better times. As in the words of the Book of Samuel, we all pray that Israel will”Be of good courage, and let us prove strong for our people, and for the cities of our G-d; and HaShem do that which seemeth Him good.'( 2 Samuel: 10:12)”

This is Sderot. Its name comes from the avenues lined by eucalyptus trees. This is its history. This is its condition.

Our mitzvah, which we are not able to deny, is to give them support. Despite the distance, it is quite easily done. On the back of the Shabbat brochure, and I am typing it into this text is a website, www.mercazusa.org/sderot.htm. Mercaz is the Zionist organization of our Conservative Movement here in the United States and Canada. I also urge you to become a member of Mercaz and support our specific work in Israel. Working together with the American Zionist Movement which unites us on behalf of Israel, you can click your way through to donate to directly to those who will buy the useful, necessary and supportive food, medicines, and toys that will help them physically and spiritually. They need to know that we are not sitting here making a simcha, as we properly should and must, and forget about them as bombs are falling on their heads. We are part of Klal Yisrael, the totality of the Jewish people. We are the whole House of Israel. Let us do our part, to make the House of Israel whole. Let us pray that maybe we can soon visit Sderot and finds its people sitting under the prophetic “fig tree and vine,” and none to make them afraid.      

May this come true soon.                  

Amen.