Life in the Missiles' Path

This article originally appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix (21 Nov 2012). If you prefer, you may read the original here.

(The article below is an example of how Sal Caputo makes me look good on paper, which is handy for my first ever publication with a news site.)

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I’ve lived in Be’er Sheva, Israel, since Aug. 27. The city is unique with its large mix of Mizrahi Jews, Arabs and Russian immigrants. After the school year began, there was a welcome addition of English-speaking college students to the mix. What’s most prominent to me about life in the “capital of the Negev Desert,” however, is our proximity to the Gaza border, which is about 40 kilometers/30 miles away.

I’m here with 26 other native English-speaking teachers in Israel, volunteering for 10 months in a program called Israel Teaching Fellows. We live together in an apartment complex, three participants to each apartment. My group teaches English to Israeli students in Be’er Sheva.

At the outset, we were warned that Gaza sometimes sends off rockets that come our way. We were introduced to concepts like mammad (bomb shelter), air raid siren and 60-second time limits. Because we are 40 kilometers from the border, we know we have 60 seconds to find shelter when the air raid sirens begin. We also know that we must wait in the shelter for 10 minutes once the siren has stopped.
In September, I learned for the first time what that new vocabulary was all about.

Jump forward about three months and you find a group of Americans (and a Canadian) well-versed in the art of taking cover at ungodly hours of the night. We know about listening for booms and hoping that, when we hear one, it is the Iron Dome engaging a missile instead of the impact of a missile on homes. We even know about daytime experience with dodging missiles.

It’s incredibly frustrating to receive urgent emails from the U.S. Embassy and Consulate General about the escalated situation three months after we’ve been dealing with the reality. Be’er Sheva wasn’t really even in the news until Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari was assassinated. The lack of previous coverage made it feel like our problems weren’t worth the world’s time.

But since early September, Be’er Sheva had dealt with air raid sirens on at least five occasions before the assassination. One of those sirens went off, for the first time, during school hours. Schools generally close the day after a siren, though students are often nervous days later. We are fortunate, however, to have the aid of an Iron Dome battery in our city, as some nearby cities had theirs moved to other locations. We also have the benefit of living in a newer apartment building, which provides a mammad on each floor.

Since we are not actually at war with anyone, we never know when to expect an attack. Sleep is almost certainly affected, and most of us are jumpy at the slightest, unexpected noise. My biggest discomfort is being shuttered into the mammad, yet I deal with the claustrophobia because being afraid is better than getting blown up. Things have escalated enough that my program has evacuated us from Be’er Sheva to Netanya. And all the while the missiles followed us north. I feel I’ve abandoned my students in the south, and I worry about how frightened they must be on both sides of the fence.

We hope the evacuation will be temporary, but that depends on a cease-fire. The program won’t allow us within 40 kilometers of the Gaza border while things are so escalated. We’re actively looking for volunteer work in the meantime, and making educational YouTube videos for our students.

More than anything, I want peace: I want the children on both sides of the Gaza border to know a night’s rest without the fear of attacks. I want all families to be safe and whole in their own homes. And I want to get back to my students in the south. After all, they’re why I’m here and why I’m staying.

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Elisa Llewellyn is a resident of Phoenix. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Arizona State University.

When Halloween Comes to Be'er Sheva

Halloween's not really celebrated in much of Israel, expect for maybe Tel-Aviv. The religious interestingly associate the holiday with Christianity, so it's of course disliked all around. It's an amusing connection to make, since I think most Christians would strongly disagree. Either way, way definitely don't talk about the day in the religious schools. The members of my program, however, felt the year would not be complete without having our own Halloween celebration (I know I'm not the only one who adores the holiday). So we threw a party.

Halloween fell on Shabbat this year, so we had the party the day after. This way, everyone was able to attend. We ended up taking over the 3rd floor lobby of our apartment complex, as we tend to do, and we decorated the place to within an inch of its life in Halloween things. I mean orange chains of construction paper (they call is Bristol here), toilet paper streamers hanging from the ceiling tiles, colorful and often-times graphic depictions of zombies, vampires, and severed body parts. Because they were drawings though, they leaned more toward cute than gruesome, if you can imagine such a thing. There was candy, VERY LOUD music, and quite a few celebratory beverages - and we invited just about everyone to come, but they had to follow our one rule: you must wear a costume to attend.

The American attendees (or Israeli Americans, as the case often was) had the best, most thought-out costumes. It was awesome to have so many people go all-out with creative ingenuity (we are in Israel, after all). Two of the Israelis dressed as Terrence and Phillip from South Park (Brian also represented South Park, but as Towelie), we also had Batman, Superman's girlfriend (me), a garden, Big Bird, and even Thor. Our celebration had absolutely nothing to do with Judaism, Israel, or religious observance of any kind, but it had everything to do with community. A few of us decided to go for a beverage and falafel run in costume before the party really started. We thought we'd need to explain ourselves, but as soon as people saw us they shouted, "Purim!" It made us laugh, of course, since Halloween has as much to do with Purim as it does with Christianity - so maybe we made it a "Jewish" thing, after all.

Some of us might've been a bit excessive with our fun (e.g. me), but it the event was just what we needed to feel like we were more at home. Even our Madrichim came in costume: our Madrich came as an angel and our Madricha came as the devil. Actually, those costumes were probably the most perfect. I think they represented semi-religious Israelis quite well.