Sderot in Hebrew is defined as “boulevards.” What a strange name for a city which has small narrow streets and alleyways. There must be another way to define “boulevards.” The first residents of Sderot, a new development town, arrived in 1951. Sderot reminds me of a Middle Eastern version of Mayberry RFD, a small, warm and friendly community. The people who live there represent Jewish communities from Morocco, Uzbekistan, North Africa, Ethiopia and so on. Sderot is a multicultural tapestry where people respect each others’ differences and support one another.

It also is where residents are living through a nightmare of trauma. There is no PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), there is only CTSD (current traumatic stress disorder). Living in Sderot now means participating in a sick Pavlovian experiment. Surveillance cameras hover over the Gaza strip monitoring
Kassam rocket attacks.

Once a Kassam is spotted, the tzeva adom (a code red alarm) is sounded, giving people at best 15 seconds to find shelter. Upon hearing tzeva adom, people throughout Sderot run like mice to a safe room, if they can find one nearby. Not every Kassam launch is spotted and many times a Kassam lands without warning.

While visiting with Corrine, whose son,Matan, age 15, spent 10 months in a hospital and whose foot was partially amputated from a Kassam injury, I experienced a tzeva adom. Corrine began to panic. “Aviva, hurry, run to the safe room.” Matan was not in the house. He had gone to pick up his nephew from nursery school. Corrine screamed out repeatedly “eifoh ha’ben sh’lee?”— where is my son?

With a cell phone in hand, she frantically dialed several numbers until she located Matan. He was in a shelter during the tzeva adom. In those seconds, I felt the vulnerability of life and death. Both my heart and my stomach were somewhere on the floor. How do people live like this? What gives them strength?

I brought with me home to Potomac a Kassam rocket that had been launched from Gaza and landed in Sderot. This Kassam was bronzed and made into a flower vase by Meir, a carpenter whose family had its home destroyed. He gave it to me as a present with the following words, “Aviva, I want you to have this Kassam vase and please show it to people in the United States so they might better understand what it is like to live in Sderot. We must learn how to take something bad and turn it into something good; to take the energy of destruction and create a vessel of growth, this is how we survive. Furthermore, please know that this is what Operation Embrace is doing: changing horrible and traumatic situations
into support and growth.”

Perhaps, Sderot or “boulevards” is not such a strange name for this place. Boulevards connote large expansive paved roads. I did not stop to think about the large expansive boulevards that can be found in the hearts, minds and souls of the residents of Sderot. These are boulevards of hope. These are boulevards where there is room for people from all over the world to connect directly with those suffering in Sderot.

After all the speeches have been given, we still feel helpless in our inability to directly make a difference for people in Sderot. Organizations like Operation Embrace give us the opportunities to reach the boulevards of Sderot directly and immediately. We can help Corrine and Meir to refashion rockets of destruction into vessels of hope.

Aviva Tessler lives in Potomac. She is executive director of Operation Embrace.