Hezbollah guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets into Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel once again late last month. Two dead. Millions of dollars in damages.
Although the assault was the area’s most deadly in four years, the rockets have become so common that Kiryat Shmona residents are reportedly asking if anyone in their country even noticed the attack.
Marin resident Eve Cohen noticed.
When the rockets hit, Cohen was in Israel on behalf of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, attending a campaign directors’ mission.
Kiryat Shmona is the JCF’s partner region. Once the all-clear sounded after three days of attacks, Cohen flew to the battered city.
“If people were coming out of shelters, I wanted to be there,” she said by phone this week from her Kentfield home. “Israelis kept saying to me I was brave to go up there, but I never felt brave. I just felt the need to be there.”
Several Kiryat Shmona residents told her she had arrived before many Israeli officials. Although the city had an air of normalcy and people went on with usual work, an eerie quiet lingered, Cohen said.
“I couldn’t see anything wrong. But then I rounded the corner, and boom, there was this wreck.”
Rockets scored a direct hit on Kiryat Shmona’s city hall, tearing off a wall, shattering all the windows and blowing the doors off the hinges.
“It looked like the picture of the federal building in Oklahoma City with one side taken off. The rockets were totally aiming for downtown. If you take out someone’s city hall, it’s the best example of how powerful you can be.”
The fatalities occurred when two people volunteered to come out to survey the damages after waiting for hours in the emergency shelter beneath city hall. As Tony Zann, 38, and Shimon Elimelech, 45, stood outside the shelter, a Katyusha hit 10 feet away from them.
Five others were wounded during the three days of attacks, and some 500 structures and 100 vehicles were hit. Israel retaliated with raids on Beirut, Lebanon’s capital.
During her stay, Cohen visited the municipal kindergarten, which serves about 70 children in separate religious and secular classes. While the bombs fell, the kids were crammed into a shelter built for 30 people. Although the school has another shelter, only one is used. It has a television and VCR, donated by the JCF in 1993.
“I asked the teacher if she wanted the other shelter to have a TV and VCR, said Cohen. She gave me a wistful smile and said, ‘Maybe we won’t need it again,'”
Cohen is not so optimistic. Even with newly elected Prime Minister Ehud Barak promising peace with Lebanon within a year, Cohen said, “I don’t believe it.”
Although Israel’s government unconditionally provides money for repairing damages from the rockets, the residents of Kiryat Shmona feel battered, isolated and ignored, Cohen said. They have launched several protests to get the ears of the policy makers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
“The people kept saying, ‘Get the story out that our own country doesn’t care,'” Cohen said. “It’s like they are sent to the wild wild West to live. When something happens, people just say it’s the price you pay for living up there.”
Upon returning home last week, Cohen sent a letter to the JCF’s Israel and overseas committee detailing her experiences. Already, one family has donated a TV and VCR for the second shelter.
Earlier this week, several dozen members of the JCF’s Young Adults Division visited Kiryat Shmona. The visit coincidentally was scheduled as part of their annual mission to Israel.
The YAD group met with Kiryat Shmona’s mayor and lit yahrzeit candles with him in memory of the two casualties.
Aaron Pearlman, young leadership director of YAD, said by phone from Israel that the group learned “that the friendships we’ve created with this area are really useful at a time like this. People feel they are being neglected by their own country.”
The YAD group also met with young Israeli leaders. The two groups volunteered to spend an hour in a bomb shelter discussing life in Kiryat Shmona and how the two cities could build connections.