VIDEO - An explosive device discovered near a vantage point visited by a group of American Jewish women last week gave the members of the Hadassah women's Zionist organization an unexpected taste of life under fire in southern Israel.
Unfazed by the close brush with a bomb, the women's tour buses continued to the Qassam rocket-battered town of Sderot, on the border of the Gaza Strip.
Hadassah recently donated USD 18,000 to the frontline town, but the organization's members said they also wanted to see the area for themselves and express solidarity with Sderot's weary residents.
"What the people of Sderot have endured, just by virtue of the fact that they live here, makes a very strong statement. They didn't leave," Ellen Hershkin, from New York, told Ynetnews. "You don't have to be in the army to be on the frontline," she added.
The women then met Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal, who described the hardships of daily life in the town and the traumas of Sderot's children.
As the buses carrying the Hadassah solidarity trip rolled away, Sderot resident Shabi Avishay told Ynetnews that while the women came to identify with Sderot for a day, he and his family had been facing rocket fire for years, with a number of rockets landing on and around his home.
On Monday, 200 members of Hadassah met Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
at the Knesset to celebrate the organization's 95th anniversary. The event topped off a packed week of events for Hadassah, which also saw its governing board launch a program to add a new building to the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem, the total cost of which is expected to be around USD 250 million.
RSS
