Thursday, August 10th,

See the kids Drawing:  Drawing 1    Drawing 2

Shalom,

Today, once again we didn’t need an alarm clock to wake up. Mr.Nasralla is making sure that we won’t get much rest today. After his warning to the Israeli Arab citizens of Haifa to leave the city, we suspect that the next few days are going to be easy. Hizballa wants to exhaust people in the North of Israel and make us leave the area, but I know that we are strong. We will do our best not to give him such pleasure.

News reports from last night were devastating: 15 soldiers killed and 38 wounded during battles in South Lebanon. Among them the brother of an Ethiopian Social Worker that works at Or Hadash, our friend, Workit. She comes once a week to work in the Northern branch of IRAC (the Israeli Religious Action Center). They have been giving legal services for new immigrants at Or Hadash since 2003. It was the worst day in terms of casualties since the beginning of the war.

Today is the 30th day of the war. We live with a feeling of tension in the air, a strange silence and going down to the shelter every hour or so. By now we already went down to the shelter 5 times. The only good thing is that there is plenty of parking space everywhere in the city and no traffic at all.

A week ago, when we reopened our preschools, we decided that our renovated shelter would be a good place for children to sleep in. Reality is not like theory. It is difficult for the 2nd graders to carry on with their games, while the toddlers (2-3 year olds) are sleeping right next to them and they have to be quiet. Sometimes when the sirens begin, there are over 100 people in the shelter (mostly children and staff members). So even though our shelter is completely renovated and it is large, sometimes it gets crowded. It is hard to go down the stairs so many times a day to the shelter. The staff has to be extremely skilled to work so many days (and 10 hours each day) in the shelter. The truth is that our committed staff members are also very stressed. I told them that stressed is desserts spelled backwards but their smile lasted for only a few minutes.

We were thrilled that Ami and Anat Perelman came back from the US. We really missed them both, especially during these times. It is hard for them to come back to the “katyusha routine”. They came back with generous contributions from many of our friends and we are all deeply thankful for your support. We were all relieved that now we will be able to pay staff salaries at the end of this month, because we were doubtful whether we would be able to do so.

This morning 3 families were supposed to come to Or Hadash for a Bar Mitzvah rehearsal. One of the families canceled and the other two were not able to come because of the sirens. If they don’t come today, we will hopefully have the ceremony without any rehearsal.

This Shabbat will be our 5th consecutive Shabbat under katyusha and missile attacks and in war. Who would have believed a month ago that this madness would last this long? It is hard to believe that we are beginning the second month of this chaos. Many people planned their weddings in September and they never believed that they might have to cancel them, but it seems they will have no other choice.

The “Ha’aretz” newspaper mentioned that some Hizballa soldiers are citizens of Iran who were sent with sophisticated weapons from Iran, Syria and Russia to try to get a good ceasefire agreement from the Arab standpoint and interests.

Tomorrow is my son Ariel’s birthday. He will be 9 years old. We decided to celebrate his birthday in the shelter. Ariel is disappointed because most of his friends are out of town and this is the first time he will celebrate his birthday only with his family and with no friends.

Yesterday, we had a brief and pleasant distraction from the situation, watching a soccer game between Maccabi Haifa and Liverpool United (UK). But even this kind of distraction didn’t end as we hoped it would, as Maccabi Haifa lost. We can only wish that these will be our main problems.

We just heard on the news that the Heathrow Airport was closed too because of an attempted terror attack. The world is not the same as it was when I was growing up, it is much more dangerous and complicated and still we have hope and faith giving us strength.

Thank you for your emails and your support.

Attached are drawings our children made around the common theme of Israel winning the war over the Hizballa.

Am Israel Hai! Hazak Hazak Venithazek!

Shabbat Shalom,