Happy Birthday Hope… For Sderot

Six years ago this month Hope For Sderot signed its first the contract to rent its storefront. We were making plans for our first public appearance, our first Hanukah party and at the same time the IDF was also making plans to enter the Gaza strip to see if they could put an end to the daily barrage of Kassams rockets being fired at Sderot.

“Cast Lead”, as the IDF would call the operation would begin ten days after our Hanukah party and indeed it did slow down the amount of Kassams fired at us, but it would not totally stop them.

Nor did “Cast Lead”  stop or slow down the people who moved out from Sderot, taking with the manufacturing jobs and employment opportunities for the residents of Sderot; nor did it help recover the industry that moved out from Sderot.

We started helping 50 families with food and by the time we had our third Hanukah party we would be helping 250 families and by the time the IDF had to go back into Gaza on 14th November 2012 we would have 450 families on our list that we help.

This has been the quietest year in quite awhile, with “only” 79 rockets and missiles fired at southern Israeli communities, of those maybe four or five of them were aimed at Sderot. This is the fourth cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the past seven years, the first having been on November 26, 2006.

Sderot has turned into “The bomb shelter capital of the world”. 500 million shekels later, Sderot has seen some 6,000 new bomb shelters,  to protect us, who live within 4.5 kilometer radius of Gaza, that includes fortification of  public buildings and new fortified schools.

Yet with the calm and the new bomb shelters for each home, jobs have never returned, the constant threat is still ever present and our list of people still needing help is growing and we still need your help feeding the people on our list.

We have enough food to take us through December but we will not order food for January until we have the funds to do so. It cost $7000 a month to feed our 450 families, that giving out 18 items to each familey. We could us your help.  If you can’t help financially maybe you could forward this on to some of your friends or to a group you belong to.

Thank you for your support over the past 6 years and we look forward with great anticipation to see what next will bring.

It is through your generosity that we are able to help the people here in Sderot… THANK YOU. If you would like to become part of this work you can click here, again THANK YOU!