1. Help create awareness – Send us the details of your Synagogue, School, Hillel Campus, Organization so we can contact them about organizing one of these solidarity events for your community or organization http://12tribefilms.org/SderotPrograms/
2. Help the people in and around Sderot – We will then send them information on ways the community/school/Hillel/Organization can help –
Constructinga community ,a public building, a homeall demand defining goals, identifying a location ,planning , permits, financial backing ,building, then planningand filling the structureswith functional and aesthetic furnishings.
Netzer Hazani Video Clip
Most important and most difficult is filling it with people, content, meaning, then evaluating its success in meeting the original goals.
It is a big team effort that can take years.Destroying it all takes only minutes.
I lived in Netzer Hazani for thirty years –we built this town on bare sand dunes that were not inhabited since Abraham and Isaac, our forefathers, who lived there.
We built from scratch. We built synagogues, mikvahs, schools, community centers, youth centers, homes, businesses, playgrounds sports fields and swimming pools, agro -businesses, community based businesses, light industry.
Most important and challenging, we succeeded in filling them all with meaningful contents.
These communities became known as Gush Katif.
When it was decided by the Knesset of Israel that bulldozers would destroy it all, piles of rubble remained of the flourishing community.
Soon the shifting winds of the renewed desert-like area again covered the rubble with sand. This once blossoming oasis is again empty sand dunes as they were after our patriarchs moved.
We were careful to take out with us the Torah scrolls and the pictures and writings of our Rabbi, the renowned scholar Rabbi Yitzhak Arama, murdered by Arab terrorists two years prior.
Our youth carried out the heavy Torah scrolls that sat safely in the sanctuary read and reread year after year, generation after generation.
Many of the scrolls were covered by the traditional Sephardic wood and metal coverings , our youth hugging them with great love, aware that this was what they stillhadleft of the town where they were born, grew up ,loved and had hoped to live.
The traditions, the spirit, the learning, the vision that are the contents of those beloved Torah scrolls hugged and protected our families as they left Gush Katif . We struggled to look forward, yet we could not easily forget the pain of destruction.
The families wondered from tents to hotel rooms to interim caravan type living quarters, struggling for survival as humans, as families as communities, as Jews at home in the State if Israel, as soldiers in our Israel Defense Force.
All this interim period, we were, as well, dealing with the drawn out bureaucratic procedure and negotiations to try and receive appropriate compensation for our businesses and homes. This has been a very very trying and frustrating challenge and in most cases is not yet near completion as appeals are yet in procedure.
The communities were spread out in every direction.
However each community made super human efforts to keep together.Our community leadership wisely utilized those eternal values and spirit carried out of Gush Katif to give strength to the community. The community in turn gave strength to the families and the families to their members.
With the eternal Torah values and spirit keeping the community together we hoped and expected to build anew as a community as defined by the Disengagement –Compensation Law.
Two and a half years later, having easily defined our goals we suddenly discovered how much more difficult was to be identifying locations, planning, applying for approvals, etc.
However, my community has accomplished this in cooperation with the Government Ministries.We now seek to define our financial backing which, not by chance, connects with our long-term goals.
For my town, Netzer Hazani, the first town built in Gush Katif in 1976, we will be receiving a government budget for building anew and we will invest all our compensations and additional loans we will have to take, in building anew.Yet still we can’t begin construction in lieu of destruction as we had so hoped!
According to the latest adjusted government figures required for payment prior to signing contract there are still some gaps in the financing.Our experiences have taught us to seek the solution in the challenge.
Our big challenge today in building a new town in Israel is how to connect to Am Yisrael, the People of Israel.
There was a terrible lack of dialogue, a lack of identification, a lack of brotherhood between Jews of different thinking and background during and after the disengagement-expulsion from Gush Katif, Gaza.
The position of Jewry around the world, the position of Jewry in Israel all point to a screaming need for dialogue and rallying around the eternal Jewish values of those Torah scrolls that our youth hugged, as carrying them out of the ruins of our communities.
Our beloved Jerusalem, more than ever, prays to us for unity around these values and spirit. I feel this intensely each time I pray at the Kotel, in Jerusalem, each time I word Jerusalem in my prayers. I am certain you feel this with me.
In building these communities anew, those that rally with us around these values will surely choose to enable construction in lieu of destruction, filling the structures with the meaningful content of these values and this spirit of the People of the Torah through the generations.
We yearn that Am Yisrael will connect and partner with us in our efforts to build anew.
Anita Tucker Netzer Hazani (May it be rebuilt), temporarily in Ein Tzurim 972-547775268
tucker.anita@gmail.com
(My grandchildren, who were born in Netzer Hazani, carried a sign as they left home that read “The Tucker family, Thirty years, three generations, this music will continue.”)
The daily reality of qassam rockets falling on Sderot and the Northern Negev continues without any hope for change. It is hard to imagine the reality of living in fear of rockets falling around you. This is the day to day reality that Israelis living in and around Sderot live with.Unfortunately, there is little awareness to the daily plight of our brothers and sisters in and around Sderot amongst world Jewry.
12Tribe Films Foundation is now promoting different cultural programs for synagogues, schools, organizations etc. to schedule so that Jews worldwide can connect with our brothers and sisters living in and around Sderot by better understanding their plight.Movies, Plays, Picture Exhibits and Speaking Engagements – each organization can decide what program or programs they are most interested in to create awareness and raise money to help the people of Sderot.
Anyone interested in finding out more information about any of the programs can contact avi@12tribefilms.org
12Tribe Films Foundation is working together with the Sderot Media Center so that the proceeds from the Sderot programs go towards refurbishing the emergency shelters in and around Sderot. (unknown by many, the shelters in and around Sderot need millions of dollars of refurbishments to make them usable)
Even With the Unfortunate Situation in the South We Can’t Forget the Current Plight of former Gush Katif Residents
Everyone is talking about Annapolis? A success? A failure? The beginning of a process? The continuation of a process?
What bothers me is once again Israel’s leaders are moving forward towards “peace” with its enemies, without first taking care of all the problems that past “peace-making” initiatives have caused.
10,000 former residents from Gush Katif and the Northern Shomron are still homeless, tens of thousands of residents of Sderot and the Northern Negev are under constant rocket fire and Israel’s leaders are moving ahead to create this same scenario again for hundreds of thousands of other Israelis.
Many Jews and Israelis still don’t understand what befell the former residents of Gush Katif or Northern Shomron and what they are experiencing today. Many Jews and Israelis still don’t fathom the situation that people in Sderot and the Northern Negev are living through on a daily basis.
Our purpose is to open up people’s eyes by exposing them to Home Game the movie and to movies and plays about Sderot, so that more and more people understand, more and more people empathize, and that more and more people tell our leadership to first take care of the casualties they created before moving on to most probably create even more. More critical than all of this is the great divide that the Israeli leadership is creating within the Jewish people. If it is so important to talk with the enemy isn’t even more important to talk to fellow brothers?
While the Jewish world continues on with the new year, around 10,000 once contributing citizens to Israeli society who lived in homes they bought and built, are still homeless. No, they are not out in the streets with no roof over their heads. No, these people are living in small cramped caravans in caravan sites built for them by the Israeli government as a 2 year temporary solution until their new homes and communities would be rebuilt.
Well, over 2 years have passed and only 7, yes 7, houses have begun to be rebuilt by the government in the first community to be rebuilt. Hundreds of homes have yet to be started. The saddest thing of all is that most communities to be rebuilt still do not have signed contracts with the government to rebuild the communities!
Here are 2 sample stories of the hardships the Netzer Hazani community is having in having a contract signed with the governement to rebuild their community.
Story #1: Farmers from the community of Netzer Hazani received compensation money for their farms. Now the government will be giving them new farmland near the area of Yesodot, where their new community is supposed to be built. But there is a hitch – In addition to giving over their farmland compensation money back to the government in exchange for the new land, the government of Israel is requesting them to pay an additional $1.2 million! The farmers of Netzer Hazani do not have such money and in refusing to pay this exorbitant sum, the contract with the government to rebuild their community can not be signed – so they still don’t know when work will begin to rebuild their new community.
Story #2: One area of land they are supposed to receive for their new community belongs to one government ministry, another area of land belongs to a second government ministry. The problem is that there is land between these two areas that no government ministry is responsible for. So, they were told that they (the community) are therefore responsible for paying for the infrastructure (ie – roads) to be built in this in-between area of land. These are just 2 stories, of the many, that typify the hardships Gush Katif communities are having with the Israeli government in trying to rebuild their homes.
All these people want is to rebuild their communities, their homes and become proud contributing citizens once again. That is all they want. They didn’t ask to move, they were forced to move. It is unfortunate that the authorities that removed them from their homes are not using the same determination and sensitivity to rebuild their homes.
12 Tribe Films Foundation Inspires 