The Justice

Media Credit: Adina Paretzky Sarah Palmer '10 paints the wall of a bomb shelter in Israel. Palmer went to Israel with Brandeis Hillel.

As Sarah Palmer '10 walks down the cold, dark corridor, musty air fills her nostrils. She opens her eyes to the cheerless, hollow common room of an Israeli bomb shelter.

The space is dreary and almost completely covered with reinforced cement and plaster, yet it was the only civilian defense against the hailstorm of rockets that rained down on Israel in summer 2006. Although the shelter offered a refuge from the war zone outside, it was truly a prison to the unlucky residents who were once forced to inhabit it. On arrival, Palmer is immediately seized by the misery and despondence she imagines the Israeli civilians felt as they laid holed up in this dreary underground room.

Over winter break, Palmer and 19 other female Brandeis students traveled to Israel for two weeks. They hoped to improve the quality of life for the Israeli citizens of Nahariya, Palmer wrote in an e-mail to the Justice, a city in northern Israel that Hezbollah had continuously bombarded with rockets in the Second Lebanon War in 2006.

The program was organized by the Brandeis Hillel and The Joint Distribution Committee, a charitable organization aimed at providing relief for Jewish communities worldwide.

Program participants undertook many charitable projects around the Nahariya community, Palmer said. Projects included painting cartoons of trees and animals on the bomb shelter walls to cheer up the inhabitants; painting houses for people who didn't have the resources to do so; planting a garden outside the city's community center; and working with the elderly, new immigrants, children and women who were victims of abuse.

"While painting in the bomb shelters, I would try to imagine residents of Nahariya, Israelis, whom I feel are my family, stuck in the bomb shelters during the sweltering summer for thirty days at a time," Palmer wrote.

The students met with a representative of the mayor of Nahariya who described the city's demographics and the devastating effect that Hezbollah's rocket fire had on the city and citizens.

Continued...

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