by Debra Rubin, Editor

If a Kassam rocket alert sounds while Gabi Baron is riding his bike around his kibbutz, he has his response all mapped out.

"If there's a house by me, even if it's a strange guy's house, I have to go in anyway," he says as though ticking off items on a shopping list. "If there is no house, but there is a tree, I have to stand by the tree If there's no tree, I have to lie down on my stomach and cover my head."

Gabi is 9 years old. He can't remember a time when he didn't hear the tzeva adom, color red, alerts of an incoming rocket.

The rockets, he says, make him afraid.

"Of course, everybody's afraid," he says, noting, though, that some kids claim that they're so strong, they could stop a Kassam with their bare hands.

"Those are the guys who are the most scared," Gabi says quietly.

Gabi lives on Kibbutz Nir Am in Israel's Sdot Negev region, an area that for the past seven years has been pounded by Kassams fired from launchers in the Gaza Strip. In the past two years, that bombardment has intensified, and it is rare that a day goes by without alerts sounding in the area, particularly in the city of Sderot, just outside of Gabi's Gaza-border kibbutz.

More than 6,000 Kassam rockets have fallen in the area during that time, 400 in Sderot this year alone; 11 people have been killed, and more than 4,000 wounded, according to Shimon Peretz, Sderot's general director and treasurer.

Sigal Yisrael, a teacher, says it's impossible to do anything without wondering when there might be a Kassam alert, giving her the standard 15 seconds to seek shelter. Her sense of humor comes through as she speaks if the alert comes when she's in the shower, "I cover myself with a towel and," she quips, "look down at my legs to see if they're shaved."

But humor can take her only so far. "I'm the guard at home. I don't sleep," she says.

Eleanor Saliman also lives on a kibbutz in the same region. She tells her children not to bring her grandchildren to visit. She fears for their safety en route. "It scares me to death," she says.

Not long ago, Saliman, 66, visited a clinic, telling the physician, "I'm shaking inside, and I don't know why."

He gave her a prescription for anxiety, telling her, she reports, "Do you have any idea how many people are taking medication today?"

Nissan Nir, 78, lives on Kibbutz Givim, in the same region. He describes what he calls the "indirect damages" from the rockets as 10 times worse than the direct damages.

"The fear that you suffer these seconds is unbelievable," he says, later lamenting, "I don't know if there is any government in the free world" that would allow its citizens to live under such conditions.

Aaron Polat is a social worker in Sderot. By now, he is well acquainted with the byproducts of the seige mentality: Family dysfunction, widespread feelings of anxiety and hopelessness and a burgeoning demand for psychiatric care.

As for himself, "I don't know what would happen if something happened to my house, my children," he says. "I don't know if I would stay."

Peretz, indeed, worries that people will abandon Sderot and its environs. Some 24,000 people live in the city, another 16,000 in the surrounding area.

But most residents, many of them immigrants, do not have the means to leave. And others simply want to stay, despite their anxiety.

This is their home.

Along with Israel's war-scarred North, the Sderot area, since November, is the intended recipient of monies generated by United Jewish Communities' Israel Emergency Campaign (see related article, page 21). The $360 million which include $14.2 million in pledges through the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington is underwriting a wide range of programs aimed at helping residents in both areas recover from the trauma of living in a shooting gallery.

They include Jonathan Angel, who was severely injured in a Kassam attack. A maintenance worker at Sapir College, he was hit in June 2006. The shrapnel punctured his lungs, intestine and part of his main artery. The latter "was the balagan," the mess, says Angel, who spent nearly two months in an induced coma "I had a good sleep," he quips and was hospitalized for more than five months.

A new abdominal wall had to be fashioned for him, and he must wear a girdle to keep his abdomen from dropping.

In his early 60s, he is on disability and receives additional assistance from IEC's Victims of Terror fund.

"The first question they asked me when I woke up was 'where do you want to live?' I want to live in Sderot," he says, despite also owning an apartment in Petah Tikvah outside of Tel Aviv.

Liron Konyo, 23, is a counselor at a camp that is run by the Jewish Agency for Israel just beyond the Kassam zone.

It's good for the kids, he says. "They can live normal lives. In Sderot, you cannot live a normal life."

An elementary school teacher in Sderot during the school year, he says he sees evidence of post-war trauma in his students. Some jump at loud noises. Others wet their beds at night.

"I try to show them that I am not afraid. I must be strong for them," he says.

But the missiles affect him, too. "I don't sleep well. Sometimes, I dream about Kassams."

Yet, asked if he wants to move, he replies: "Never."

"You can't leave, it's your house," he says.

Despite her anxiety, kibbutz-dweller Saliman feels the same way.

No, she says, she doesn't want to move. "This is our home."

Saliman and Nir are also beneficiaries of the emergency fund-raising campaign. They often find refuge in a senior day care center at Sapir College in Shaar Hanegev that receives IEC funding.

Gabi is enrolled in an afterschool IEC-funded enrichment program that he says is "making children feel more comfortable with each other and with the places where you are living."

His mother, Marcell, nevertheless describes life under Kassam attack as "horrific."

Parents are "stuck in a situation where they cannot protect their children," she says. "You never get used to it, you learn to live with it, you learn to compensate."

The family spent several months in Marcell Baron's native South Africa earlier this year. "It wasn't a trip," Gabi points out. "It was more running away."

But, the family came back.

"This is our home. This is where we live," says Marcell Baron. "We have every right to be where we are."

As an elementary school principal in Shaar Hanegev, Anat Regev says she feels a heavy sense of responsibility. "It's not normal to raise children this way," she says. "Parents feel as though they're sending their children to the front, and they're not soldiers."

Until parents went on a strike last year, the school had not been fortified. The strike worked, and the government reinforced the school. "Their strike saved the children," Regev says, noting the school has since been hit by Kassams.

Earlier in the day, as visitors leave the senior day care center in Shaar Hanegev, the tzeva adom alert sounds. Their Israeli hosts quickly usher them back into the center's reinforced safe room, fortified with IEC funding.

"I'm sorry you had to have this experience," Claudia Bar, the center's director, tells her guests. "But, it's lucky you had this experience. You experienced what has happened two or three times a day."

Within moments, the visitors once more leave the center and begin to board their bus.

The tzeva adom sounds again. With 15 seconds to find safety, the nearest shelter is a building's windowless hallway.

Debra Rubin visited Israel on a United Jewish Communities-sponsored media tour.