- Israel

Eight Year Old Haifa Girl Cares for Her Family in War and Peace

"Hello sir. I'm calling for my family. We're scared and want to go somewhere without missiles."

"Who's calling?" asks Roni.

"My name is Tamar B., and I'm eight-and-a-half-years-old. My mother is hearing impaired, so she asked me to call," Tamar explained. "I'm also calling for my grandmother…and great-uncle…and great-aunt…and great-grandmother…and my brother."

The innocent sounding voice caused tears to well up in Roni’s eyes. As a coordinator for MAGEN — a crisis response program run by JDC in partnership with Mateh Maavak HaNechim: The National Organization of Disabled People in Israel., the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Commission for Equal Rights for People with Disabilities and local municipalities - Roni's phone had been ringing off the hook, as individuals with disabilities in northern Israel called for clarification about the situation and help to travel to safety. Yet this call stood out from the others.

Roni, who has disabilities himself, could sympathize with Tamar and her family. He understood that in families with disabled parents, the children often end up taking on added responsibilities — in effect, becoming parents themselves. When a crisis hits, the child's burden intensifies.

Helping her family escape a war zone was definitely not how Tamar planned on spending her summer vacation. For weeks, Tamar had been looking forward to spending time with her friends and attending a local summer camp. Then the Ketusha rockets began to fall. A couple of weeks into Tamar’s summer vacation, the first rocket landed in Haifa, where the young girl lives with her mother, Sara, and her 10 year-old brother, Ofir (her father passed away four years ago).

In an ironic twist of fate, Tamar’s mother's family moved to Haifa from the northern town of Kiryat Shmona twenty years ago in order to escape the frequent Ketusha barrages that assailed the city in the 1980s. When the rockets began falling in Haifa, the family was sent reeling, doubly traumatized, as the attacks brought back memories of Kiryat Shmona and the fear they had hoped to escape by moving to Haifa.

As if this was not enough, the fear was made even more acute for Tamar’s family, the majority of whom are hearing impaired: her mother, her grandparents, and her great-aunt and uncle. Tamar’s great-grandmother, who also lives near by, has her hearing but faces other health problems that additional challenges during these times.

Security crises are especially hard on the hearing impaired. While Tamar’s mother and grandmother have limited hearing and are sometimes able to hear the alert sirens, Tamar's grandfather is completely deaf and thus unaware when the sirens blare. Although all the family own beepers which alert them to rocket attacks, with sirens going off every ten minutes, the family lives in constant fear that they will miss an alert and thus rarely venture out of their protected room, let alone out of their apartment.

It was this situation that forced Tamar to take a leading role in helping her family.

When the rocket attacks first began, Tamar, Sara and Ofir went to Ashkelon to stay with family friends. When Ashkelon was attacked by Kassam rockets from Gaza, Tamar and her family once again had to flee for safety, moving to Tel Aviv where the rest of the family was staying with an elderly relative. Their relative's health was poor and her house small, however, so the family soon had to return to Haifa.

Back in Haifa, Tamar’s grandmother and great-aunt suffered frequent panic attacks and fainting spells and the entire family lived in constant fear. Only the great-grandmother's building had a bomb shelter, a crowded room in the basement which was too small to house all of the building's residents. In any case, at the age of 71 her great-grandmother could not make it down the stairs in the short space of time between the siren and the rocket landings.

The attacks placed a strain on the entire family, throwing their lives into disarray and placing them in a state of dependency. Although Sara lip reads and is normally quite self-sufficient, taking courses at Haifa University and serving as a sign-language translator, the current crisis has left her dependent on Tamar, who serves as her link to the outside world. "She's like a little mother in our house," Sara says. Because of her poor hearing, Sara is unable to hold telephone conversations, and thus Tamar was placed in charge of getting the family safely out of Haifa.

When Sara saw a television advertisement for MAGEN, she wrote down the number and gave it to Tamar, who made the necessary call.

Tamar, who is unusually bright and articulate for a child her age, explained to the MAGEN coordinator that her multi-generational family was hearing impaired and desperate to get out of Haifa. "I told the coordinator that I wanted to help my family because they were really scared. I said my grandmother's scared, my great-grandmother's scared, she can't get to her bomb shelter," Tamar explains.

Together, Tamar and the coordinator arranged for a van to take the family to Jerusalem for a temporary respite. Tamar spoke with MAGEN on Sunday evening, and on Monday, the family piled into a MAGEN van, all except her grandfather who stayed behind, as he'd recently underwent surgery and was not allowed to travel. He claimed that he was doing fine in Haifa, though in the days since his wife and family arrived in Jerusalem, a rocket landed on his street, and he has begun to feel apprehensive himself.

Tamar’s grandmother and great-aunt are still panicky and sleep next to their cell phones, awaiting news of the family members they left behind. They greet visitors with desperate eyes, "Where will they send us after this? We can't go back to Haifa, we can't."

July 2006