Living with Rockets: Rockets for Rosh Hashana

It's true there were no physical casualties from last night's rocket fire - but that doesn't explain what happened here in Sderot last night.

My family lives in Silver Spring, Maryland - thousands of miles away from where I live and work. I spent the family-oriented holiday Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, with amazing families in Sderot, Israel where I work and live.

After a long day of eating, drinking, and celebrating I arrived home to take a relaxing shower and go to bed. As I got out of the shower the night silence was lit up, my heart began to race and my legs quivered. The echoing Tzeva Adom (Color Red) reverberated in my first-floor apartment in Sderot as I huddled in its most sheltered area - the corner of the kitchen next to the refrigerator.

Then, suddenly, the deafening silence following the alarm was broken by a not-so-distant explosion. I work for the Sderot Media Center , and two Kassam rockets had just clocked me in at just before 1 a.m. - I was out the door, running down the street to get my camera.

Why has the world bought into this misconception that the rockets have stopped as more than 250 have struck Israel in the past eight months?

Last night, the two rockets with doubled explosive warheads that the recently-debuted al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist group Ansar al-Suna fired at civilians were out of the news in minutes as usual, as thankfully there were no casualties.

Why is it such a struggle to make people listen to what is happening here in southern Israel? If President Obama gives his wife a "fist-bump", the whole world knows about it and is giving "fist-bumps," yet no news coverage is given to thousands of people running from rockets in the Holy Land over Rosh Hashana.

Today, the "day after," as I was eating lunch with a friend from work I asked him if he was asleep when the alarm went off, and he told me he was. Knowing that he's a bit lazy, I asked him if it got him out of bed.

"Of course," he said, "Because everyone was yelling and screaming throughout the whole house." This from someone whose family never even talks about the rocket fire existing.

After lunch I stopped in to wish some other friends a happy new year. Over a cold glass of grapefruit juice this mother was telling me how some of her kids had finally started sleeping on the second floor of their home. The family had been sleeping in the living room on the ground floor for years now because of the rockets. She said that since last night, they have been scurrying around the house like traumatized mice.

After a cold drink and catching up with some friends I arrived at another close friend's house for their holiday bbq. Among the festivities, I asked my friend how she was doing. The woman, who takes 6 pills a day to cope, told me she was feeling surprisingly OK.

She went on to tell me it only took her an hour to fall asleep after calling her pregnant daughter to check how she was doing following the alarm. She quietly explained how her 14-year-old son had jumped out of bed and had had trouble breathing.

Have incidents such as this become boring to the rest of the world to hear about?

As millions of parents around the world send their kids off to their first weeks of school this September, is it not striking that there is an entire generation of children in Sderot suffering from the reality of not knowing life without constant rocket fire?

This Rosh Hashanah, away from my family I started the new year crouching to protect myself from incoming rockets, while thousands of miles away my father was taking a walk to help his digestion and my mother was reading a book on the couch. People are physically detached from this reality of rocket fire, but ignorance is no excuse.

As we start the new year, the rockets are still falling here, so how long do the people of Sderot have to wait until the world listens?