Sderot, the Capital of Rockets and Rock

Daniel Friedman
Sderot Media Center
20 June '10

You know you’ve arrived in Sderot because you turn from the dusty highway onto a city street bordered by a thin roadside park with new decorations and beautifully manicured lawns. Three years ago this park was a dump, but donations from Jewish National Fund groups - like the one holding a ceremony in the park, under a tasteful canopy that protects participants from the blazing sun - have transformed the approach to the city. And, after mostly ignoring it for 50 years, everyone’s arriving in Sderot.

Sderot from Jewish Forward on Vimeo.

A few hundred yards from the ceremony, in the main police station, is a gruesome museum full of the twisted rocket parts that have landed in this impoverished and embattled town of nearly 20,000 over the past decade. The 10,000 rockets fired from nearby Gaza are the reason that Diaspora Jews and journalists are visiting in droves. Their concern goes beyond Sderot itself. The rockets’ steadily increasing ranges and explosive loads suggest a threat not just against Sderot but ultimately against the whole nation.

Still, Sderot is more than an iconic target. The city is also a hothouse incubator of Israeli rock music. A transit camp for Kurdish and Persian refugees in the early 1950s, Sderot (ironically, the name means “boulevards”) was established as a town late in the decade with the arrival of a large influx of Moroccan immigrants fleeing an independent and increasingly antisemitic Morocco. And thereafter it was forgotten - except as an exporter of musicians.

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