by Mayer Fertig

What do Sderot and Nassau County have in common? The correct answer is not rockets, thankfully - despite Long Island’s past as a center of the aerospace industry - but that each is home to a large yeshiva founded by a member of the same West Hempstead family.

In 1953, Rabbi Meyer Fendel founded the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County. Nearly 40 years later a son, Dovid, founded a yeshivat hesder in Sderot that he describes as the second largest in Israel.

In 1993, Rabbi Dovid Fendel, 46, left a secure position at Yeshivat Sha’alvim, where he had studied for 17 years, and moved his family to Sderot, a gritty development town of 22, 000 on the Gaza border. “We went there for ideological reason,” he said. “With a real goal of bringing Torah education and Torah Zionism to the town.”

His success may be one of Israel’s best kept secrets.

A year after he moved in, Rabbi Fendel founded the Max and Ruth Schwartz Hesder Yeshiva of Sderot, backed by a HANC family from Great Neck.

“I tried to take that Long Island spirit, of activism, to be open-minded to working with an

entire community, to be inclusive of all segments of the Jewish community,” he said. The yeshiva is home to 500 Israeli students and their teachers.

Younger children of faculty members are “mainstreamed,” Rabbi Fendel said, in a day school-like setting, with students from families that do not necessarily maintain similar levels of observance, though he add that children from non-religious ... Do not attend that school.

“There’s no end to the amount of good work that can be done because it’s not a one-man show” said Rabbi Fendel.

Students of the yeshiva engage in community outreach and kiruv on a large scale, going into schools, shuls and homes.

“My parents live in Har Nof and it used to be that Purim in Har Nof was the greatest thing in the world and Purim in Sderot was dead. Now, it’s a fair competition,” he said, a result of yeshiva students going from shul to shul in town, “Changing the atmosphere.”

“This isn’t just a yeshiva,” Rabbi Fendel said. “This is a community-oriented center of Zionism and activity and learning and teaching.”

More than 2,000 Kassam rockets fired from Gaza have struck Sderot in the nearly 27 months since Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. While the rockets are often described as “homemade” or “crude”, they’ve done a lot of damage ans shattered the nerves of many residents, leading large numbers of people to move away.

“The Palestinians want to see Sderot a ghost town,” Fendel said. “We’re trying to make it a dynamic place. In the last weeks I was the m’sader kiddushin [officiating rabbi] at three weddings. Two of the couples are moving into Sderot. They’re trying to destroy, we’re very involved in building.

Rabbi Fendel is putting his own money where his mouth is. Renters for the past 13 years, the family is now building a new home.

By and large, according to Rabbi Fendel, the yeshiva community is staying put and actually growing. To accommodate natural growth, the yeshiva is “putting up five apartment buildings” with government assistance, he said. The goal for the new buildings, which are hardened to repel rocket attack, “is to give protection in the center of town when these guys come back from army service, and so parents can sleep in safety.”

Several weeks ago, he said, when a rocket struck right near the yeshiva, a young mother found herself surrounded by fire. Se said Shema and believed she was about to dies, Rabbi Fendel said, before she finally was rescued.

After the flames were put out it was discovered that a bumper sticker on the back of her care that had read ‘G-d will protect,’ had been incinerated, along with the rest of the vehicle - except for the Hebrew letters which form an acronym for HaKodosh Baruch Hu [the Holy One, blessed be He].

The yeshiva sits on the Gaza border, described Rabbi Kenneth Hain of Congregation Beth Shalom in Lawrence. “If you stand in [Rabbi Fendel’s] beit Midrash [study hall] and look outside,” he said, “you are looking into the windows of houses in Gaza.” Rabbi Hain and his wife, Nancy, dedicated a dorm at the yeshiva ten years ago. It has since been torn down and is to be replaced with a building better able to withstand rocket attacks.

To Rabbi Fendel, the error in withdrawing from Gaza “wasn’t a political question, it was a matter of common sense. That’s one message we could send back - through living experience - that it was a mistake.”

“Every child in Sderot,” he said, “knows the consequences of a unilateral withdrawal.