“Courageous Citizens” was the theme of this year’s Israel Independence Day ceremony in Jerusalem. In that spirit all the individuals honored to light the thirteen torches symbolizing the thirteen Biblical tribes (Yosef being split into Menashe and Efraim), were from among the country’s outstanding heroes and heroines.
Hallel Bareli, an attractive seventeen-year-old girl from the city of Sderot, was the youngest torch lighter in the country. She is a student at the Shirat Ulpana High School for religious girls in the city. Hallel’s motto is: “You should try to do some good wherever you are in the world.”
“I am representing not myself, but all the youth of Sderot,” she said at the ceremony.
Hallel Bareli is one of ten siblings who have spent the majority of their lives in Sderot, which means that they have also known rocket fire for the majority of their lives.
The city of Sderot is located less than a mile from Gaza – its closest point is 840m – and has been an ongoing target of Qassam rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip since 2001!
“I love Sderot,” Hallel says with enthusiasm. “I am happy in this city. There are amazing people here. The residents are brave and strong and don’t give up and won’t let the terrorism take them away from here. Of course, I remember the previous wars. I was young, but you remember. You remember the fear. Every citizen in Sderot feels the same. You hear a door slam and you think it was a Qassam – it is a part of our instincts to run and look for shelter,” she explains.
Her love of Sderot has turned her into a notable social activist who aids the city’s population in times of quiet and in times of emergency. During the last Gaza war she ran shelters for the city’s children and engaged in volunteer work for the elderly.
Hallel Bareli single-handedly managed to unite the city’s youth and encourage them to help restore normal life to the residents each time the city was under fire from the Gaza Strip.
She created a volunteering timetable for each of the city’s neighborhoods and galvanized the youth movements – religious and secular alike – to be active in helping their beloved city that was under constant threat of attack.
In her daily routine, Hallel continues to inspire the youth in her city to keep up the good work with her various activities in youth movements, especially as counselor for the Ariel youth group and in the municipal youth council.
She also participated in a community volunteer project that provided a 24/7 telephone hotline and aid services to elderly and ran shelters for young children, organizing fun activities to provide a respite from the constant rocket fire.
“When I was young, the adults always tried to give us candy or chocolate when there was an alarm so that we wouldn’t feel scared,” she remembered. “So we tried a bit more. We played music, brought clowns and balloons. We wanted to give the kids and their parents a break from the Qassams and let them have some fun for a little while.”
If all this were not enough, she also visited injured soldiers in Soroka University Medical Center in Beersheba and remarked, “One story that always makes me emotional is when we went into the room of an injured soldier to tell him about Sderot and thank him for defending us. He looked at us for a while and then said that he had taken the grenade with ‘love for us.’ Can you imagine? You can’t forget that people have paid for this city with their blood, with their lives. Despite the Qassams, the city has only grown – there are no words to express the strength of this city,” she went on. “It is the city that deserves this credit.”
