Ashkelon, the Baltimore Jewish community’s sister city in Israel, sits just 8 miles north of the Gaza Strip, and the relentless rocket attacks of Hamas’ latest and deadliest terror campaign are far from the first to hit the coastal community.

Two years ago, a rocket landed in Sigal Ariely’s living room and destroyed her home while she took cover in a bomb shelter.

“It seemed like Hamas put Ashkelon as a target, trying to wipe us from the world,” Ariely wrote on Facebook in May 2021, a statement that no rational person would contest, especially now, given the homicidal attacks carried out by Hamas over the weekend.

Ariely has lived in Ashkelon for more than 30 years, and for more than half of that time she’s been director of a project to connect Israelis with Jewish people in the Baltimore area. It’s the Baltimore-Ashkelon Partnership, established in 2003 by The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore.

“Hundreds, if not thousands of Baltimoreans have been over to Ashkelon,” says Marc Terrill, president of The Associated. “We’ve even had marriages come out of this partnership.” The idea is to help children, particularly, get to know Israel and Israelis firsthand and, Terrill says, provide American Jews with “an emotional, spiritual and intellectual connection to the land.”

Many of the Baltimoreans who traveled to Ashkelon, a city of about 150,000 in southern Israel, are familiar with Sigal Ariely.

And many contributed to the rebuilding of her house, a project that took a year and a half.

Her house now has a safe room, a shelter, as do many new residences in Israel.

Since Saturday, Ariely and her daughter have spent many hours in their safe space as Hamas rocket attacks continued. Several Ashkelon homes have been hit by rockets, destroyed or damaged since the assaults on Israel started.

On Wednesday, Ariely took part in a virtual meeting with officials of The Associated and described her life since the weekend.

“What started Saturday is something of a magnitude, we can’t even express it,” she said. “Rockets, we are used to that. We have gone through many [attacks]. Violence, we are used to that. But this time it’s very different because the horrors that we discover every hour — what’s happened to friends and families on the Gaza border — added to the feeling of fear that everybody has.

“We all know people who were [living in a kibbutz], who were kidnapped to Gaza, who were killed, wounded or luckily were saved. It touches everyone.”

While Ariely has a safe room, she said, about 40,000 residents of Ashkelon do not live in a home with one. “So if there’s a siren they need to run and find a safe place in 30 seconds,” she said. “Most of these people are staying in public shelters and don’t leave them. They literally live there.”

That is bound to continue as Israel conducts its ground war against Hamas, with a vow to destroy it. News organizations have reported rocket attacks on Ashkelon each day this week, and on Tuesday Hamas issued a specific threat to fire on the city in response to Israel’s retaliatory assaults on Gaza.

In Baltimore, The Associated has established an emergency fund drive to support Israel. Terrill says the organization already has purchased mattresses for bomb shelters, bulletproof vests for volunteers and generators to provide electricity during power outages.

“What we do with the amazing support of Baltimore and [The Associated] is, these people in the shelters get food, they get toys and games,” Ariely said. “The people who are on the volunteer security teams, the ones called to every scene where a rocket hits, they get vests and helmets.

“We have so many people in Baltimore reaching out to people in Ashkelon. … We get strength from hearing that we are not alone. And I have to tell you, to be alone facing something like that, a war on this scale, is something that nobody can do.”

On Tuesday, Ariely said, a news report on Israeli television claimed four Hamas fighters managed to fly into an industrial area of Ashkelon by drone. The same day, the Israel Defense Forces said its soldiers had killed three terrorists during a gunbattle in the Ashkelon Industrial Area.

“My daughter heard gunshots,” she said, “and we saw on the television police and army chasing the four terrorists. When they were killed and that terror ended, we heard about a scuba diver trying to come from Gaza — I guess on a boat and then swimming — [and he] was killed.”

The IDF confirmed the diver’s killing in media reports on Wednesday, and Israeli forces bombed locations in Gaza from where Hamas was believed to have launched attacks by sea.

“So you have to understand the level of stress and fear in Ashkelon,” Ariely said. “I can’t even describe it.”

Toward the end of the Zoom conference, Yehuda Neuberger, chair of the board of The Associated, thanked Ariely for her report and her service to the Baltimore-Ashkelon partnership.

Seconds later, as Neuberger started to introduce the next guest, Ariely spoke up again.

“Sorry,” she said, “there’s a siren. I need to go, bye.”