HADERA, ISRAEL - An elderly woman sits outside her home off Hanassi Street in downtown Hadera, crippled both by the shrapnel that shredded her legs and by her broken spirit after a car bomb destroyed her store in November 2000.

Two blocks away on Hanassi, the main street of this working-class town, a young man waits for customers from behind his desk at Armon David, the banquet hall where six people were killed by a Palestinian gunman during a bat mitzvah on Jan. 17. The business is stuck, he says, with hardly any bookings and so much debt it would take 10 to 15 years to pay it off.

Farther down the street, 16-year-old Ronit Lankary eats pizza with her girlfriend and two boys they met at a mall a few blocks away. "Of course we're afraid," Ronit says about what everyone in Israel refers to as "the situation." Across the street stands a memorial that lists one of her relatives who died in a shooting on that block.

Hadera has been the site of five terrorist attacks since the beginning of the second intifadah, or Palestinian uprising, in September 2000. With 18 terrorism-related deaths and 253 injuries, it's hard to find anyone in Hadera who has not been affected directly or indirectly by terrorism.

After several years of exploratory talks, the Raleigh-Cary Jewish Federation adopted Hadera as a sister city this year. But now any talk of exchanges, travel or direct support between the two communities has been halted while people on both ends shift their attention to assisting victims of violence.

The federation raised $150,000 as part of a fund-raising drive launched after the Passover bombing in Netanya that killed 29 people, most of them elderly. With the sister-city relationship with Hadera on hold, the money raised in the Triangle is being added to simultaneous efforts by national groups such as the United Jewish Communities.

The money will be sent to the Jewish Agency, a worldwide organization whose main goal is the absorption of Jewish immigrants to Israel. The agency will funnel the money to Israeli social service agencies that provide physical therapy, counseling and economic and social support to civilians affected by the attacks.

Judah Segal, executive director of the federation, said the Triangle Jewish community decided to raise money for victims after the Netanya bombing and then found that a national effort was under way under the auspices of United Jewish Communities.

Segal, who has traveled at least three times to Hadera to help seal the sister-city program, usually wears a watch that shows the time in Raleigh and the time in Israel, which is seven hours ahead. The money raised in North Carolina helps Israelis directly, but in another way too, he said.

"They realize there are people around the world that care about them," he said.

Arik Shorer, director of the city's department of social welfare, has been at the forefront of providing assistance to Hadera's immigrants and to its victims of terror. In five years, the department's caseload has nearly doubled while the city's population has grown by about 14 percent.

"In every war, all Israel is one long border," Shorer said.

"We can't cope. We're not receiving more social workers, and we're swamped."

Hadera was founded by immigrants from Poland and Lithuania in the late 1800s on swampy land bought from Arab landowners. Located now amid orange groves and aquaculture ponds, it sits midway between the industrial port of Haifa and the commercial center of Tel Aviv. It has roughly the population of Wilmington, with 80,000 residents. About 30,000 of them arrived in the past 10 years as Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia and from the Caucasus. It is a gritty city where Jews range from blond and fair to black.

Hanassi Street is adorned with a grass median, patches of red, white and pink flowers and palm trees. It is lined with many small stores, sidewalk cafes and blocklike concrete apartment buildings reminiscent of Soviet architecture.

Tsafrira Levit, 70, on Tuesday described the attack that ruined her cosmetics store 18 months ago: "Very simply, [my daughter] and I were in the store. All of a sudden something fell on us. Then I was laying [on the floor] and my leg was shredded." Levit's daughter suffered a head injury.

It was the first car bomb of the intifadah. Responsibility for the attack was claimed by Hamas, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Two people died and 54 were wounded, including Levit. For her, the injuries were more than physical.

"Let me explain: When a driver gets in his car, he knows he might be in an accident. A soldier goes to war, he knows he can die," she said. "I was just talking to her."

Levit talks about how active she used to be, unloading trucks for her store, managing three other rentals that she still owns and always walking up and down the block to visit friends. Now she can't get around without a walker and without pain. Her lower leg is still wrapped in a compression bandage, and she has not been able to reopen her store. The government paid for repairs, but after 18 months, one of the four storefronts she owns on what was the busiest block in Hadera still stands empty.

Levit undergoes government-paid physical therapy once a week and started seeing a psychologist last week. Otherwise her days are empty. "I'm really not doing anything, and that's the problem," she said.

"I have problems," she said over and over. "Everybody is struggling, but each person in a private way suffers more."

She thinks the country has been weakened by the attacks, which had become nearly everyday occurrences until the Israeli onslaught to stamp out terrorism began March 28. There have been a few attacks since, with the worst occurring Tuesday night in Rishon Letzion.

Sid Pinkas, director of emergency and volunteer services for the Department of Social Welfare, said mental health workers all over the country experienced a spike in the number of calls with the beginning of the intifadah. But as the situation continued, the demand went down, Pinkas said, because "not everyone can maintain that level of tension for so long."

"The fear has become the routine," Pinkas said, repeating an often-heard saying in Israel.

Two blocks away from where Levit sat in her debris-strewn yard, Yossi Albaz, 24, spent the day staring out the glass enclosure around his office and into his empty banquet hall.

He still has nightmares about the day a Palestinian dressed like an Israeli soldier walked into Armon David and opened fire. Albaz's brother-in-law, Avi Yazdi, 24, and Albaz's sister, Yasmin, 22, were working security at the door. Avi Yazdi was the first to be shot in the attack. Yasmin, a kindergarten teacher who now lives with her parents and Albaz, retells the incident and cries almost every night, he said. She and Avi were married in the same hall four months before the attack.

Albaz's father, a retired factory worker, helped him open the hall after Albaz finished his compulsory military service. They renovated it, adding stone decorations and dramatic torch lights on the wall, and for a while, the hall was booked solid for bar mitzvahs, weddings and circumcision rituals.

"We worked a lot. We worked to succeed, and the terrorist ruined everything," Albaz said. "He stopped us in the middle."

After the attack, events were canceled and business dropped to 10 percent of what it was. Now, when events are booked, Albaz pays two armed guards, but he hasn't repaid most of his suppliers and is about $200,000 in debt.

"If the work doesn't return, we'll have to start not from zero but from minus, until I pay back all my debt," he said. "Then 10 or 15 years from now, I'll be able to start again from zero, like a baby."

The only thing Albaz could think of that might make a difference was the security situation, but he had no suggestions for how to solve it. "If they want to stay where they're living, fine; nobody wants them," he said of Palestinians and their quest for statehood. "If they want part of our country, that'll never happen."

Back on the street, four teenagers sat in front of a pizzeria called Casa del Pepe, flirting and sharing a pizza. Still visible in the asphalt behind them was the indentation from the 2000 car bomb that wounded Tsafrira Levit. The explosion was so strong that a bus was thrown about 100 feet into another pizzeria.

When the attacks were at their height, Ronit Lankary stopped traveling to Hadera from the small town where she lives, and her parents still don't let her hang out on Hadera's streets. On Tuesday, she told them she was taking the bus to visit her girlfriend, Maria Sopoznikov.

Like many Israelis, Ronit rides the bus to school and nearly everywhere else she goes. Israel has an efficient public transportation system, which has been a frequent target of terrorist bombings. The buses often stop to let police get on and check bags and papers, a constant reminder that danger is always close.

"Our whole country is cops and guards," she said. "It's become routine now."