I live in Rehovot, a quiet college town in central Israel. For the past several months, the soundtrack outside my apartment has been jackhammers, concrete mixers and the voices of workmen perched on scaffolding.

The building across the street is adding mamadim—reinforced safe rooms—to apartments that were built decades before anyone imagined they would become necessities. Soon, every family there will be able to reach shelter without racing down three flights of stairs to a communal bunker in the middle of the night.

From the street, it looks like an ordinary construction project. It isn’t.

A mamad is engineered as part of the building itself. Thick reinforced-concrete walls surround heavy steel reinforcement. Blast-resistant steel doors and protected windows are designed to withstand forces that no ordinary room could survive. It is not an addition intended to make a home more comfortable. It is built to keep a family........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)