Brill's optical museum

What do Napoleon Bonaparte, Benjamin Franklin and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda have in common? Their glasses are part of a unique optical accessories collection held by the Israeli optician David Brill.

In Brill's collection, exhibited at his optic store in Givatayim, one can find a selection of rare eyeglass frames from the 15th century to the 20th century; a selection of old cameras including a Box system camera – among the first cameras ever produced; theatre binoculars of the Renaissance; an old Nelson telescope; and an old microscope from the beginning of the scientific microscopes era.

photos: Hans Engelsman

These rare items, picked by David Brill for decades in Israel and abroad, also include spectacles which were used by the father of modern Hebrew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, spectacles and telescopes which were used by Napoleon Bonaparte in the 18th century, and bifocal lenses which were produced by Benjamin Franklin.

The canary bird from Aspö

Last week a very dear friend of Israel passed away in Sweden.

Ralph Haglund, another friend of Israel in Sweden,

wrote a necrology for her, whose English translation is brought below

 

Karin Rebel, from Aspö in Blekinge, southeastern Sweden, her decease occurred very suddenly and unexpectedly on the 16th of July 2011, at an age approaching 80, and I experienced the chock wave from the news a few hours later.

I met Karin maybe a decade ago in Stockholm at a pro-Israeli meeting and we were soon in deep conversation, as we were both engaged in the discussions about promoting information about Israel. After that we only met once, on her little island in the archipelago, where I saw the small romantic yellow cottage situated as a perfect work place for an author.

We have brought upon us the duty to inform about Israel as this information is very limited in Swedish media except as reflections in joking mirrors. Known spokesmen for Israel have compared Israel's role as the canary bird for the West, with the canaries of mines, warning for poison gases. With today's attacks on the land and people of Israel for no discernible reasons, the canary of Israel gives very strong Danger signals. Karin has written and given information to high and low, the radio program Call P1 was more and more often contacting her in Israel-related questions. She was also monitoring the local media where some local anti-democracy spokesmen got free rein.

We discussed many of the hard facts and showed how the local media had no knowledge at all about international laws and negotiation results, or alternatively did not care.

Karin loved to make long distance exploratory travels, everything from art tours to museums in Mexico to safaris in Africa.  During her marriage she also lived an international life in a few different countries and got much linguistic knowledge and experience.

One of our latest subjects of discussion was her memories from her childhood on the island of Aspö, how people lived far from shops, on their own farming and fishing. I have often speculated over such things as my mother was also born in a small cottage far into the forest of central Sweden - a life not possible to grasp for us with no experience of it, only stories.

The knowledgeable voice and sharp pen of Karin will be remembered by the emptiness, missed by family and friends and many of the pro-Israeli information groups of Sweden.

The funeral has occurred with the nearest of the family members.

Ralph Haglund, Lund

The Galilee Subbotniks

 Dubrovin farm in Yesud Hama'ala (photo: Yehudit Garinkol)

The Galilee converts are the families of Russians who converted to Judaism from 18th century on. Among them there were peasants and landowners, commoners and nobles such as Alexander Volnitzin and Prince Valentine Potocki. According to one opinion, the converted Abraham Ben-Avraham Kurakin's father is mentioned in War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy as Anatoly Kuragin or Prince Kurakin.
 

The first reports on the Subbotnik movement, the converted Russians, appear in an official document from 1770, about 400 Subbotniks in the province of Saratov. In 1823 the Russian Interior Ministry counted about 20 thousand Subbotniks in various areas of the empire, and at its peak, in 1912, the movement numbered about 100 thousand members.

Excluding the period from 1912 to 1905, the Subbotnik movement was illegal. In 1825 the "Holy Synod" of Russia enacted a law dealing with "ways of stopping the spread of Jewish sect called Subbotniks". All "heresy distributors" being rejected for military service, were exiled to Siberia, where they founded "Subbotnik villages" while maintaining their uniqueness. Children under the age of seven were taken from them and given to "governmental education houses". Jews who lived in areas where Subbotniks were reported to live were expelled from their villages as well and were not allowed back.

Dr. Yuval Dror, a descendant of Kurakin family, who deals with the study of the Subbotnik movement, writes about the destiny of converted Evdokimov family: "The family father was arrested and was jailed for two years and the rest of the movement members were harassed as well. More than a thousand families were dispossessed from their homes, deported and exiled to the Caucasus ... At their new residence they suffered as well... there were attempts to reconvert their many children to Christianity by force. They were forced to carry stones to the village Pravoslav church and were chased at the rural community meetings".

Despite persecutions the Subbotnik movement expanded and during the 19th its leaders got into close contacts with the rabbinical Judaism. In the beginning of the 20th century, emissaries of the Zionist movement appeared in its villages. Some of the Subbotniks sold their possessions, immigrated to Eretz-Israel and joined the pioneers of the Third Aliyah. The Subbotnik movement also sent delegates to the all-Russia Zionist Congress in 1917.

Since they were farmers and outstanding peasants, when they moved to Eretz-Israel they contributed a great deal to the development of agriculture in the Galilee. Yoav Dubrovin imported from Russia plows and modern agricultural equipment, introduced at his farm elaborated crop rotation and applied new methods of cattle raising.

The enormous power and body structure of Dubrovin family members triggered the Galileans to call them by the nickname "Moskobians" or "Goliathians". "Fever is not a disease", the old Dubrovin used to encourage his family in times they had fallen ill. During the Malaria period the family horses were galloping without guidance, right to the doctor in Yesud HaMa'ala. "The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away", Dubrovin said after the Shiv'a following the death of his 22 years old son Abraham. In the fall of 1918 the second son, aged 37, was depeated. "Do not cry for the dead, one should not doubt the actions of God. During all those years passed, I have never heard from you a thought to leave the country", he encouraged his sons after the death of his son in law. When he was about 100 years old, sick and lying on his bed, he got the last blow, from which he never got up: "My Hero", the old man lamented his youngest son Ephraim, "How did you fall, Froyke, how the mighty have fallen!"

Over the years the Galilee Subbotniks were thoroughly assimilated between the Israelis and nowadays one can get to know their origin only by their surnames. Amog the Israelis who could credit themselves for a "Subbotnik" origin one can mention Ephraim Avidan - Yoav Dubrovin's grandson - who served as commander of Northern Region in Border Police; Abraham Avigdorov - Abraham Kurakin's great grandson - who earned the medal of valor in the War of Independence, Menachem Kurakin - Abraham's grandson – who was among the twenty-three missing commandos at Operation Boatswain.

Behind each donation lies a life story

Every year there are strange donations and estates being transferred to Israel, finding their way to the administrator general in the Israel ministry of justice. For example, one American farmer donated a pair of stallions, a European donor set up a fund to bestow awards to soldiers serving at the IDF as dog trainers, another person's donation for the country was a rare violin, provided to be played by new immigrants only, and there was even a person who donated money provided it will be used to establish the Third Temple.

Some 50 years ago the Israeli government imposed the Administrator General to handle the estates and donations donated to the state. According to estimates, each year the state is endowed by individuals worldwide  amounts and items whose total value is about 200 million Shekel.

For example, a Jew of Russian origin died childless in his poor Paris apartment. After the Paris municipality workers cleared the pile of junk that filled the apartment, they found a small box. When they opened it, they found a handwritten will, in which he wrote: "I bequeath my property to the State of Israel". It turned out that the amount the man had in his bank account was a quarter million Shkalim.

However, in London one day a non-Jewish man, in a wheelchair, appeared  at the entrance of the Israeli Embassy. He took out of his pocket a bank check and wrote in it the amount of  2.1 million dollars. He handed the check to the surprised consul, and asked to spend the money to rehabilitate the disabled in Israel. The donor asked to maintain his anonymity and the only thing he was willing to say is, that being a child he had been adopted by a Jewish family.

Following the sheep

photo: Revital Kagan Ben-adar

When the jouvenille Moshe Kagan, a native of the Polish city Kremenets, wanted to immigrate to Eretz-Israel, though painting was his great love - Hashomer Hatzair activists encouraged him to acquire a profession before he arrives in Israel. So, when a relative of him came to Kremenets from another city, Moshe learned from him his profession - a dental technician.

In 1948, while a soldier in the Polish army led by Władysław Anders, Moshe came with his division to the devastated Warsaw and burning Berlin, and discovered that his parents and sister had been murdered by the Nazis. He made Aliyah to Israel, and settled in kibbutz Shamir, where he worked as a shepherd for ten years. He would go out to pasture with fabrics, papers, pencils and brushes, and paint the landscapes, and of course - lots of sheep.

Following the sheep he found in the area ancient pottery, tools, coins and flintsones - which he passed to the Israel Antiquities Authority - where they learned that those archeological findings testified of some twenty pre-historical settlements in the area. The archaeological hobby became "half a profession" when Moshe helped the American team digging in Tel-Anafa located beneath kibbutz Shamir. He also set up a small archaeological museum in the kibbutz, and became an expert of dolmens.

Today, the 89-year-old Kagan collects stamps, coins, antiques and drawings. He handles his garden, and of course - paints.

Two stories out of thousands

Children of the Holocaust Memorial in Ramat-Hasharon (photo: Avishay Ticher)

On Holocaust remembrance day this year, Ma'ariv newspaper published a special supplement dedicated to stories of some Holocaust survivors living among us in Israel. Every such story, folded in a concise double page spread with a photo of the survivor as a child and of photo of him or her nowadays, could have feed a whole book or an entire movie full of drama and tension. And who knows how many such stories have not been told even in a newspaper?

Such, for example, is the story of choreographer Ruth Pardes, a pioneer of dance therapy, born in the ghetto of the Polish town Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, February 1940. Following her husband's advice, her mother left the town with her baby Ruth, still too young to understanding the horrors around her, and moved to the capital Warsaw, hoping to find a safer place. The mother pretended to be a Christian woman, and during the air raids ran with her baby to the city shelters.

In 1942, when Ruth was two years old, her mother learned that her husband was still alive, in the ghetto of Sambir. She took her daughter and went there. After she wrote a letter to a relative, asking him to send clothes for her and for her daughter, a Polish man named Alojzy Plewa who served in the German army, arrived to the ghetto, carrying a suitcase with clothes sent by the relative. Ruth's mother dared to ask him if he would come the next night to take with him the two-year-old girl. Plewa agreed and the next night came near the wire fence to receive the girl transferred to him over the fence.

First Alojzy took Ruth to his home, but when it raised the suspicion of Poles who knew he was not married, he gave her to his parents in a pro-Nazi village near Gdansk. His parents were devout Christians, and since Plewa told them that Ruth was his illegal daughter, they called her Antoska and nicknamed her Saint Mary's daughter.

In 1945, after the war was over, Ruth's mother – whose own story of survival is too long to be told here – came to collect her five-year-old daughter from Plewa's parents. They traveled to Warsaw, where the mother arranged a counterfeit pass for herself and for her daughter, previously owned by a woman who perished in the Holocaust. Then, the mother found another child to join them – since according to the dead woman's pass she had two children – and they all boarded a ship en route to Eretz-Israel.

In 1978, after Ruth's mother applied for Yad Vashem to recognize Alojzy Plewa as a Righteous Among the Nations, he came to Israel and Ruth first met the man who had saved her life and the lives of other children. Plewa said that after Ruth left the his parent's village she became a Christian saint there: After the war, when the Soviet army arrived to Polish villages which collaborated with the Nazis – the soldiers used to burn, pillage, rape women and sometimes even murder. But when they arrived that village, some villagers ran to them, asking for mercy due to the rescue of a Polish girl – Antoska. The Soviet soldiers acceded to the request and went away. Following this occurrence, the villagers erected a large cross on a hill near the village and called it St. Antoska Hill.

Another story in the mentioned above supplement is the survival of the Israeli demographer Sergio Della-Pergola. Sergio was born in Trieste, the grandson of Rabbi Raphael Della-Pergola of Florence. In September 1943, when he was one year old, Sergio's parents were forced to flee Trieste that was already occupied by the Germans, and went to Florence, hoping to find help from relatives and friends.

When all their documents specified "belongs to the Jewish race", they stayed for a few days in a small pension, and then had to leave to a mental hospital directed by a friend of Sergio's father. When one day the place was surrounded by German soldiers, Sergio's father turned to the guard at the gate in German, and firmly, as if he were a senior, told him: "I'm going now to find a taxi. When I get back – open the gate and let the taxi come in!". The guard saluted, Sergio's father returned with a taxi and took his wife and child back to the small pension.

From there they moved for six weeks to the apartment of a kind lady, while she left for a while to stay in a convent and teach religion. In one of his secret "sorties" outside, to buy bread and milk under the watchful eyes of the Germans, Sergio's father made a contact with the Italian underground aiding the Allies, and supplied them information he learned from listening to conversations between German soldiers hanging around, confident that no one might understand their language. After providing valuable information, the underground helped him move with his family to neutral Switzerland, with other Jewish refugees, soldiers deserting from the Italian army, and British and American pilots escaping from captivity.

The instructions given to them by the underground were as follows: During the drive to the border the train would be so-called bombarded from air, to make the German soldiers ran away from it. The escapees will have to jump out of the coaches, look for an immediate hide and after a few minutes return to continue the journey to Milan.

In the small village of Canova, near the border of Switzerland, Della-Pergola family went down with the other escapees and according to a command they began to run to the boats dock, where they met an unknown person who ordered them to run toward the nearest mountain. Near the mountain another unknown person informed them that at night they would cross the border to Switzerland by skilled smugglers. The head of baby Sergio was covered with a sack. It was 24 December, Christmas Eve. Snow around and sharp cold. On the other side Swiss policemen were waiting for them to lead them to the police station. Sergio's mother was told that she and her baby could  stay but the men would return to Italy. When the woman began screaming, the restrained Swiss men were alarmed and phoned their superiors in the capital Bern. Then they said: "Since it's Christmas day, we decided to let all of you enter our country".

After the holiday the woman and her baby were sent to a rural boarding school, and the men – to a refugee camp where they had to work draining swamps. Those nights, on the wooden bed at the Swiss work camp, Sergio's father, Massimo Della-Pergola, formulated the idea of Toto Calcio – the legal football betting, and invented its form and its check method: 1, 2 ,X – which is used until today.

After the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the Swiss took the refugees to another village, more comfortable, where Sergio's father became a local sports reporter. When the family returned to Italy he became the editorial secretary of Gazzetta Dello Sport, while establishing the first toto betting company - Sisal.

These are, as noted, only two out of hundreds, thousands and perhaps tens of thousands stories of Holocaust survivors.

Where did the question words go?

The poem KEN LATZIPOR (A Nest For the Bird) performed by Noga

Children literature, like any literature, is a mirror that clearly reflects social and cultural transformations. Looking at Israeli children literature one can see a substantial reduction of issues: While Bialik's Poems and Songs for Children contains poems about nature – such as A Nest for the Bird (KEN LATZIPOR), game songs, lullabies – such as Lay Down, My Toddler, character songs, experience songs and poems of Jewish tradition and folklore – such as For Shabbat, in the children songs of Yehonatan Gefen, Hagit Benziman and Yehuda Atlas it is difficult to find "sun", "wind" and "trees" and if one finds such objects they are all subjected to the condition of child,  the hero of the song.

If the old songs can be defined as describing "how the world looks to the child", the songs these days can be defined as describing how the child, showing off his personality and wishing to sketch his self-portrait, appears in the world. Hence the change in the status of objects such as "games", "toys" or "aunts" and "uncles". In post-modern children songs they all serve the same goal – exposing fundamental features and typical situations of the child's consciousness.

The language and the style of songs for children have changed as well. While in Bialik's songs there are Aramaic phrases and flowery phrases like "hush lest thou awake" (HAS PEN TA'IR), in songs today the language has been lowered as if it strives to a complete identification with the natural language of children: simple and often incorrect.

In current children literature personification and animation – meaning, ascribing human attributes and skills to figures of still objects, plants and animals – are very rare. The question words "what", "who" and "where", which Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovsky and Ya'akov Fichman frequently used for dramatization – disappeared, replaced by the abundant "why" word – either as a rhetorical question in the framework of a "personal confession" by the child speaker or in order to expose the parents' weaknesses.

In classic children songs there is an emphasis on pathos and drama and  on the child's confusion in front of the world. In post-modern songs the child is presented as smart, knowledgeable, confident and as one who allows himself or herself to criticize the elderly. The topics of post-modern songs are daily life, not top of world affairs, and such matters are "natural" to be commented by a child's opinion.

In The Fleece Festival (HAG HAGEZ) by Anda Pinkerfeld-Amir's from the 30's, we read: "In Tel-Yoseph everyone is glad" – so the emphasis is on the whole, the collective. Children poems nowadays emphasize individualism and difference.

In Miriam Yalan-Shteklis' Michael and Alone (LEVADI) from the late 50s' - there is no God and nature. There are only dolls and bears, lifeless and without a response. Alienation. The poetess has already lost faith in God, but still there is a searching for other people to conduct life together.

Later, the inner spiritual mantel content of Man is going lost and he is willingly enslaved to the sensory stimuli. There is no real conversation. Everyone listens to himself or herself or trying to enforce his or her opinion. So are, for example, the songs by Ayin Hillel (Hillel Omer) about a talk between two girls, in which each of them relates only to herself at that moment, without communication, and the song expressing the certainty of each part of clothing hanging on the clothesline to dry that just for him the sun is shining.

An extreme example of this shift in children literature is the song Lights Out (KIBUY OROT) by Moshe Oren:

Some people sleep
with butt to the wall,
some sleep with face,
and some can not decide
and constantly change phase.

Seeing the glasses through rose-coloured glasses

Young children who need glasses are sometimes ashamed to wear them in their kindergarten. The kindergarten teacher Limor Shlomi has a method to overcome this embarrassment: Glasses Party.
 
At the Glasses Party conducted by Limor all the kindergarten children participate in activities of movement and creation, and thus strengthen the confidence of the bespectacled child.

For example, to let the children see how well the celebrating child sees with his or her glasses, Limor puts them all in a circle around the child: They throw him or her a ball, he or she catches it and throws it to them again and again. If the child is sporty, Limor gives the other kids more than one ball to throw at him, so he or she should respond and return the balls quickly.

Other activity in the Glasses Party is creating "glasses" by all the children from small metal rings and pipe cleaners: They wrap around each ring a pipe cleaner and connect the two rings by a small piece of pipe cleaner. Then - all the kids wear their "glasses".

The Glasses Party guest of honor is an optician, who conducts a vision test for all the children, and usually find among them some new candidates for a future Glasses Party...

Not every line suggests a hint

The Israeli government has lately issued bills bearing the images of four poets. One of the four is Nathan Alterman

Night by night (Layla layla) by Nathan Alterman and Mordechay Ze'ira

Nathan Alterman, Israel national poet – who was a playwright, journalist and translator as well - is mostly known for his weekly poetic column The Seventh Column in the daily newspaper Davar, which was published from 1943 till 1965. Before publishing this column Alterman was the paper's translator of Reuters news, a job which made him revive into Hebrew the speeches of Winston Churchill.

The Seventh Column was an outcome of a period in which a certain Jewish audience in Israel reached a maximal solidarity with the nationwide. Alterman was a prayer leader, who frequently utters his mission in the first person plural, as if feeling that his work should not be esoteric, spread out from life.

photo: Kfar Saba Municipal Museum

After giving the name Shalom to the first Israeli luxury ship, he refused to partake in its maiden voyage. Although being an integral part of the Israeli elite, he acted toward its favors as a "vegetarian" and did not take even a tiny bit of a cherry on top of a whipped cream in an embassy cocktail.

But his refusal to take gifts and to exploit bypass roads of the bureaucratic labyrinth ceased when it the matter involved his beloved daughter, Tirza, the vulnerable soul to whom he wrote the poem Safeguard  your soul. When it came to his daughter, he sent urgent messages to the military authorities and to those responsible for casting, making them acknowledge the daughter's desperate fragility.

Alterman's fondness for the working people was for him as a conscience relief, since his spiritual occupation might have endangered one of arrogance and detachment. When he went home drunk, at dawn, and saw a worker going to his work, he would call his companions: "Go in order, a man is going to work". "Everyone needs a shoeshine boy", he once said, "but only few need poems".

Ars Poetica engaged him a great deal:

Not every line suggests a hint,
the city is a city.
the street – a street,
the light is light,
the dark is clear as the sun.
 

Just like Sigmund Freud who once said to his psychiatrists audience, looking curiously at his cigar as if it was a significant phallic hint: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".

Rest is Come to the Weary, by Nathan Alterman and Daniel Sambursky

Alterman did not help much to his interpreters, the maximum attention he gave them was a bit of derision: "If I had known your interpretations before I wrote my poems", he said, "it could be helpful. If you do not understand it does not matter, as long as you feel".

Although being a Tel-Avivian in his soul, no one remembered him visiting the beach or sitting exposed to sunlight. Someone said about him: "So humbling as it reaches arrogance". His daughter, Tirza Atar, once said: "That was closure, terribly loneliness in the heart, unconditional by a thing".

He did not allow his beloved daughter Tirza to publish her poems until she was 18, and when she finally did so, many of them were influenced by him, many were devoted to him and many aspired to him. Some would say that if her father would stay alive near by and continue to beg her "Safeguard your soul, Safeguard your life" – Tirza might not have taken leave of life.

A Ballad for a Woman (Balada Le'isha) by Tirza Atar and Moshe Wilensky

Jurka Chapters

"Zviya shook her 600 kilograms very cheerfully for the unexpected freedom, while we asked to know why and what for" (fields of kibbutz Dan, 1949; photo: Upper Galilee Documentation Center)

 

In the second half of the 20th century the anthropological research and the historical study went through a parallel shift: When the unknown and exotic tribes like the Samoan one among which Margaret Mead had done her career became lesser and lesser, anthropologists began to investigate "sub-cultures" in their nearby Western societies, such as the Israeli kibbutz or of the Israeli ultra-orthodox Jewish groups; While historians abandoned their preoccupation with great events like wars, conquests and migration waves, and started to examine daily lives: How the slaves in ancient Rome had eaten, how the monks in medieval Spain had slept, and how babies had been treated in Germany of the 18th century.

The book Jurka Chapters gives us a glimpse of daily life of the low-middle class Jewry in Budapest at the eve of Second World War: "At the table one sits on high stool. Chairs with arms are considered luxury. Dishes and cutlery are washed in a bowl called Weidling, by a simple rug and a laundry soap. In the kitchen one makes laundry as well, in large wooden laundry tubs, and one hangs the laundry to dry on wires stretched high up in the kitchen... In the kitchen one also does homework, or has non-significant conversations with daily guests. The apartment's most important institution: a tap of running water - is reigning on all".

The author, Jurka Klein, who adopted in Israel the Hebrew name Moshe Eytam, is one of hundreds and perhaps thousands of anonymous Holocaust survivors who published and still publish their memories, most modestly, usually in formats of austerity. Some of these books not only provide fascinating pieces of information about the daily war of survival practiced by Jews whose dear ones and friends disappear around, but also an unusual philosophical perspective and even literary intensity. Such is Jurka Chapters - although not a real literary work, it has the spark that could have make it so under the hand of a talented editor and under the auspice of a well established publishing house.

An example of the way famous national events hide behind small and personal occurrences in such books, is one of Eytam's experiences after immigrating to Israel in the framework of Youth Aliyah and settling in kibbutz Dan: "On one early morning milking there came into the dairy barn the kibbutz's security man. He asked frantically to free one cow and expel her from the barn, to let her romp outside… Zviya (The cow's name, which means in Hebrew... a female deer) shook her 600 kilograms very cheerfully for the unexpected freedom, while we asked to know why and what for. It turned out that the Syrians caught in their territory an Israeli intelligence squad... Our government is trying to return the squad through the United Nations, claiming that they have chased after escaped cows. The attempt was unsuccessful. Uri Ilan of kibbutz Giv'at-Shmuel, who was among the trapped, was tortured to death. He was returned without a soul in his nose, just a note hidden between his toes: "I haven't betrayed"!

Shani's golden touch

Shani Blumenfeld - fashion illustration made in a computer collage technique

Shani Blumenfeld - costume

design for a play taking place

in New-York in the 60s
(photo: Sasha Flit) 

Like Midas' golden touch, that whatever his hands touched turned to gold – one can say that the hands of Shani Blumenfeld (23), a third year student of fashion design at Shenkar College of Engineering And Design, whatever they touch becomes a design: As a young girl, rhymed verse she wrote and read in family events and presentations she created and screened to the guests - were the focus of attention and enthusiasm.

While being a student at Pelech high school  in Kiryat-Ekron, she created the documentary Foreign Labour (a Hebrew title which has double meaning: in modern Hebrew - a job being done by a foreigner, in biblical Hebrew – a faith other than the Jewish faith, especially idolatry), which won the prize for the best documentary inthe 2006 Jerusalem Film Festival. The same year she won the prize for the best director in Docaviv Festival (the international documentary film festival).

Shani Blumenfeld - garment
inspired by the Zulu, including
the special bead technique
used by the South African tribe
(photo: Sasha Flit)  

The film documents the daily life of Maria, a Christian Romanian woman that like many foreign workers in Israel makes a living by hard physical labor and sends most of her income to her overseas family. Maria makes a living from aiding an old man who lives in the religious community Beit-Gamliel.

Shani's film shows Maria's religious conflicts – as a religious Christian who takes care, among other things, of the religious needs of the old Jew, Maria's yearnings for her home and family, and especially – Maria's enormous dedication to the person she takes care of, beyond differences in age, culture and religion.

With these golden hands Shani (whose Hebrew name means "scarlet") is engaged nowadays in fashion design, and after completing her studies she would like to acquire professional experience where she can "utilize her capabilities to the fullest and express herself". She hopes to get to a fashion house which she appreciates and feels close to its design style. Later on, she might like to open her own studio.

"Flea buster" is free

Dror children group of Kibbutz Ein-Hahoresh in the forties (photo: Ein-Hahoresh Arcive). Some half of the children bear Biblical names such as Samuel (SHMUEL) and Judith (YEHUDIT) while the rest bear new Israeli names such as Amira



Who hasn't wondered at some time what the origin of his name is? Who did not happen to wonder about a strange name of another person? The Hebrew book The Origin of Names (MOZA HASHEMOT), by the deceased Avraham Stahl, presents a compilation of historical facts related to the development of Jewish first and last names, seasoned by amusing anecdotes related to the relations between humans and their names.

It turns out that not many years ago most people shared a very small variety of names. Roman men, for example, shared less than a hundred names - among them Gaius, Titus and Marcus. Even an analysis of the Israel telephone directory from 1971-1979, shows that 15 percent of the Jewish men were named after Jacob and his sons: Joseph, Reuben, Simeon, Judah, Dan, Gad, Benjamin etc. The use of a few first names in traditional societies, Stahl explains, reflects the community dominance versus the individual, so there is no interest in emphasizing people's uniqueness.

In 1992 Stahl made a comparison between the names of children in the secular Jerusalem residential district Gilo and the names of the children in the religious community Beit-El. He found that half of the secular boys, but only one religious boy, had new Hebrew names, that is - names that were created from the late 19th century to the present, and the rest of the names were from the Jewish scriptures, mostly from the Bible.

In his book Stahl explains that many of the family names held by Israelis of Ashkenazi descent are related to a law published in 1787 by Emperor Joseph II, ordering all Jews to carry a permanent family name in German. One could have chosen the name from a special list of names, unless his family had already have a name, and in that occasion a payment for the new name should have payed. The most expensive names were those derived from names of flowers or precious metals, such as Rosenthal (rose valley) or Goldstein (gold stone). Names of less privileged materials were sold cheaply: Holz (wood), Stein (stone) or Stahl (steel) - as the author's family name.

And one who could not meet even the low rate, received from the emperor's officials a name for free - a ridiculous and sneered name, such as Ochsenschwanz (ox tail) or Wanzenknacker (flea buster).

And here, Itzik, a recipe for mimicking a pea

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The humor of the comic pair Avi Grainik and Idan Alterman, best known for their show YELADIM SORGIM, i.e. Knitting Children (rhymed in Hebrew with YELADIM CHORGIM, i.e. Step Children, hinting to the drama film God's Step Children) reflects the range of causing-to-laugh skills of the two: from sophisticated physical humor, through clever mimicry, to sharp linguistic wit.

Instead of mimicking personalities and celebrities, Avi Grainik mimics vegetables: a cucumber, a pickled cucumber, then a banana, and then a squashed banana. Actually there are several levels of humor at the same time here: a simple physical humor of impersonating, a humor caused by the mere  "selection" of the mimicked objects, and a parody of the subject of mimicry - the efforts invested by entertainers to study thoroughly the mimicked object and the willingness of an audience "to be entertained" by someone trying so hard to look like someone else in order to make his audience laugh.

It's not incidental that much of their skits are based on the motto: "I am Hezi and this is my brother Itzik" ("Hezy" is the Israeli nickname for Ezekiel and "Itzik" - for Isaac) – when the two enter the stage as a pair of brothers, not too bright, not very polished, as if they are just two ordinary people invited by someone to do some skits "for the guys".

This pose, of a couple having "some idea" about what things should be done in order to be considered entertainers – is, in my opinion, Knitting Children greatest contribution to the Israeli entertainment scene: the very authentic design of the causing-to-laugh craft concept, the transition from "just two ordinary people" to "a pair of entertainers".

Adjusting Sights

Field training of Israeli tanks in the Golan Heights, 2009
(photo: Rose Schneiderman)



The Israeli film Adjusting Sights - based on the book with the same title by rabbi Haim Sabato - describes the battles of Yom Kippur War (Day of Atonemet War) in the Golan Heights from the perspective of a religious gunner who had lost his best friend in the war.  In Hebrew, the term adjusting sights (TEUM KAVANOT) has double meaning: the material action of coordinating the tank cannon intentions – which is a modern meaning, and the spiritual notion of intent in prayer - which is the traditional meaning.

Although it is an understatement and non-frenzy film, with subdued and quiet acting and soft like a coo background music - Adjusting Sights sweep its viewers precisely because it doesn't fall into the abyss of depression on the one hand and doesn't rise up to the heights of ecstasy on the other hand. Just as Maimonides, who is constantly  quoted by the protagonist, recommended: One should choose the golden mean - not to be rolled down to depression on the one hand and not to be carried away to euphoria on the other hand.

photo: www.tobypress.com

In the transition from book to film, the director Eyal Halfon well  used the opportunity to express subtle differences between secular and religious Israelis by different body language and diction - beyond the differences in the content of their associations, which literature can express no less delicately than cinema. When the documentation officer and his assistant arrive to the camp to investigate and interview the soldiers, each soldier has his own manner to sit down, start speaking and spell his guts, but when the religious soldier opens his words with the verse "My Lord, open my lips that my mouth may declare your glory" (Psalms, 51, 17) and in the background the assistant's typewriter is ticking – the army tent is filled with the special religious respect to the written word.



It is accepted that written literature has more emotional and intellectual potency than cinema – due to the deeper penetration of the verbal tool to the characters' souls and minds and due to the force the written medium put upon the reader to stimulate his imagination in completing visual details and take an active role in the artistic experience. Still, there is also and advantage of the movie over the book: In this movie, all along, we share with the characters the gap between the vitality of memory - the re-experienced experience while being reconstructed in the mind – and the dryness of things being documented, typewritten in a typewriter, and by the documentation officer are well dated and adapted to the military documentation rules. In the book, made of merely written words, these two layers unite in one but in the film they run a constant dialogue between them.

The cinematic clothing of Adjusting Sights is of special importance with regard to the view of life of young secular Israelis, since it might dim a bit the image of the young religious warrior whom they usually encounter. Things written by a young participant of one of the book discussion groups in the Hebrew internet might testify for that:

"Last week I found the book Adjusting Sights by Haim Sabato at the Hebrew Book Week fair… It seemed to me appropriate to read it on Yom Kippur…. Yom Kippur has not yet come but I have already read the whole book... The uniqueness of the book is the biography of its author as a yeshiva student, so the text is full of quotations from the Prayer Book and from the Talmud, and the daily atmosphere being depicted is therefore religious. Perhaps a radical heretic person would be revolted by the book, but I prefer to look at this aspect of the book from the human perspective rather than from the religious one. The author, for example, tells about his strictness and piety in putting on tefillin, every day of his life. During the war, when leaving a damaged tank, his small bag of tefillin was left there. Towards evening time his battalion team is returning to the tank, and our protagonist finds his tefillin and quickly put them on before sunset. To me, more than it is a religious act it is an act of holding tightly on the blessed routine in the chaos of war, the author's own way to maintain sanity".

Reality series as Jotham's and Orwell's parables

It seems that the high popularity of two reality series on Israeli television: Big Brother - which follows 24 hours a day the "residents" selected to spend 100 days together in a complete isolation from the external world and Beauty and the Geek - which brings together a group of high IQ male nerds and a group of high ICQ female beauties and after dividing then into male-female couples,measures their task performance, is reflected in the abundant reference to them in online forums and talkbacks in the Hebrew net.

However, recently I found in two Hebrew online forums two different references, by two surfers apparently with no connection between each other, which indicate a sound associative relationship between those who refuse to be carried away by the popularity of these series. The first reference was as following:

"Most people refer to Big Brother participants as normal people, all of whom are well aware of the fact that the reality in which they operate is not humane and not healthy, because everyone has already read 1984 by George Orwell - and made wise. In my opinion, that reality is more similar to the plot of Animal Farm by George Orwell than to the plot of 1984: as the pigs take over the farm, led by the fat dictator Napoleon, so in Big Brother - the 'pigger' one is, the more screen time and chance to win he or she gets".

 
The second reference was as following:

"A few times I have been already offered to participate in the Beauty and the Geek, and I refused. Those who have forgotten, that what is said in the Bible parable of Jotham (Judges 9, 8-15):

The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive tree, Reign thou over us.

But the olive tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honor God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?

And the trees said to the fig tree, Come thou, and reign over us.

But the fig tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees?

Then said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us.

And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheered God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?

Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us.

And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow: and if not, let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.

"So, As a productive person, I would love to take a public office and if I would be offered to be prime minister - I would consider it positively, but I will not participate in a TV series like Beauty and the Geek in order to be a famous person just for being famous".

Indeed, the story of the governing dynamics in the Animal Farm of Orwell resembles the panel discussion about power among the trees of Jotham's Parable: actually the least productive and fruitful person, wants the power more than everyone else.

And the two parables together reminds of a Jewish anecdote about a rabbi who refused the insistent pleading of his followers to take on the role of community leader. The rabbi explained that he prefers to learn and teach rather than be engaged in leadership. He accepted his followers plead only when they "threatened" him as following: "If this role would not be taken by someone who does not want to take it – it will be rapidly taken by someone who is eager to take it…"

A prisoner's request, my cartoonist's request

A couple of weeks ago the supreme court of Israel rejected a prisoner's request to put a computer and a television set in his cell, in order to conduct his defense by using a CD containing legal information and a videotape containing the prosecution evidence against him.

The supreme court ruled that a criminal trial is being conducted mostly by arguments, and that a prisoner wishing to submit any written documents might do so by using his own handwriting or the services of a public defender.

When asking a cartoonist friend of mine to illustrate this case, he was ready to start immediately but when asking him what credit I should attach to the cartoon, he replied: "Which credit? What credit?" - with the common Israeli intonation of rejecting the whole idea just pronounced.

So, from now on, in order to respect his wishful anonymity, his credit on his cartoons in this blog will be which credit what credit.

Well, guys, what's new in our world?

The story of man falling asleep for many years is found in folk stories of various nations. Among Greek legends, for example, one can find the story of Epimenides, being once sent by his father to find a stray lamb. On his way Epimenides got into a cave, to relax a bit at noon, but he fell asleep and slept for no less than 57 years.

When he woke up, he continued his search for the lamb, thinking that he slept only an hour. After searching in vain, he returned to his father's estate, to be astonished finding out that someone else got a hold of it and that everything there had been completely changed. When he returned to his father house in the city, he found there strangers as well, asking him who he was. Eventually he recognized among them his younger brother, who was then a very old man, from which he learned about the long sleep he had been going through.

The Jewish legend about the long sleep of Honi HaM'agel (in Hebrew - "Honi the Circle-Drawer") has one version in the Jerusalem Talmud and another one in the Babylonian Talmud. According to the Jerusalem Talmud, Honi, who lived at the time of the first Temple's destruction, once went to the field and when it began raining, found a shelter in a cave. After dozing off there, he fell asleep which endured 70 years. At this period the Temple was destroyed and built again.

After 70 years, when Honi woke up, he got out of the cave and saw a completely different world: places once being vineyards and olive orchards were now seeded fields.

He asked the people around: what's new in the world?
They told him: Well, don't you know?
He said: No.
They said: Who are you?
He said: Honi.
They said: We heard that a man bearing this name - once entering the Temple courtyard the courtyard had been filled with light.

So Honi entered the Temple courtyard, and it shone full of light.
He said to himself: "When God will return the captives of Zion, we will be like dreamers".

Comparing the Greek legend to the Jewish legend reveals many similarities between the two, but while the Greek legend doesn't explain why the protagonist slept for specifically 57 years – the Jewish legend supplies a "realistic explanation" for the period spent on sleeping: Honi fell asleep for 70 years, in order to hinder such a tzaddik (in Hebrew - "righteous person") from witnessing the destruction of the Temple, and he woke up only after the Temple had been rebuilt.

Which reminds me of the film "Goodbye Lenin", about the huge efforts of a young man, son of an East Germany devoted communist, to conceal from his mother - who fell into a coma in October 1989 - the "unbearable" historical events that took place in the meantime: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, and the making of the previous East Germany a capitalist society.

So, when she awakens out of her coma, and in order to prevent her excitement facing the extreme changes - excitement that could undermine the health status, the son makes the mother's environment an East German "nature reserve", exactly as she had in the "good old days".

According to the Babylonian Talmud, the verse "A song of ascents, when God will return the captives of Zion we will be like dreamers" - made Honi upset, and he wondered if there was anyone who could have spent 70 years in sleeping and dreaming. One day, while walking along the way, he met a man planting a carob tree.

He said to the man: That tree, within how many years will it give fruit?
The man answered: Up to 70 years.
Honi said: Are you sure you will live 70 years?
The man replied: I found a world in which there was a carob tree, since my ancestors planted it for me, so I plant a carob tree - for my children.

Honi sat, ate, and a sleep came over him. When he was asleep, a rock bump hid him and so he slept for 70 years. When he got up he saw a man gathering carobs from the tree once being planted.Honi asked the man: Did you plant the tree?
The man replied: I am the grandson of the man who planted the tree.

Then Honi realized that he had been sleeping for 70 years, and looking around he saw that his donkeys had been fruitful and multiplied to many donkey herds. When he went to his home and asked the people if the son of Honi HaM'agel was there, they said: his son is gone, his grandson is here. When he told them that he was Honi the Circle-Drawer, that could solve any question of study, they didn't believe him and didn't honor him. With grief, his mind "went weak" and he died. And so our sages said: "o havruta o mituta" (in "Aramaic" Hebrew - "either a friend or death").

Thus, while the Jerusalem Talmud version of the legend emphasizes the sustainability of man - the Babylonian Talmud version of the legend emphasizes the inability of a person belonging to certain generation to fit to a different generation.

The painting on the wall

Fifth century BC painters Zeuxis of Heraclea and Parrhasius of Ephesus became familiar with each other when they both settled in Athens. Their activity was recorded 400 years later by Elder Pliny in his book Naturalis Historia. According to Pliny, they held a competition which one of them was a greater artist, that is - who painted pictures that look more realistic.

When Zeuxis revealed Parrhasius a painting of grapes, they looked so inviting and tempting that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them. And when Parrhasius asked Zeuxis to watch his painting and Zeuxis asked Parrhasius to divert the curtain over the painting, he found that the curtain itself was Parrhasius' drawing.

Zeuxis had to admit his loss in competition, and said: "I managed to deceive the eyes of birds, but Parrhasius managed to deceive the eyes of Zeuxis".

Nowadays big hyper-realistic wall paintings adorn buildings in many cities worldwide. Unlike spontaneous graffiti made at the dead of night, professional wall painters get an advanced approval of the municipalities to paint the walls of specific buildings in the city. So is Rami meiri, one of the first Israeli wall painters, that Tel-Aviv is one of the major stages for his art (he also painted in Germany, Beijing, Fort-Lauderdale Florida, and Buenos-Aires).

Most of his paintings are made by using Trompe-l'œil technique, designed to blur the boundaries between reality and illusion, and one of the most famous among them is The Scream, painted on the wall of Max Fine school at the intersection of Begin Road and Hashalom Road.

In an interview Meiri told about the inspiration for this painting:

"This painting is influenced by the first carnival I saw, in northern Brazil. It's kind of crazy sense, people get there into ecstasy, and I saw there one I liked. In the baby bottle there was alcohol, and the man ran and went wild. At the same time, the painting is not merely that. All good art is made of tension and relaxation. So here he increased the tension, was kind of a frightening figure, and suddenly you see that he has a bottle in the hand".

Is it only me that this painting reminds her of The Scream by Edvard Munch?