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.

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...