This has been an interesting week, on Monday evening we hosted a group of Bridges for Peace Leaders, some like Rev. Rebecca Brimmer, president, CEO and Editor in Chief of BFP and her tour-guide husband, Tom, (old friends of ours) Cheryl  Hauer, the International Development Director and Daniel Kirchevel,  from the Jerusalem office who helped to co-ordinate the hosting evening, are all resident in Jerusalem. With them, we hosted Keith Buxton, the BFP National Director from Australia and the Canadian national Director, Eric Malloy.  All delightful people and amazingly well- informed about Israel and Judaism. The remainder of this group of over thirty were hosted by other families in Jerusalem, including our friend Jim Solberg the International Director for America.  For those who don’t know, Bridges for Peace is a “Jerusalem –based, Bible-believing  Christian organization supporting  Israel and building relationships between Christians and Jews worldwide through education and practical deeds expressing G-d’s love and mercy.”  BFP gives a great deal of financial help to Israel both to various projects and to needy families through their food bank and other sources. Before you ask, no, they definitely do not have ulterior motives and are not interested in converting us all to Christianity.

Shabbat evening we were delighted to receive a visit from our old friend, Canon Andrew White, now more usually known as The Bishop of Baghdad, who has been away from Israel for far too long, happily, he is again engaged in work here and will, hopefully, be visiting Israel more regularly. Just before writing this, we received the news that this morning he has become extremely ill (Andrew suffers from Multiple Sclerosis) and was on his way to hospital in Baghdad, he needs all our prayers for his speedy recovery.

On Wednesday we spent the day in Naharia at the Hospital for the Western Galilee in the Opthalmic Department, for Norman to have his second cataract removed  and, as on our previous  visit, were fascinated by the ethnic mix of patients, ranging from ultra-orthodox Jews to Arabs in various traditional garbs, (none of the women with their faced covered, I am happy to report) also many Druze, the men in their unusual loose trousers and tall white hats and various other religious ‘uniforms’ that we were unable to place.  During the Lebanon War, we were told that the hospital received a direct hit from a rocket which destroyed the Ophthalmic Unit. Mentioning that we were going to the hospital to Bridges for Peace Director Rebecca Brimmer on Monday, we were amazed to hear that it was BFP money that had rebuilt the Opthalmic department after the hospital was severely damaged by a rocket during the Lebanon War. We had not realized just how close we were to the Lebanon border until we looked out onto the foothills from the windows of the ward.

NEWS ABOUT ISRAEL THAT YOU ARE UNLIKELY TO FIND IN THE MEDIA

·         A schoolroom desk that is light enough to be carried by two children but offers protection against earthquakes has been designed as a final project by students at Israel’s prestigious Bezalel  Academy of Arts and Design’s industrial design programme.  The desk is made of standard metals that are welded together in such a way that would enable the desks to be manufactured at a relatively low cost.  The design is competing for the 2012 Brit Insurance Designs of the Year award.
Bottom of

  Design duo Arthur Brutter and Ido Bruno

(De Zeen Magazine)

·         We have never thought Israel to be sufficiently ecologically aware when it comes to the recycling of waste products.  We are therefore delighted with recent developments in our Jerusalem suburb of Gilo.  For some years we did have in our road, a very ugly container for plastic bottles which are recycled into garden furniture.  This has now been replaced with a much more attractive one and a second placed at the other end of the road. We have also acquired containers for newspapers, at both ends of the road and now a huge one has appeared near to the ‘makolet’ (grocery shop) for the disposal of all kinds of cardboard cartons.  Things are looking up and we are pleased to see that our neighbours are making very good use of all of these which are full to overflowing by the time they are due to be emptied.  Glass bottles can be returned to the shops and one receives a very small cash reward for doing so but  Israelis still have to learn not to take so many plastic bags at supermarket checkouts but here again, there is an improvement with more and more people taking their own reusable cloth bags out shopping with them.   We now hopefully await containers for other waste products such as used batteries, leather goods etc. as we have seen on visits to the U.K.

·          For the third time in three days Israeli border police have caught Palestinians trying to sneak pipe bombs into Israel, on this occasion it was three bombs.  There have been four separate attempts by Palestinians to get bombs into Israel in the last month.  On May 4^th two Palestinians were arrested trying to enter Israel with backpacks full of bombs and knives.  We are eternally thankful for our vigilant border police. (Taken from The Times of Israel)

·         Among the 120 soldiers honoured for excellence by president Shimon Peres on Israel’s Independence Day was an Arab living in East Jerusalem.  As far as he knows, up to now, he has been the only East Jerusalem Arab serving in the Israeli army.  Only a very few of his family members know about his army service and he never takes his uniform home with him.  “I wanted to serve, I wanted to defend the country, I wanted to serve in order to do something good and something good with my life,” he is quoted as saying. He serves in a Bedouin unit and has been certified as an army medic, it is a matter of great pride to him that now two of his brothers have chosen to follow in his footsteps and have also been drafted into the Israeli army. He hopes to continue his studies, possibly through the army’s higher education programme and one day, become a doctor. Before that, he is looking forward to serving as a role-model for his brothers and helping them through the difficulties of being a soldier in secret.  (The Jerusalem Post)

·         Millions of asthma sufferers can breathe a bit easier thanks to a number of research products coming out of Israel.  These include Or-Akiva’s  Deep Breeze which can be used in hospitals and at home for non-invasive treatment of asthma patients.  There is a portable Personal Wheezeometer from Karmel  Sonix Ltd. which can monitor and store breathing data to detect nocturnal and exercise induced asthma and a new, ‘green’ inhaler from Teva Pharmaceuticals.  Salt rooms can be of enormous help to asthma sufferers and Israel boasts a number of these and is the only country in the world where treatment can be received through national health insurance plans.  (Go to Israel 21C to read more about this subject and other Israeli medical innovations.)

There have been lots of pieces of news that I have wanted to post on our blog lately but it has had other ideas, every so often it goes on strike and shuts me out and I have to wait for my friend and computer guru to come and put it to right, something I seem incapable of doing.

The better weather has tempted us out and about after what has felt like an unusually long and chilly winter and I have been longing to share our enjoyment of living in Jerusalem with everyone who reads our blog. This week saw us back in our very favourite place, the beautiful Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, with the trees the brightest possible green, not yet having collected a layer of summer dust and in full blossom, it could not have looked lovelier.  We also enjoyed it through the eyes of the visitor we took with us,  our neighbour’s carer who is from Rumania, seldom has a day out and had never before been to a zoo.  The excitement of this middle-aged grandmother was like that of a small child’s. It’s hard to say what she and we enjoyed the most, one of our favourite spots has always been, “Squirrel Monkey Look-out,” where one can watch these lively little creatures, in completely natural surroundings, as they enjoy their food, climb trees and chase each other.  An extra treat is when there are babies clinging to their mothers’ backs. The Sumatran Tigers in their magnificent enclosure situated on several levels with a pool and stream running through it is also a huge attraction. It is impossible to see all the exhibits in one visit so we have promised Galena – and ourselves- that we will return in a few weeks to visit the bears, chimps, lions and many other exhibits for which there was not enough time.

The Whol Rose garden, near to the High Court building and Knesset, is another beautiful spot but on this week’s visit we were a little disappointed, the roses were in full bloom, the air fragrant with their scent and the birds singing but, sadly, since its early days, when we volunteered there, it is showing signs of neglect.  Too many weeds, unkempt flower  beds  and rose bushes badly in need of pruning.  The Botanical gardens which we have also recently visited was, in contrast, well-cared for and a riot of colour, with all the spring and early summer flowers in full bloom.

Jerusalem’s Mayor, Nir Barkat, works hard to rid Jerusalem of its image of being a boring,
over-priced, overly-religious city where there is nothing to do and to that end,  puts on all kind of entertainments both to encourage Israelis from other parts of the country to visit and for the benefit of its residents. The most recent of these events was the Jerusalem Ice Festival.  The Mayor had engaged the services of 35 Chinese ice sculptors who had carved scenes of Jerusalem, including the Old City walls, within which frolicked all kinds of animals from the great lion that is a symbol of Jerusalem, to cows, pandas and horses.  Scenes from fairy tales and Biblical stories were also portrayed, all of them exquisitely carved from huge blocks of ice. The area in which the carvings were displayed (Jerusalem’s old train-station compound)had, of course, to be kept extremely cold, making us glad that we owned warm winter coats and gloves unlike most of the other visitors. The other visitors- who were they?  Almost entirely schoolgirls from local Arab schools, many thousands of them, coaches were arriving every few minutes, disgorging a new lot and collecting those who had done the rounds of the exhibition. They were a credit to their schools, modestly dressed with scarf swathed heads and very well-behaved.  Some of them who heard us talking English were happy to exchange a few words with us.

Being a week day morning the day we visited zoo, it was very quiet there except for several coach loads of Arab children, mostly boys this time, who were again, neat and tidy and nicely behaved.  A group of senior Arab boys were being conducted round the rose garden during our visit and were then given a lecture by one of their teachers as they all sat under one of the huge trees.  On our visit to the Botanical Gardens we treated ourselves to lunch at the restaurant situated next to the lake.  Guess who was sitting at the next table –   an Arab mother and daughter, the mother elegantly dressed in traditional Arab garb, long black robe with gold embroidery and her head covered in a loosely draped cream lace scarf.  Please tell us, have the people who persist in calling Israel an Apartheid country ever actually been here?

ISRAEL’S BIRDS

Friends sent us, as a Pesach  greeting, a delightful You-tube link which shows a ceremony which took place recently at the Western Wall, to welcome back the over 80 pairs of resident swifts from their yearly sojourn in Central Africa.  Here is the link so you can enjoy watching it yourselves.  Although a number of the speeches are in Hebrew there are English ones as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kfZpyHdL5ns

As bird-lovers we were delighted that so much importance is attached to the Wall’s feathered inhabitants and so much care taken not to deter them from returning each spring.

SPRING AND AUTUMN MIGRATIONS

Israel is a wonderful country for bird-watchers, being at the junction of three continents, every autumn, 500 million birds of hundreds of different species, fly over Israel, heading south to spend the winter in the warmer weather of Africa, flying back the other way in the spring.  According to Dr. Leshem, Director of Israel’s International Centre for Bird Migration, most birds prefer to fly over land when migrating because it enables them to save energy by  using the warm, thermal air rising off the land below to assist their flights. This means that birds flying south from Northern Europe and Asia to Africa want to avoid the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas and so are funnelled down over Israel and the Palestinian Territories.  This results in Israel being on the second busiest bird migration route in the world, coming second only to Panama.

BIRDING IN EILAT

Although we love and are very interested in birds, in fact, all living creatures, we do not take them quite as seriously as the group of dedicated and experienced bird-watchers that we once joined for a birding excursion while holidaying in Eilat. They were all equipped with special binoculars and some had telescopes on tripods and carried notebooks in which they ticked off the varieties of birds they had seen and when a new variety, not already on their lists was spotted, the excitement was huge.  Suddenly, there was a muted cry of excitement from our guide, he had just spotted, he whispered, “A  Baillon’s Crake.”  We were ordered to follow him quickly and quietly over the small, wooden, bridge ahead  of us as this rare bird was in the narrow ditch below . The group was ecstatic, none had seen this species before and several said that seeing one was one of one of their life’s dreams.  The rest of the party were a lot younger and more agile than ourselves and so everyone except us followed the guide across the very narrow and highly unsafe-looking bridge.  As we stood hesitating, two young men grabbed Lola round the waist and picked her up most unceremoniously and carried her bodily across the bridge which wobbled and creaked alarmingly, “We can’t allow you to miss this wonderful opportunity, one of them whispered in her ear.”  Thankfully, safely on the other side, this amazing and apparently rare bird was pointed out to us, the amount of excitement  that its sighting had generated had given us false expectations, we had expected something exotic, multi-coloured plumes or at least a crested head, but there, dabbling in the mud,  was something that looked, to our untrained eyes, very similar to a common sparrow and a bedraggled one at that.  The rest of the party returned to the starting point, chattering excitedly and boasting about the photographs they had captured while we ignoramuses were left wondering what all the excitement had been about.  Yes, we love birds but are definitely not real twitchers, as dedicated bird-watchers are called. 

At last! An Update.

 

I apologise to anyone who looked at our blog recently to see what was happening in Gilo, they would not have seen anything new for several weeks. Preparing for Pesach plus Norman having an operation for the removal of a cataract, which to avoid a wait of many months, he had done in the hospital in Naharia, left no time for updating the blog .  Happily, all went well and we are now awaiting an appointment to have the second eye done.

It is very many years since we were in Naharia and we were very interested, during our brief visit, to see how totally different it is in every way from Jerusalem. The hospital is a large, sprawling complex, and we must have walked several miles during the course of the day, going from ‘Admissions’ in one building to the clinics for a pre op check-up in another, to the eye department which turned out to be the wrong eye department and, having located the right one, back to the main building for the operating theatre. The entrance takes one through a shopping mall with a variety of eateries, pizzas, falafel and schwarma plus a proper restaurant, a pharmacy, well stocked with all kinds of cosmetics and herbal preparations and a gift shop What we noticed especially was the mix of Arab and Jewish owners and workers and the presence of many Druze residents, the men easily identified by their hats. Inevitably, the operations scheduled for 5 p.m. because our surgeon had noted we had to return to Jerusalem afterwards, a three hour journey, was late, by nearly two hours because of an emergency but otherwise the day went smoothly if long and tiring.

Since I last added to our blog, Purim has passed and we are in the middle of Pesach and summer has come, arriving overnight with a leap of 20 degrees in temperatures. The barbecues are out in full force and the smell of meat cooking and smoke fill the air in the early afternoon and evening. We are going to a barbecue lunch ourselves, at our daughter and son-in-law’s on Friday.

We send belated good wishes for Easter and Pesach to any one who is still bothering to look for news on this site.

FOR LO, THE WINTER IS GONE.

We have just celebrated Purim, recently explained to us in the following succinct terms:  “They tried to destroy us, we survived, now let’s eat!”  Not the only Jewish festival that can be explained in similar vein.  Purim is a festival celebrating a miracle and this year, we experienced a miracle ourselves!  For the first time in the 27 years we have lived in Jerusalem, we enjoyed dry and sunny weather for the festival, in fact, it was warm enough for the  Purim Seudah  that we attended to be held outside, in our friends’ garden.  

PURIM COSTUMES

During the days running up to Purim many schoolchildren wear their costumes to school but they are not as much fun as they used to be when families devised and made their own.  Now cheap and, often nasty, ones and hideous masks are available in the shops and the children, it seems, much prefer them to the more creative, home-made variety.  It was nevertheless,  fun to travel on the bus with a bevy of little Queen Esthers, penguins, rabbits, angels (even if one was wearing thick black tights) playing cards and even Minnie Mouse.  Nice too, that for once, the children were not shivering with cold and carrying umbrellas.  A not so enjoyable sight at Purim is that of youngsters from ultra-orthodox families dressed as soldiers.  This is real make-believe as they will not be doing their bit by serving in the army and makes us and all other families whose children and grandchildren give part of their youth to serving their country, furious.

PESACH IS APPROACHING

Now Purim is over everyone is going into over-drive with their Pesach preparations, the women all boring their friends with details of how many cupboards, drawers etc. they have or have not already cleaned and Kosher L’Pesach foods are already appearing in the super- markets along with shelves loaded with cleaning materials.  Of course, the day after all our windows  have been cleaned, there will be a sharav, accompanied by a sandstorm but that is a yearly occurrence and par for the course if one lives in Jerusalem.

ROCKET ATTACKS

The pleasure of Purim has been greatly overshadowed by the barrage of rocket attacks suffered by residents of the southern part of the country where over 200  rockets have fallen in the space of 4 days.  There have been a number of injuries and a great deal of damage to property.  As we write this, those under bombardment  are enjoying a respite but no one knows how long it will last  and ‘enjoying’ is probably the wrong word to use as so many of the children and many adults too, are suffering the effects of post traumatic-stress  disorder.  The, fortunately, frequent announcement following a rocket attack, “No one was injured and no damage caused,” does not take into account the enormous emotional damage sustained  as the result of days and nights spent in cramped shelters and the stress of having to dash to them immediately on hearing the “Red Alert” warning siren.  In some areas residents have only thirteen seconds between the sounding of the alert and the shell landing.  Fortunately, the Iron Dome defence system has proved successful in this recent wave of attacks in destroying 90 percent of the missiles that were aimed at city centres.  We pray that Israelis in all parts of the country will be allowed to celebrate Pesach peacefully, undisturbed by Red Alerts and explosions.