Meet Noam Dolgin from the Green Zionist Alliance
Jewish religious values can help green The Holy Land.
Noam Dolgin is a Jewish environmental educator and the executive director of the Green Zionist Alliance (GZA). Based in Vancouver, Canada, he travels regularly around North America teaching about Jewish environmental values and Israel’s environment.
Green Prophet blog sits down with Noam to learn a little more about the Green Zionist Alliance and what it does. Read more
Hamshush time
Filed under: Business, General, Israeliness, Movies, Music
If it’s the weekend of December 3-5, then it’s the second Hamshushalayim, which is one of those Hebrish idioms for Hamshush — that’s a combo of Hamishi, Thursday, and Shishi, Friday and Yerushalayim, Jerusalem. But what it really means in this context is three long weekends of various Jerusalem events, from plays and musical performances to bar specials and city tours.
It’s all part of Mayor Nir Barkat’s efforts to liven up the city of Jerusalem, and make it a happening place, rather than a place of ‘incidents’ and situations.
“We broke all records this past summer with festivals and events,” he says, whipping out the first statistic: the doubling of the local culture budget. “Journalists don’t always grasp that the public differentiates between a demonstration and a performance, even if they are just 300 or 500 meters apart. Beautiful things are happening in Jerusalem parallel to the demonstrations, even if they lend themselves less to media coverage,” he told Ha’aretz last weekend.
The events are definitely geared toward students, university students that is, in an effort to keep them in Jerusalem. But there’s lots of cultural stuff going on, so it’s worth checking out.
Here’s the PDF brochure in Hebrew, and a few events that I’ve selected that look worthwhile:
*The Psik Theater group will be performing for free on Alrov Mamilla Avenue at 9, 10 and 11 pm on Thursday night.
*All Cinematheque movies are just NIS 28 for all Hamshushalayim participants, throughout the weekend.
*Nighttime tours of City of David, between 9 pm and 12 am, NIS 10-NIS 20 per ticket.
*Craft fairs at the ICCY and on Bezalel Hakatan (in town), on Friday morning.
And if you can’t make it this weekend, there’s always next weekend.
Looking at things (ir)rationally
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, War
Signing in at the induction site
Sending a kid off to the army is alot like coming to live here in the first place – a big leap of faith. It’s not really a rational decision – although for many, alot of thought has surely gone into it. But most of us assume that things will work out in this country, and there is some reason why we should be living here.
With the army as well, there’s the rational and irrational. Of course we need soldiers to protect our country – moreso here than just about anywhere else. Rationally there’s not much of a choice -unless you’re haredi, or Arab, or … well, let’s not get into that can of worms.
Heading to the bus with a lollipop.
In fact, one could argue that sending your child to the army is the ultimate objective in making aliya – we conceive little Israeli babies in order to increase the Jewish population of Israel and stock the fighting forces.
Obviously, like alot of people we knew who made aliya with us way back when, there was a naive hope we possessed that by the time we had kids and they turned 18, there would be no need for military conscription, and there would exist only a voluntary army like in the US. That dream seems as far off today as it did 25 years ago.
The point of no return for tomorrow's soldier.
Bidding farewell to Sarit yesterday, amid the other families hugging their child-turned-soldier for the last time (the next time we hug them, they’re not going to be the same people – even if it’s only two days later for Shabbat), I was touched by the irony of it.
We spend 18 years of our child’s life protecting them from harm, nurturing their soul, giving them a sense of security. Then one day, you simply hand them over to a body where there’s going to be bullets, tanks, explosions – things that you’ve been avoiding like the plague until now.
It’s hardly a rational thing to do for a parent, isn’t it? But unfortunately in the reality of Israel, for anyone who cares about the country, doing anything else would be irrational.
Everybody loves Raym…er…. Sha’are Zedek??
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, health, Israeliness, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Movies
Phil and Monica Rosenthal - gotta love them.
Everybody Loves Raymond creator and executive producer Phil Rosenthal is teaming up with Dreamworks Studio and Tel Aviv-based TTV Production to produce a six-hour documentary series focusing on Jerusalem through the prism of the capital’s Sha’are Zedek Hospital.
Scheduled for release in 2011, the as yet unnamed project is going to highlight contemporary Jerusalem and reveal the various social, political and cultural nuances that characterize the city through the lives of doctors and nurses in the hospital.
It’s unclear from the press release that announced the partnership whether the film is going to be a real documentary or a promotional tool for the hospital, but with Rosenthal and Dreamworks involved, it’s bound to be high caliber.
Working along with Rosenthal – who’s wife Monica played the role of Robert’s wife ‘Amy’ on the long-lived comedy series starring Ray Romano – will be screenwriter Jeremy Garelick, who recently wrote the hit comedy The Hangover, and veteran Israeli producer and head of TTV, Zafrir Kochanovsky.
“Jerusalem is a place that demands to be explored through the medium of documentary filmmaking and we believe that medicine is a perfect conduit to do so,” Rosenthal said in the press release. “Dreamworks has long sought to create a documentary piece that conveys Jerusalem but we wanted to avoid limiting it to the more obvious undertones of politics or religion. In discovering Sha’are Zedek we believe we have found a perspective that allows us to tell this story in an original and no doubt captivating way.”
The Rosenthals landed in Israel midweek to meet with Kochanovsky and his team and discuss the script. They will also attend a benefit evening Wednesday night – Everybody Loves Sha’are Zedek – for the hospital’s new Wilf Children’s Hospital. The attendees will enjoy multimedia presentations by the Rosenthals focusing on the power of humor and their experiences in developing one of television’s most successful sitcoms.
I’ve often thought that a hospital in Jerusalem was an ideal location to display the diverse cultural tapestry that engulfs the city and reveal that there’s alot more coexistence going on than anyone – including most Israelis – realize. Jews and Arabs are all doctors, nurses and patients, the families of those hospitalized are thrown together in a common bond, and it’s there that sometimes, the best comes out in people. If the planned documentary succeeds in showing that, then it will truly be worth seeing.
Hanging with Bambi
Filed under: Environment, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness
We headed out today to Nahal David, David Stream, one of the two year-round streams in the Ein Gedi National Park, on the eastern border of the Judean Desert, on the coast of the Dead Sea. The ‘we’ was myself, baby boys, and two friends visiting from overseas, Bruce and his almost-ten-year-old daughter Ronit. The goal of the trip was for Ronit to swim — or float — in the Dead Sea, something she’d been waiting to do. I suggested the add-on activity of Nahal David, since it’s an easy walk (or so I remembered), and has a couple of waterfalls.
It was fairly easy, although it was my first time hoisting and carrying one of my boys on a carrier on my back, and climbing up and down stone-hewn stairs and slippery slopes. What was phenomenal was the wildlife we saw along the way. On our way in, as we tried to slip past the MASSIVE group of high school girls on a school trip, we spotted a few ibex among the trees, or as the teenagers called them, “Bambis.” Funny, those Israelis.
But better yet, on our way out, after having frolicked in one of the waterfalls and bypassed the school groups, we came upon a whole family of hyrax, a guinea pig-like creature, all of whom were sitting on large boulders and just staring at us. According to Wikipedia, the word ‘rabbit,’ or ‘hare’ was used instead of ‘hyrax”‘many times in some earlier English Bible translations because European translators of those times had no knowledge of the hyrax (Hebrew שָּׁפָן shafan), and therefore no name for them. There are references to hyraxes in the Old Testament, particularly in Leviticus 11, where they are described correctly as lacking a split hoof and therefore being not kosher. It also details that the hyrax chews its cud, however this observation is due to the habit of the hyrax chewing without having ingested anything, resembling the chewing of cud (the hyraces studied by the Hebrews may have been in captivity). Hyrax tend to make chewing motions when they feel threatened. I would guess that they felt threatened when they were in captivity.
Moving on from the hyrax, we came upon another, well, herd, of ibex, just wandering around, even on the path where we humans were trodding. They’re smaller than deer, although the dads of the herd are bigger, with longer horns and this great ‘goatee’ that would look great on a human (which, hey, is probably why humans have adopted goat hair growth). In Israel, ibex are almost as ubiquitous as deer are in the States, although they don’t wander through our backyards. Even so, I don’t think I’ve ever been this close to one.
Nature. It’s a good thing.
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