Even Israeli soldiers need friends

March 31, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Blogging, coexistence, General, Israeliness, Life, War 

Liran is one of the many IDF soldiers awaiting your questions on Friend a Soldier

If anyone has a worse image in the world than Charlie Sheen, it just might be the Israeli soldier. Whenever they’re shown on TV, it’s almost always doing something aggressive – which of course is the nature of their business.

In Israel, we know that under that IDF uniform is … us – our ordinary selves, our children, neighbors and colleagues, all for better or worse. But to the outside, we seem like a lethal force that is justifiably fighting Hamas in the South, Hezbollah in the North and getting into all kinds of tangles in the West Bank.

That’s why a group of former soldiers who now do their annual reserve duty have decided to launch a PR initiative in order to show a different – gentler and kinder – side of the army.

Their website – Friend a Soldier - invites vistors to bombard them with questions about anything – their service, their lives, their political views and their feelings.

The organization’s founder, 24 years-old Daniel Nisman, told Shalom Life that “many people see soldiers as nothing more than a uniform. I wanted people to see the human side of the IDF.”

Friend a Soldier is an interactive website that essentially allows users to ask the former Israeli soldiers, who now act as goodwill ambassadors, anything that is on their minds whether it’s about their service, the army life or the army’s legitimacy as well as the Middle East conflict, Israeli politics and more.

The visitors who want to ask a question pick an ex-soldier (each with his own expertise) and then submit their question. That soldier then responds to the question, as best as he knows how to, based on his knowledge and personal experience. The site is not affiliated with the IDF nor the government and the views expressed on it don’t represent official army policy.

So, if you always wanted to find out how to make ‘botz,’ the right amount of chocolate spread for that perfect midnight sandwich snack, or want to get serious and get inside the heads of Israeli soldiers on the front lines of defending the country, give Friend a Soldier a try.

Tags:

Car decorations

March 31, 2011 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Business, design, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life 

The car being decorated next door

Until today, I thought that here in Israel, one only decorated cars with ribbons and flowers for weddings. Turns out, I was wrong, and they can be decorated for bar and bat mitzvahs, as well as other major life cycle events, such as a brit milah or simchat bat. I learned this as I watched my French neighbors next door spend a good chunk of the morning decorating their Chevrolet, quite well, I might add. (You can usually tell the self-decorated cars from the professional, florist-decorated cars — yes, people really do pay florists several hundred shekels to decorate their cars for those special events — and while I wouldn’t say this looked professional, it was certainly neat and tidy, with evenly spaced loops of ribbon along the side of the car.)

Anyway, turns out the neighbors were decorating their car for their daughter’s sweet sixteen party — yes, I was surprised as well — and she came out of the building all decked out in purple taffeta and black lace. At which point, anyone passing by called out a “Mazal tov!” Friendly. This was clearly no MTV “My Super Sweet 16″ in which said celebrant has a massive party and is given a brand-new car at the end. Still, kind of over the top for Arnona, Jerusalem.

A professionally decorated car

Nevertheless, for anyone who does need to know how to decorate a celebrant’s car, there is, thank goodness, an Israeli company that has invested in this process and can show you exactly what to do. Check out Haponpon (which means the pom-pom), and you’ll never wonder again.

As for figuring out when and how to hang up signs on the highway pointing to your wedding hall location, I have yet to find an entrepreneur who’s taking care of that. But we’ll keep on looking.

Tags: , ,

Wedding by Ikea

March 30, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Israeliness 

Ikea store (sorry no photos of the happy couple)

Haaretz has an article on how the entry of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea into the Israeli market has created a design revolution. While most of the piece delved into the business of Ikea and what Carmela Jacoby Wellek, head of the interior design department at the College of Management in Rishon Letzion, labeled the “democratization” of design, there was one tidbit that caught my eye: weddings by Ikea.

By that, I don’t mean a wedding decked out in Ikea furniture. Rather, a wedding staged at Ikea itself. OK, I go too far. But Asaf and Noa Miron did at least stage their wedding photographs at the Netanya branch of Ikea a few months before it burned down.

The two were snapped in the parking lot in front of the blue cube-shaped store, laying on beds in the bedroom section, and modeling the latest stainless steel appliances in the kitchen division.

Why did they do it? Are they Ikea addicts? Not really. “Yes, we shop there,” Asaf told Haaretz. “I don’t know if we have a lot, but it’s more than a little.”

That said, the photo session was more of a lark than a mission statement. “We thought it was an original idea (although) later we heard that other people had done it too,” Asaf said.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. When Ikea first opened, I took the family to the coast just to walk through. We ogled a plenty, but only bought a couple of kitchen mittens and some salad tongs.

And Ikea has fulfilled other social needs in Israel. Apparently, according to the article, religious singles in the vicinity of the store are using it as a neutral meeting space for first dates. That’s a lot cheaper than the lobby of the Tel Aviv Hilton. And think of the icebreaker opportunities. “Gee this bed feels a bit too firm, what do you think?” Or “Look at these lovely childrens bunk beds. And how many kids were you thinking of having?”

Tags: , ,

Israeli doctor goes from Jerusalem bombing to Japan earthquake

March 30, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, Israeliness, News, Social Justice 

Israel's field hospital in Japan.

Israel’s field hospital in the Miyagi district of Japan is up and running following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. And the first patient treated this week at the facility – set up by 50 medical staff from the IDF, Home Front Command and Medical Corps – was Minamisanriko Mayor Jin Sato, who had suffered broken ribs.

He was examined by the commander of the medical team, deputy to the IDF Chief Medical Officer, Col. Dr. Ofir Merin, Deputy Director-General of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.

ISRAEL21c reported that only last week, Merin was frantically treating victims of the terror bombing in Jerusalem. And in 2010 following the Haiti earthquake, Merin played a similar role running a unit of the Israeli field hospital there.

“The events in Haiti, as well as our extensive experience dealing with mass casualty incidents, have given Israeli medical personnel an important advantage when it comes to setting up these field hospitals and providing comprehensive support and care for those who are desperately in need,” Merin said before leaving on the mission to Japan.

After his arrival in Japan, Merin wrote the following entry about his experiences so far in the field hospital.

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 – 10:15 pm:

At 5 AM, after a 14-hour flight and another 7-hour drive, we finally reached the small town in Northern Japan called Kurihara. This city was largely saved from any real damage.

After my morning jog (in 0 degree weather) we left about two hours later for a small village near the ocean, called Minamisanriko.

In comparison to the relative calm we saw upon arrival, in Minamisanriko we saw before us an area that looks like the aftermath of an atomic bomb. EVERYTHING is destroyed.

The village is gone. Half of the 17,000 people died from the tsunami. The damage from the earthquake itself was barely anything, but the tsunami caused the devastation. The people who survived are the refugees you read about on the news – completely homeless. These are the ones we came to assist.

With light snow coming down, we were able to assemble our “medical center” in 4-hours. This is essentially a clinic, but with both imaging and laboratory abilities.

Overcoming the cultural barriers is a formidable issue. The Japanese are not easy about letting foreigners treat them. But this morning after an opening ceremony with the ambassador and the mayor of the town, the mayor himself who was injured from the tsunami, asked to be seen.

He was injured in the chest so I was given the chance to see him, and after x-rays and an exam he was discharged. He is fine, but all the local media took pictures, and so the patients are now beginning to stream in.

The hospital in the Miyagi district is the second one set up by Israel since the quake – the previous being the first field hospital set up by any country in the fishing city of Minamisanriko.

Tags:

Liz Taylor, ala ha’shalom

March 29, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Movies, Pop Culture, Religion 

Given all the world strife, haven’t had time to really focus on the death of Elizabeth Taylor, that screen icon who — who knew? — was such a longtime friend of Israel. Here she is in a photo from the Ben Gurion University archives, when she visited in 1983 — she also met with Prime Minister Menachem Begin during that trip.

Turns out, as I learned from Nathan Burstein’s Washington Post op-ed, that Liz converted to Judaism in 1959, supposedly before her wedding to Eddie Fischer but had been considering the move for some time, specifically after her third marriage to Mike Todd, who had been born Avrom Goldbogen.

And once she did convert, following a six-month conversion course with a local L.A. rabbi, she took it seriously, even if she seemed to take her marriages less than seriously. She purchased $100,000 in Israel Bonds in 1959, prompting the United Arab Republic to ban her movies; sang a Hebrew duet in Moscow, and appealed for refusenik Jews in Russia.

Here she is with Richard Burton on their 1975 trip to Israel, a short clip at the Western Wall:

Tags: , , ,

Page 1 of 1112345...10...Last »

 

© 2012 ISRAELITY | Site by illuminea | Sitemap