Strange bedfellows Sarah Palin and Gene Simmons converge on Jerusalem
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Music, Politics, Pop Culture, Travel
The luxurious David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem is going to have some colorful visitors swinging through its revolving doors the next couple of days.
Passersby may be wondering if people dressed up in Purim costumes or the real deal as former Alaska governor and future US presidential candidate Sarah Palin checks in on her first visit to Israel. And as soon as Palin checks out, who else is likely to take her executive suite but Gene Simmons, the outlandish front man for 70s shock rockers Kiss and now a reality show TV star.
Palin will tour Jerusalem and Nazareth and have dinner with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at his official residence in Jerusalem on Monday evening. Palin will be arriving from India, where she delivered an address on Saturday.
“I’m thankful to be able to travel to Israel on my way back to the U.S.,” she said in a statement obtained by ABC News. “As the world confronts sweeping changes and new realities, I look forward to meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu to discuss the key issues facing his country, our ally Israel.”
Hopefully, she’ll leave a tidy room for Simmons, who won’t be meeting with our prime minister but will be arriving with his family including his wife, former Playboy playmate and actress Shannon Tweed, to shoot episodes for their Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels reality show.
The Israeli Simmons was born Chaim Witz in Haifa and speaks fluent Hebrew. His mother is a Holocaust survivor who spent time in Auschwitz, and his family left Israel for the US when he was eight years old.
With all of the country dressed up this week for Purim, it’s just possible that Palin and Simmons will blend right in with the crowd.
Post earthquake: Will Israel suffer a sushi shortage?
Amid the panic over Japan’s nuclear reactor crisis following that country’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, there’s a new concern that may effect Israelis more imminently than radioactive fallout: a shortage of sushi.
Ynet reported last week that Israel relies on a particular type of soy sauce – Kikoman – and that one of the company’s manufacturing plants in Japan was damaged. Israel has already seen delays in delivery, according to Dudi Afriat of the Rakuto Kasei company, which imports the Kikkoman soy sauce
Israel is particularly reliant on Kikoman – the brand makes up 85% of the soy sauce in the country.
Seaweed and wasabi may also be affected, although not sushi rice, which comes to Israel from California. Israel’s supply of sushi rolling mats and chopsticks are made in China and tempura is imported from South Korean.
While worries over sushi are certainly trivial compared to the big picture still unfolding, Israel does love its sushi – Tel Aviv is the fifth city in the world in the consumption of sushi per capita, and fourth in the world in the number of sushi restaurants per capita, says Afriat.
I remember years ago when you couldn’t get decent sushi in Israel. Sushi is now the number two take-away food in Israel. Five years back there were only 20 sushi restaurants in Tel Aviv; today there are 130 – an 800% increase, according to Afriat. In terms of sheer volume, Israel imports 54 tons of rice for sushi a month and 900 kilograms of soy sauce.
Kikoman has five factories around the world, so Israeli sushi aficionados shouldn’t have too much to worry about. But the lesson is clear: the world is intricately interconnected and what happens thousands of miles away can have unexpected ripples. Our thoughts continue to be with the Japanese, where ensuring a steady supply of soy sauce is much lower on the radioactive totem poll.
Foto Friday – Bialik-Rogozin celebrates Purim
Filed under: education, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Immigrant Moments, Movies, News, Politics, Social Justice
Purim in Israel is a great holiday for kids. For weeks now, children around the country have been figuring out — either alone, with their families, friends or the entire class — what this year’s costume will be. The ultimate goal is, of course, to out-do whatever last year’s costume was and show off this year’s model at school, parties and at Adolyada, the ultimate Purim street festival.
Students at Bialik-Rogozin in south Tel Aviv were no exception to the norm, although the school itself is quite exceptional. The majority of its students are children of foreign workers and/or refugees representing a range of nationalities and faiths. Many are under threat of deportation — and not under the kindest of circumstances. (This complicated issue spans the Middle East and is not easily understood by the headlines. The UNHCR and Refugees International sites are good places to start research).
Earlier this month, you may recall, a movie about the school, Strangers No More, won the Oscar for best documentary film.
Tel Aviv was home to the first Adolyada in 1912. There have been many since and each one is special for its own reasons (you can read more about the history here, including the Sheinkin’s Punk Adolyada of the 1980s). What made today’s Bialik-Rogozin’s parade special was that it wasn’t. It was kids just having fun as they were in every other school around Israel.
Parents, teachers and students took to the streets…
IDF soldier saves Palestinian baby
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, health, Israeliness, Life, News
IDF Corporal Levin baby Jude
At the same time that IDF Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz was paying a shiva call to the Fogels at another settlement of Neve Tzuf, a taxi carrying a 20-year-old Palestinian woman in an advanced stage of labor arrived at the gate of the community.
According to Ynet, army paramedic Cpl. Haim Levin, reached the scene followed by civilian paramedics, and discovered the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby girl’s neck.
“When I arrived I saw a woman covered by a blanket in a yellow Palestinian van,” he said. “I moved closer and saw the baby’s head and upper body. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, and the baby was gray and did not move.”
Levin assisted by other paramedics immediately cut the cord, and he then pinched the baby, who started crying. Both the mother and baby were reported to be fine.
Ynet reported that Palestinians from the nearby village of Nabi Salah gathered around the paramedics and thanked them, adding that the baby had been named Jude.
“I volunteered for Magen David Adom since age 15 and it’s the first time I witnessed childbirth,” said Levin. “It was an amazing feeling, to hold the girl that was just born in my arms, and to know that in this complex place we did something good.”
Gadi Amitun, who heads the Magen David Adom team at Neve Tzuf, told Ynet that they often help Palestinians in distress.
“They know we have a skilled medical team here, and in any case of accident or injury they arrive and we help them,” he said.
Ambulance driver Orly Shlomo who helped cut the cord said she had mixed feelings about the incident.
“It was touching, but I couldn’t help but think that a few meters from there, people were sitting Shiva for another baby, who was murdered,” she said. “I was touched to see the face of the new baby, but I also thought about the face of the murdered baby.”
Death and life in the West Bank only days apart and under very different circumstances. Just as the terror attack last week made it difficult to think there’s any possibility of peace, the birth this week made some people realize that there’s no alternative.
Finally some good news in a bad week: Kinneret above the red line
Photo by Yaron Kaminsky (Haaretz)
Finally, after all of the terrible news of the last week – the Fogel family murder in Itamar, looming nuclear meltdown in Japan, Saudi Arabia and Iran preparing to go to battle in Bahrain – here’s something good: earlier this week, the water level of the Sea of Galilee (the Kinneret) topped the “red line” for the first time this year. It now stands at 212.95 meters below sea level.
The government puts the red line, below which serious damage to the lake will occur, at -213.18 meters, so 212.95 is not a huge improvement, but it’s over a meter and a half higher than the Kinneret’s lowest point this winter: on December 11, 2010, the water stood at no more than 214.12 meters below sea level. That was precariously close to the devastating “black line” of -214.4 meters.
The Kinneret’s absolutely lowest point, at least as far as has been recorded in modern times, was -214.87, on November 29, 2001.
None of this means we can start taking longer showers or flushing the toilets more often, at least not yet. The region is still suffering from an ongoing drought and no meteorologist worth his saltwater can say what the coming years will bring.
How high would be too much? If the water rises to anywhere near -208.8, the lakeside city of Tiberius will flood, at which point dam gates are opened, sending water cascading down the Jordan River in the direction of the Dead Sea.
When balmy spring temperatures took over the country in the past three days, weather worriers might have cried out “that’s it, no more rain, we’re all doomed.” Let’s not rejoice too quickly, but the good news from the Galilee might help us cope with the icy winds of change (and radioactivity) billowing around our planet.
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