365 days of inspiration in new app

January 1, 2012 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Art, History and Culture 

Israel365 app

Got an iPhone? Love the diverse and often dazzling landscapes of Israel? Enjoy a bible quote every now and then? Then a free iPhone app from a newly minted immigrant, Rabbi Tuly Weisz, should keep your fingers swiping in inspirational bliss.

Weisz’s app, Israel365, is a visual calendar of sorts. Each day has a different picture and quote from the bible. The quotes are in English and Hebrew with transliteration. And that’s it. Nice and simple. Well, not quite: If you want to dig deeper there’s also a Hebrew lesson based on the passage. But most people will probably just look at the pictures.

Which is absolutely fine, because they’re really quite pretty. Weisz assembled some 30 Israeli photographers who donated their pictures to the app. Inspiration aside, the app is also a form of subtle advertising  (if you like what you see, you can contact the photographers and Israel365 takes a 50% cut).

Weisz says he got the idea after reading that, when Herzl was considering establishing the state of Israel in Chicago, a Christian pastor named William Blackstone set out to visually illustrate the connection of the Jews to Israel, not Africa, by underlying every passage referring to the Promised Land in the bible.

Weisz was fascinated and did the same thing. “I couldn’t get over the fact that [references to Israel were] on nearly every page,” he says. Before you could say Holy Sand Dune, Weisz had made aliyah, launched a non-profit called “Teach for Israel” (it connects rabbis back in the States with their local Christian Zionist communities, something Weisz was already doing as a congregational rabbi in Ohio), and found an enterprising software developer who could get the app out in time for the beginning of the 2012 calendar year.

Weisz has big plans for Israel365, including versions that will run on the Android and other mobile platforms, along with the addition of more languages. “Since the content is limited to 365 bible verses and the bible already exists digitally in other languages, this should be very do-able,” he says.

The app is officially published by the United with Israel organizations, which calls itself “the world’s largest pro-Israel social community with nearly 900,000 supporters on its Facebook page alone.

You can get a preview of the app here.

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Foto Friday – 2011 beginnings to be continued

December 30, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Entertainment, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Picture of the Week, Politics, Pop Culture, Social Justice 

2011 was a year of tentative beginnings. Burgeoning consumer awareness sparked by skyrocketing cottage cheese prices brought Israeli citizens to the streets. They then proceeded to sleep on those same streets for the rest of the summer in protest of the high cost of housing. The peaceful tent city campaign culminated in a really big rally…
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But for most of the summer, it looked like this…
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Sadly, it still does look like that in Jerusalem’s Sacher Garden, where the truly homeless continue to reside in the cold and wet. The next chapter in the Social Justice movement remains to be written in 2012.

Some chapters were closed in 2011, which marked the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the homecoming and start of a brand new life for Gilad Shalit after over five years of imprisonment by Hamas.
Photo: IDF Spokesman via Wikimedia Commons

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak were present at Shalit’s release — so much so that they were accused of being publicity hounds (does no one know anything about politicians?) — and Netanyahu’s image was used to create the first Israeli photo meme.

There were other beginnings as well. A rare sand cat was born at the Ramat Gan Safari…
Photo: Tibor-Jager

Jerusalem held its first marathon and got its first Light Railway…
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Dead Sea was not selected as one of the New 7 Natural Wonders of the World…

Photo: New7Wonders

On the other hand, the nomination campaign may have served to draw public attention to the salt lake’s plight — just this week, Israel Corporation subsidiary Israel Chemicals reached an agreement with the Ministry of Finance on terms for the Dead Sea’s rehabilitation from excessive salt harvesting. It’ll be interesting to see if this promise, along with many others made in 2011, will be fulfilled in 2012. Here’s to that, and to a hopeful and happy New Year!

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Hanukkah at the Dead Sea

December 26, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Religion, Travel 

The country is in full Hanukkah mode this week. Arriving late afternoon at a Dead Sea hotel for an overnight stay, we were kicking ourselves for forgetting to bring our Hanukkia with us in order to light candles.

But soon after checking in, and returning from a quick walk to the Dead, we returned to the hotel, and found tens of guests in the lobby with hotel staff lighting around 15 different hanukkiyot. We joined them – some observant, some not, some even non-Jewish tourists (and without any separation between men and women) – and then participated in singing a few Hanukkah songs. A hotel worker wheeled out a tray of fresh sufganiyot and passed them out to everyone.

Even though I appreciated the gesture, I’ve already eaten my share of fried dough and jelly for the next few years, so I passed, and headed to the hotel spa. Not a bad way to spend the sixth day of Hanukkah.

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Nostalgia Sunday – The sevivon spin

December 25, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, design, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Religion 

Hanukkah’s traditional motifs are the menorah, sufganiyot jelly doughnuts, potato latkes and the dreidel spinning top. Here in Israel, the latter two have lost in popularity in recent years. Face it, in terms of speed, color and excitement, playing dreidel pales in comparison to even the lowest freebie computer game. (And for some reason, deep-fried balls of dough dusted in sugar or coated in gooey frosting have gained on the hearty potato pancake. This probably due to effective marketing. It’s certainly not because one’s caloric content and health benefits outweighs the other’s).

Some years ago, to salvage the industry, dreidel-makers began producing more upscale and eclectic versions for collectors of contemporary Judaica. Styles encompassed everything from modern contemporary to silver and gold filigree and, of course, chocolate. The sevivon, as it’s known in Hebrew, has become less of a children’s game, more of a conversation piece.

In secular Israel, toy stores very often sell round tops at Hanukkah time, which is, of course, a mistake. A true sevivon has four sides, each emblazoned with a letter: nun, gimel, heh and peh — ness gadol hayah poh, a great miracle happened here. This, as opposed to the Diaspora, where the fourth side of the dreidel is marked with a shin for the word sham — a great miracle happened there. Clearly a Hanukkah holiday symbol throughout the generations.

But all that is just spin, if you’ll pardon the pun. The true origins of the dreidel have less to do with Hanukkah and more to do with keeping the children occupied, as is often the case with a week-long holiday. According to an essay (in Hebrew) by Israeli collector Rachel Bar Lev, “We all played sevivon in our childhood… but collectors know that the picture is far more complex: playing with tops is universal and prevalent in all continents of the globe. The top is not Jewish in origin and its connection to Hanukkah is late. In addition, tops appear in a range of shapes, sometimes with accessories to assist.” Bar Lev notes that archeologists have found tops dating back to as early as 2000 BCE.

“The tops most widely known in Israel are those with four sides, but in the world there are also tops with six and eights sides… Tops are also used in gambling. On such tops you can find letters instructing the player to pay the others, take the winnings, etc… So, for example, in Italy, the letters P,O,M,N are on the sides, meaning Pone ‘put’ (pay into the pot); Omne, ‘all’ (you won it all); ‘Medium’ (half, take half the pot); and ‘Nihil’, zero, nothing (you lost).”

“The Hanukkah sevivon, whose identifying characteristics are four sides, spindle and point, came to us from Germany. On Christmas in December, German children would play with tops to win nuts.” The tradition spread to the neighboring Jewish communities; Bar Lev says that it was the Jews of Poland who brought the dreidel game to the pre-State Land of Israel. “We find the German influence on our sevivon in the letters engraved on it – N,G,H,S – which encapsulate the instructions in German for playing the game.”

“As part of the ‘conversion’ process, the sevivon’s acronym was Hebracized to nun, gimel, heh, shin and received a new meaning: ness gadol hayah sham… intended to mask the game’s non-Jewish origins… As the years have gone by, it turns out that this creation of a link between Hannuka and the spinning top has been so successful that many tend to believe that the sevivon has always been a Jewish game.”

A note about the word “sevivon”. The root word is “svv” (“to turn”) and, according to Wikipedia and other sources, it was invented by a 5-year old Itamar Ben-Avi, the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who was the driving spirit behind modern Hebrew. However, the first usage of the word in print was on December 24, 1897, by journalist David Isaiah Silberbusch, who credited himself with the new term.

The poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik created a different word, “kirkar” (from the root “krkr” – “to spin”) and author Mendele Mocher Sforim created the word “hazarzar” (from the root “hzr” – “to return”) but neither of these were adopted.

Dreidel, by the way, comes from the Yiddish word “dreyen” (“to turn”). This is similar to German word “drehen”, which means same thing.

Dreidels have become so identified with Hanukkah, they appear in all things Hanukkah-related, including the American-Israeli Hanukkah stamp, the first stamp ever issued jointly by Israel and the United States.

Referring to the joint Israeli-US stamps, Bar Lev writes, “We can see the dilemma of which acronym to use in the First Day Issue envelopes. We find sevivons with the letters N,G,H. But the side that is supposed to have the letter P (for stamps issued in Israel) or S (for stamps issued in the US) — is hidden. Thus is created a philatelic item familiar to children in Israel and the Diaspora as one.”

A lovely PowerPoint presentation about spinning tops — Jewish, Israeli and non — is available for download here, courtesy of the wonderful Nostal.co.il site.

Proving that kids today do still play the game: just today, 15 children from New York, accompanied by their parents on the UJA-Federation of New York’s Winter Family Mission to Israel, met with 20 Ethiopian children at the Mevasseret Zion Absorption Center near Jerusalem to eat sufganiot and make glitter glue dreidels together.

Photo: Ilan Halperin, courtesy of UJA-Federation of New York.

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Hadarat Nashim

December 23, 2011 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, education, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Politics, Religion 

On my way downtown this morning on the Egged bus (the 74, which makes its way from the southern end of Jerusalem to the northern end via Derech Hevron, then onto Keren Hayesod and King George), we sidled alongside a protest of some sorts, taking place on the street, along King George. We on the bus all looked on in interest, trying to figure out who and what was being protested.

For my part, I noticed the, by and large, lack of kippot or covered heads for women, so it was a clearly mostly secular crowd. It wasn’t until I saw one of the signs that mentioned “הדרת נשים”, that I realized it was another protest, one of many of late, demanding respect for the exclusion of women. And so, when the woman across from me — wearing a sheitel — asked what the protest was about, I was able to tell her. And she nodded, along with others in the bus.

The only reason I now know the term hadarat nashim, or exlusion of women, (I originally wrote dignity of women, as it was first described to me), is because it’s become a catchphrase in our daily language over the last few weeks. After the recent spate of incidents on buses, with women being told to sit in the back, to segregate themselves from the men, people are speaking out in the streets, in the newspapers, and on the buses.

I learned the term at a parlor meeting with Councilwoman Rachel Azaria, who’s becoming well-known in these parts for her great work on the part of young families in Jerusalem, but primarily for having her portfolio taken away by the mayor for petitioning the High Court of Justice to immediately remove gender barriers in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods that were erected during Sukkot. It was once more of a ‘gender studies’ kind of term, a friend of mine told me, whose sister teaches gender studies, but has now become much more common, because we appear to need to understand the concept in these parts.

In the meantime, back to the protest. Got off the bus, just across from the plaza in front of the former Hamashbir department store, where the protesters were gathering and dancing to some Hadag Nachash being blasted from the speakers.

And who should I bump into but Rachel Azaria, just making her way into the crowd, and getting ready to speak. We said hi, and I told her thanks for teaching me the term hadarat nashim. She responded, “You would have learned it sooner or later.” True, I told her, but more memorable to learn it from her.

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