I used to think it was weird that Israel’s Memorial Day and Independence Day are back-to-back. As the sun sets on Memorial Day, we go from eulogizing to dancing – in the same ceremony. The shift feels jarring.

But this year, I finally understood what Prime Minister Netanyahu referred to as “the unbreakable bond between Memorial Day and Independence Day.”

My husband and I visited Jerusalem’s Mt. Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery and its main military cemetery, on the morning of Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day). The day before, it had been filled with somber families and politicians. The morning after, it was quiet. Bouquets and wreaths, memorial candles and black-beribboned Israeli flags adorned every one of the too-many graves.

The flowers were just starting to wilt. The plastic bags in which they’d come — imprinted with the words “Yehi Zachram Baruch,” “May their memory be a blessing”– overflowed the trash bins. Exactly how many stems, I wondered, did the government purchase and distribute at its 44 military cemeteries to lay at the graves of22,993 men and women killed in the line of defense? How much wax, how much blue-and-white cloth and black ribbon were needed to supply all the candles and flags?

Walking among the rows of tombstones, through the underground memorial to the 69 Dakar submarine sailors lost in 1968, and around the blue pool dedicated to the 140 sailors killed on the SS Erinpura in 1943, we saw that many were under 25 years old at the time they fell, and many were immigrants, like us.

We left Mt. Herzl and got on the light rail, where the mood changed abruptly. Instead of handing out fines, the conductors handed out lollipops and wished everyone a happy holiday. We then met up with our son, daughter-in-law and two little grandchildren for a traditional cookout amid throngs of Israeli families fanning the flames of their grills.

That’s when we understood the connection on a personal level. If not for all the brave men and women who sacrificed their future, we wouldn’t have a present to celebrate. They are the reason we were free to scamper around a Jerusalem park with our grandson and granddaughter on Independence Day, wiping their sticky faces from the residue of s’mores and listening with delight to their “Hebrish” toddler talk.

If Independence Day were separate from Memorial Day as it is in the US, the message might not be as obvious. I really get that now.

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The Hursha event flyer

And then, a major scoop on why it is that the Hursha recycling area never happened. During a ‘heppening’ — Hebrew for a gathering, an event — that was taking place yesterday at the Hursha playground, sponsored by a local Jerusalem political and social action party, a municipality official taking part in the event told a friend that the reason the bins were never put in place is because the space wasn’t planned well, and there was no way the recycling trucks would ever be able to access the bins.

The Hursha, you see, is situated between two streets, Efrata and Korei Hadorot, accessed by what we call a simta, a kind of open alley or path that connects the two streets. The recycling space is at the front of the park, about midway up the simta, formally known as Barzilay Street, and therefore inaccessible to cars or trucks. It’s quite true, there is no way to access large recycling bins and clearly someone in the municipality made a big mistake when they poured the cement for this particular corner.

So that’s it. No cardboard or metal recycling corner for Talpiot, or not yet. And it seems doubtful that the city would post an apology sign, letting us know that they screwed up. Instead, the orange-painted area has become a default hangout space for parents and their toddling kids, until someone comes up with another, better idea.

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Kathleen Reiter, the winner of The Voice.

The 23-year-old Reiter is the daughter of Israelis who moved to Quebec before she was born. Deciding to make aliya last summer, the amateur singer auditioned for the maiden voyage of the show, which was popularized in the US last year.

The Israeli version turned out to be hugely popular and helped elevate the mentors – Shlomi Shabat, Aviv Gefen, Sarit Hadad and Rami Kleinstein – to even more of household names than they were before, and it exposed some seriously talented young singing sensations out there among the Israeli public.
“I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that this is an amazing opportunity for me and a great start to what will hopefully be a great life here in Israel,” Reiter said a week after her televised debut in January.

What happened afterwards may turn out to be one of the great aliya stories in Israeli history.

Here’s a clip of Reiter’s first single, which she sang last night at the finals – “Shout to You”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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I loved her depictions of Israelis: the hairy sabra, the men in undershirts and sandals, kibbutz women in headscarves and shirtsleeves, prim and proper German-Jewish immigrants wearing jackets in the height of summer heat. And I loved the book, which was English on one side, Hebrew on the other, and which I donated some years ago to the Israeli Cartoon Museum in Holon. It was nice to see a copy (not mine) of “In Short, Israel” under glass at the Museum’s opening of a Friedel retrospective but I felt a bit wistful at not being able to reach out, re-read it and re-live the old memories. But that is how it goes with historical artifacts, even those of contemporary history.

At the exhibit, which runs through June 23rd, I did learn more about Friedel Stern herself. She was born in Liepzig, Germany in 1917 and immigrated to Palestine in 1936. During World War II she was one of many who volunteered to serve in the British army, serving alongside a group of young women who later on went on to prominence in the new State of Israel: actress Hannah Meron, former diplomats and politicians Esther Herlitz and Tamar Eshel, political wives Sonia Peres and Leah Rabin, Cafe Tamar proprietor Sarah Stern and many others. According an article in The Jerusalem Post, her caricatures were often used to camouflage dispatches.

Stern studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts, and began her career as a caricaturist in the ‘50s, working at leading newspapers and magazines such as Davar and Dvar Hashavua, LaIsha and Bamahane signed with her trademark signature and a small star (Stern means star in German), focusing on social issues and humorous portrayals of daily life.

“In her heyday as a journalist, Friedel Stern would dress up as different characters – a cleaning lady, a bus conductor, and once even as a man – to provide her readers with amusing reports about her experiences,” writes Yirmi Pinkus in the museum catalogue. “[Her] articles recounted her experiences as a fictitious American tourist and were, of course, accompanied by original caricatures. Friedel strolled through the ‘Persian [Bahai] Gardens’ in Haifa, she was impressed by the dining room in Kibbutz Gesher Haziv, she inspected souvenirs in the Old City in Jerusalem, and was eventually dropped a heavy hint to tip the tour guide.”

She also illustrated books, posters, brochures and was a lecturer at the Department of Graphic Design at Bezalel. From 1944 onwards, she exhibited and participated in exhibitions of both painting and caricature. Her works were presented in galleries and museums in Israel and abroad. She received many awards, including, in 1999, a lifetime achievement award in the field of caricature and painting by the Council of Women’s Organizations in Israel.

Friedel Stern died in October 2006, only weeks before her 90th birthday. According to an article about the new exhibit in Haaretz, “In her will, Stern, the only woman among the group of cartoonists active in Israel during the state’s first decades, bequeathed all her works to the Cartoon Museum. A few months ago, after prolonged legal proceedings, the approximately 10,000 drawings she left finally arrived at the museum’s archive in Holon.

“Before her death, Stern, who had no children, also saw to the establishment of a foundation in her name, which organizes a biannual competition for humorous cartoons, with a prize of NIS 10,000 for amateurs and NIS 25,000 for professionals. A ‘control freak,’ according to people who knew her, Stern stipulated that works of hers be displayed alongside the works in the competition. And indeed this week at the Cartoon Museum they acceded to her wishes, and hung works by Friedel along with dozens of entries in the latest competition.”

Haaretz noted with disappointment that the small size of the Friedel show — and I must agree. It was nice to see some unfamiliar works but I would have welcomed the chance to see a few more pages from In Short, Israel.

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It’s a window that’s been opening gradually for author Leegant, who has been dividing her time since 2007 between Boston and Tel Aviv, where she is the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University.

Sigalit takes out a tissue and wipes her eyes. She is constantly weepy. Her 88-year-old mother is hanging on in an old age home ten minutes from our building, which Sigalit visits for two hours every day when she’s not bringing her mother to her apartment for meals. “It’s not rebellion.” She stuffs the tissue into her pocket. “He really likes German culture. And how can I argue with him? Look at what they produced. Bach. Beethoven. Thomas Mann. Not everyone was Goering and Himmler.” She waves toward my window. “You want to hear the irony? Out there, Ben Yehuda Street? My mother says they used to call it Ben Yehudastrasse after the war. Little German-run shops, tea houses where people sat all day discussing Max Weber. It was schizophrenic. On the one hand, Germany was totally taboo—the first Israeli passports were marked as valid for any country in the world but there—but then they replicated the society as closely as they could.” She pulls herself out of her chair. “I should relax, right? The Germans have been paying for their history for decades; reparations practically built this country.” She goes to the door, puts her hand on the knob. “And all those earnest young volunteers who come on atonement missions: the most apologetic people on the planet.”

For more of Leegant’s work, go to her website, www.joanleegant.com.

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Avraham Terifa

Avraham Terifa is in the eighth grade but he looks like he’s only nine-years-old. A tiny dynamo of a boy, he stands before an audience of several hundred at Jerusalem’s Mishkenot She’ananim concert hall and begins to play his violin. All around the room you can hear jaws start to drop as the music that emerges from his diminutive frame suggests someone twice as big and three times as old.

Avraham is just one of 30 children from the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem who is studying at the Jerusalem Conservatory Hassadna, a unique institution whose mission is to provide music instruction to children between the ages of 3 and 18, “regardless of physical or mental ability, socio-economic level, ethnicity or religious affiliation.”

Avraham is part of a program called “From Risk to Opportunity” which grants full scholarships to children of Ethiopian descent who, more often than not, come from very difficult home environments, rife with poverty and sometimes even abuse. Many of the children are referred to the program by social workers at Jerusalem’s Municipal Welfare Department.

The program was founded by Ruth Mason and Bob Trachtenberg, who have been active in supporting the Ethiopian immigrant community and were disturbed when they realized that, at a friend’s daughter’s dance recital, there were no Ethiopian children represented. Ruth says she thought “what if there are Ethiopian kids with musical talent? Can they develop it? The vast majority of their parents don’t have money for that.”

They established the “From Risk to Opportunity” in 2005 which, in addition to the scholarship, covers rental of a musical instrument, transportation costs and home tutoring.

Meron Moola

Avraham wasn’t the only Ethiopian-Israeli musician to perform at the concert held last week to celebrate the program’s success. Ronit Taklo was equally impressive. Even smaller than Avraham, one might expect this 10-year-old girl to be intimidated by the grand piano in front of her, but her confidence was stirring and the audience was once again riveted. The same for Meron Moola who belted out (in English) the lyrics to “When You Believe” from the animated film “The Prince of Egypt.”

While the music performed was primarily Western classics (Brahms, Mozart and the like) along with that Steven Schwartz movie pop tune, there were also two traditional Ethiopian numbers sung (and danced) by Molokon Patego, a guest performer.

The evening had two celebrities in attendance. Former Supreme Court president Dorit Beinisch’s husband is on the Conservatory’s board and some of the program’s participants played at the swearing in ceremony of the new chief justice. Beinisch presented the children with certificates of appreciation. Belaynesh Zevadia, the Israeli ambassador designate to Ethiopia (and the first Ethiopian-Israeli to become an ambassador) was also in the audience.

The “From Risk to Opportunity” program is exemplary in another way: It does not segregate the children into a separate track for disadvantaged youth as too frequently happens with the Ethiopian community elsewhere in Israel. Rather, the young musicians are fully integrated into the Conservatory’s mainstream program, which provides instructions for 550 talented young people.

The results show: three students have been accepted to the Jerusalem Music Academy High School – the first Ethiopian-Israeli students to be accepted to the prestigious school’s music track.

As for Avraham, he is one of them. His fiddling days, it seems, are just beginning.

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The video is actually several years old, but the experience is the same now as it was then: The siren comes, people scatter, trying to get into bomb shelters or shelter of some kind in the few minutes they have between hearing the sirens and the fall of the rocket. And there they remain, waiting until the calm to emerge into their lives again for a few hours until the next round.

I was upset to hear about the renewal of rockets landing in the south over the weekend, and immediately spent some time reading up on what had happened over the weekend and what it all meant. I thought about it all, and then I turned to something else, since I can, living in Jerusalem where we’re not disturbed by those kind of incidents at the moment. But as a friend of mine pointed out in a Ynet article he read, our apathy is our enemy. The article was written by a 24-year-old Ashdod resident, Nir Tal, who writes:

“What’s most bothersome is our apathy, the apathy of us all. It allows us to play the tragic new game of the southern cities, where we try to guess where a rocket landed after hearing the siren. It allows us to get used to the new situation over the past few years. The apathy is our new enemy, without a doubt. But what are we guilty of? It’s natural.”

I guess so. I know that when I think about what I can do, the only thing I come up with is opening my home to residents of the south, but no one I know down south wants to come here. They want to stay home, even if home may mean a bomb shelter for several nights running. And when I think about going down south for a story later this week, a story that has nothing to do with the current volley of rockets, I consider not going, as it doesn’t make sense to go down south for something that doesn’t have to be written right now, as it isn’t about the current situation, but is more concerned with the non life-threatening matters of culture and life.

When this kind of situation is taking place, you don’t want to be apathetic. But you also wonder what you can actually do to help.

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The seven shekel sign

Why not indeed? We exited off Highway 1, right near the airport, veering around the curved road into the parking lot of the fast lane center, so to speak. This is where you can 1) Register for the fast lane (also doable online, but this is actually more convenient) 2) Park your car for free and take a free shuttle into Tel Aviv 3) Pay at the turnstile to enter the fast lane.

Luckily, as we were short on time, as usual, my friend had already registered for the fast lane on a previous trip. That left us the task of entering the two-lane turnstile in order to pay our seven shekels and enter the fast lane. The turnstile, however, did not make sense. If this fast lane is considered the most advanced in the world, why is it that it is impossible to get the car close enough to the self-serve turnstile without having to actually get out of the car in order to pay? And once you do start getting out of the car, a cranky man comes over to take you to task for not getting close enough. He appears to be a tollbooth operator, but not the kind that I’ve ever experienced in my toll booth situations.

Nevertheless, we paid the seven shekels — the price seems to be calculated based on number of passengers in the car and traffic on the road — and headed toward the fast lane entrance. As usual, signage was a little confusing but we figured it out and got on our way. Luckily, we didn’t need to get off at Kibbutz Galuyot, the first exit on Tel Aviv’s Ayalon Highway, as the fast lane doesn’t allow you to exit there.

We arrived at our final destination, just off the LaGuardia exit, with minutes to spare. Were we saved by the fast lane? Probably. But I was not impressed by the system or service. Just to juxtapose it with our next transporation-related segment: We entered a parking lot only to find that all the spots were reserved for the various insurance companies in the building (why did they let us in if there’s nowhere to park?) We finally made our way to the exit, and the parking operator told us he had a parking spot just for us. Where? In the non-authorized spot behind his booth, between the entrance and exit lanes to the parking lot. Quixotic? Yes. But the car was waiting for us four hours and forty shekels later. At that point, we just drove home slowly.

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Why am I mentioning the Nachman Gutman Museum? Because of a happy coincidence that took place last weekend. We were in Tel Aviv for Shabbat with family and friends, and had spent time Friday at the Carmel shuk, eating hummous and buying treats and then hanging out and relaxing. On Shabbat morning, some of us wanted to go to shul, while others were happy to walk on the beach or in nearby Neve Tzedek (it was next to our hotel and is considered to be the first Jewish neighborhood of Tel Aviv outside Jaffa). We knew that there was a Masorti synagogue, Kehillat Sinai, in Tel Aviv. (Full disclosure: My BIL is a Conservative rabbi.)

We also knew that said Masorti shul was supposed to move to new digs in Neve Tzedek, at the new Schechter Center for Jewish Culture, which is otherwise known as Beit Lorenz, an historic Templar building where writer S.Y. Agnon once sat and drank coffee.

But as these things happen, the building wasn’t completely ready yet, and Kehillat Sinai is temporarily meeting at the Nachman Gutman Museum, which is just across the street from the rabbi’s house. I could not have been happier. This way, I could get in some shul, visit the museum and show it to my friends, and be in Neve Tzedek.

We strolled over, enjoying the narrow streets and gentrified but still elegant architecture of the neighborhood. When we got to the museum, I realized that the shul is using a meeting room, but the museum is open on Saturdays — this is Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem — and you have to buy tickets to get in, as usual. Clearly, it would’ve been too easy to go to shul and get to see a favorite museum. So I sat in shul in any case, enjoying the mixed crowd that Kehillat Sinai draws, including some tourists, some transplants and a few Israelis who have clearly returned to religion the Masorti route. And what was most amusing was seeing the odd-museum goer walk in, buy tickets (at the gift shop next to our ‘sanctuary’), and then stick their heads in to the shul to stare and clearly wonder, “What is going on in here?”

To be a Jew, in shul, in a public manner, in Tel Aviv, can be awkward. Particularly when it’s viewable to those who are not doing the same. But the flip side was how right it felt to be using this building for yet another purpose, and that it all works. You can spend your Shabbat strolling, museum hopping, praying or some combination thereof. I felt Gutman would have approved.

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To understand what had the entire country looking hopefully eastwards, let’s take a look at snowy Jerusalems gone by.

One of the nicest photo-essays about coping with Israel’s bad winter weather can be found at none other than bus company Egged’s website. Oh, the irony! We may complain bitterly about their “the customer is always wrong” company policies, the drivers’ rude and aggressive behavior on the road and inside the bus, their tendency towards strong-armed monopolistic practices (with a healthy dash of nepotism thrown in for good measure) and horrible taste in bus depot design but when the going gets tough, we get going — to Egged.

According to the Egged essay (in Hebrew), the winter of 1950 was a particularly bad one, especially because many new immigrants to the young State of Israel were still living in makeshift shanties. “Nonetheless, it was a memorable experience for both children and adults and looking back, they remember it with a smile and longing.”

Hmmm… perhaps. Happier documentation may be found in this pre-State film from news service British Pathe, which captures the Jerusalem winter of two years earlier, in 1948.

Jerusalem in White aka Jerusalem Under Snow

A very sweet photo essay (in Russian) about the 1968 snowstorm describes the adventures of three friends who brave the storm in order to visit a snow-clad Jerusalem.

News Report: Snowy Day in Jerusalem, 1980

And the most recent big storm, which was in 2008.
Jerusalem in Snow from All About Jerusalem.com

Yes, Jerusalem did let everyone down this year but snow buffs can take heart: there are still a few more weeks of this miserable weather so maybe you’ll get your wish. As for me, I’m holding out hope for an early thaw.

© Леонид

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