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#46

Mazal tov, James Snyder! The director of the Israel Museum was recently included in a pretty prestigious list of the 100 most influential people in the art world, as compiled annually by the Journal des Artes, the French sister-edition of The Art Newspaper.

Snyder was 46 on the list which includes collectors such as Leonard Lauder, colleagues Glenn Lowry, director of The Museum of Modern Art (James’ previous place of employment); artists Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor (whose sculpture current graces the redesigned museum); architects Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid; designers Ron Arad and Philippe Starck, who have their own Israel connections (Arad designed the well-regarded Holon Design Museum and Starck did the Yoo Tel Aviv, a prestigious set of high-rise apartments).

Snyder has been the director of the museum since 1997, which recently completed a massive, $100 million renovation, the most comprehensive since its 1965 establishment.

Hard to say how much longer he’ll be here, but it’s been good to have him here.

Jewish geography and brownies

It’s a busy week at our house; two nights of hosting around 22 high school students and one counselor, feeding them peanut butter brownies (recipe below) and popcorn and showing them an Israeli student film from Jerusalem film school Maale. Why, you may ask, would we volunteer to host 44 teenagers and staff twice in one week or even at all? Well, they’re my husband’s students, spending four months in Israel on TRY, Tichon Ramah Yerushalayim, a tour-and-study program run by Ramah Israel, the Conservative movement’s camping arm.

They come from all over the U.S., many are Ramah campers from one of the eight Ramah camps in New York, Massachusetts, Georgia, Wisconsin, Canada, California and Colorado, and they’re tenth, eleventh and twelfth graders. They study all their regular subjects at the classrooms of Ramah Israel, located in the Goldstein Youth Village in San Simon, Jerusalem, and then take what is called ICC, or Israel Core Course, an intensive tour-and-study class that takes them all over the country, really delving into modern and ancient Israel. It’s the kind of thing I would have loved to do as a teenager, an opportunity to be away from your family, growing, learning, making great friends, and experiencing a little life on your own.

What’s fun about my limited interaction with them — which happens several times over the semester — is getting to know these kids a bit, finding out where they’re from, discerning which ones are the children or nieces and nephews of my old camp friends, playing a little Jewish geography with them. That’s easiest with those who come from my home camp, Camp Ramah in the Poconos, and I think I freaked out one of the kids last night when he made a random comment and I — knowing he was the son of old friends — called him by name and told him his father and I had lived on the same dorm floor in college. He had had no clue that the ‘director’s wife’ — that’s me — knew who he was. Omigod! But then they’re all learning to appreciate the connections that we often have with one another, particularly when you’re so far from home.

As for the movie, it was amateurish but interesting; about a religious Zionist from an unnamed settlement who is months away from his army draft, and as the brother of a gung-ho army type but an ardent drummer in a band, is torn about how to approach his army service; to be a draft dodger like his fellow band members recommend, or attempt to get into an elite unit. The TRY kids were intrigued, and not knowing much about Israeli kids and army life, had good questions to ask.

We sent them home replete and possibly on a sugar-high, but with a taste of yet another Israeli home and what life is like in this place.

PB Brownies
1/2 cup peanut butter (can be crunchy)
1 cup flour
125 grams margarine (I know, nasty stuff but feel free to use more natural substitutes)
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
1 bag chocolate chips.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix all ingredients except for the chips. Smooth as best you can in 9×13 pan, then sprinkle chips on top. Bake for 5 minutes, remove, and swirl chips into batter. Bake for 20 minutes.

Nostalgia Sunday – Arrivederci Analog

Israel is on the brink of revolution and doesn’t even know it. No, not that kind. On March 30, 2011, analog television broadcasting will cease to be and henceforth, we will be a purely digital nation. As with Morse Code, HAM radio, fax and other tried and true technologies, analog is being put out to pasture.

The Ministry of Communications has produced a series of friendly ads featuring a 70s-style dude in black and white, who lets you know in no uncertain terms that, “The old method of broadcasting via rooftop antennae is passing from this world. It’s over. The end.”

Which makes it a perfect time to wax nostalgic for the old aluminum rooftop antenna. After television broadcasting commenced in Israel in 1968, these sprouted up like so many spindly saplings in a JNF forest, covering every city and town throughout the land.

In addition to creating urban blight, the rooftop antenna — aided by its housebound cousin, the rabbit ears antenna on the set-top — was also the source of many an amusing moment. I distinctly remember, days before the first Gulf War, standing on my friend’s roof, metal mop handle in one hand, antenna in the other, furiously tying one to the other and then both to a old chair, in hopes of improving the TV reception. (PS: It worked). And of course, one could spend hours making shapes out of a piece of tin foil in hopes of accessing Jordan TV in English.

Of course, if you really wanted good reception — and you had the means — you could just invest in a bigger antenna. These got so big and so ugly that eventually a new style was born to suit the nouveau riche: the TV antenna in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. Ooh la la!

Then, in the early 90s, cable TV came and changed everything. A decade later, satellite TV was launched. Aside from bringing Israel into the international brotherhood of couch potatoes (to be discussed in depth on another occasion), these platforms also changed our landscape; the rooftop antennas began falling into disuse and then literally fell to pieces. These the neighbors would sweep up. Sometimes.

And now, we are set to follow the worldwide trend towards Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) where, as explained by the 21st century dude in the ads (he’s the one in color), we’ll be able to receive programming via a reception kit comprising a tuner and antenna.

Wait. Did he just say antenna? Yes, but only a very small one. And it can’t do nuthin’ without the decoder.

DTT’s many advantages — better reception, environmental friendliness — are explained in a series of commercials from IDAN+, a joint venture of the Second Television Broadcasting Authority (which is in charge of aggregation and distribution) and Bezeq, our semi-privatized national telecommunications company (charged with technical responsibility of the network). Another advantage: after the initial small outlay for the kit, no more paying an average of NIS 2,400 annually to HOT cable or YES satellite television for free-to-air channels.

Plus, you have no choice. The era of accessing the airwaves freely is over and the long arm of the government is ever more easily able to stretch out and turn off the information tap, should it choose. Our saving grace, here in Israel, is that the government’s arm is very often busy scratching its nether parts and if a tap needs to be repaired, you could wait forever for a plumber.

Farm land

I did recently mention my brother-in-law, Michael is his name (pronounced Meecha-el in Hebrew by my family, but called Mike by his Israeli brother and friends), in my last post, but he’s popping again in this one.

It’s because of him that my sister and I — not the one he’s married to — recently ended up in Kfar Vitkin, a moshav near Netanya that is essentially adjacent to the small seaside village in which he grew up, Hofit, which I’ve also written about before. Michael spent his childhood in this very bucolic, charming place, running across the sand dunes of what is now the Coastal Highway to the beach, and working on the farms of Kfar Vitkin, taking care of what he calls ‘his cows.’

We were in the area checking out some sites for future articles — to come later — and stopped in at a farmstand that we’d read about in Kfar Vitkin called Emek Hefer Mushrooms, named for the region in which Kfar Vitkin is located. By the way, Kfar Vitkin, or Vitkin Village, was the first Jewish settlement in the Emek Hefer Valley. It was founded in 1930 by a group of 20 people who lived communally in one stone house, and was named after Yosef Vitkin, an educator and leader of the Labor Movement.

Anyway, Kfar Vitkin, Hofit and Beit Herut, another village, all blend into one another, and have this wonderful old-fashioned feeling, if you can ignore some of the mansions that have been built in the area. We called the mushroom farm to get directions, and they gave us fairly vague ones that took us to the town’s cemetery which is right next to the local pool. And there is the farm.

We, city slickers that we appeared to be, called a couple of times to ask where exactly the farmstand was located, and I think I used the term farmer’s market, which must have seemed somewhat grand to the person answering the phone, because she laughed and said, “Sure, you can call us a farmer’s market. We’re farmers.”

Once we realized that the farm really was located right next to the pool, we wandered in, perhaps expecting a wooden cart, the kind that you see on country lanes in the Berkshires, loaded with fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and apples. We got all that, but housed in a funny kind of warehouse whose walls are lined with shelves filled with old paintings; dusty and worthless, but quirky. But the bounty was real; all kinds of mushrooms, citrus fruits — pomelos, clementines and grapefruits from their trees, tiny peppers for snacking, all kinds of herbs and lettuces, dried fruit made from their fruit trees and a great display of tree slabs that can be used as trays, trivets, what have you.

We loaded up on the goods – I was thinking ahead to it being pizza night and using oyster mushrooms and fresh arugula (known as ‘rocket’ in Israel), on the some of the ‘zas I’d be making.

The market is open Thursday through the weekend, and the village is worth a visit, as there’s lots to do in the area, including anemone- and strawberry-picking in season, a local winery, the pool and beach in the summer, and the turtles of the Alexander River just down the road.

Nostalgia Sunday – The French School

Walking down Cremieux Street in Jerusalem yesterday, I was suddenly struck by its connection to the current implosion of the Arab world. Adolphe Cremieux, was the president of first Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Paris-based international Jewish organization founded in 1860 to arm Jews with self-defense and self-sufficiency through education and professional development.

The organization took as its motto the rabbinic injunction Kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh (“All Jews bear responsibility for one another”).

According to the organization’s Kol Israel Haverim online history, “The 1860 founders recommended the integration of ideas from the revolution of 1789 – equality, justice and human rights, together with the principals of Judaism…” It also embarked on a mission to educate the Jews of the Middle East through French education and culture. A mere two years later, the first Lycee Alliance opened in Tetouan, Morocco. “It was a cornerstone that in time became a widespread network of schools from Morocco to Iran”.

But AIU’s struggle for equal rights extended to other minorities as well. For instance, “in 1860, [it] acted on behalf of Lebanese Christians, victims of a popular uprising, and in 1863 the organization interceded at the Spanish Ministry of Justice on behalf of imprisoned Protestants who were prohibited from spreading their religion.”

In 1870, founding member Charles Netter, received a tract of land from the Ottoman Empire as a gift and opened the Mikveh Israel agricultural school, the first of a network of Jewish schools in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel.

By 1900, Alliance Israelite Universelle was operating 100 schools with a combined student population of 26,000. Its greatest efforts were concentrated in Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey, but there were schools throughout the Middle East.

In an essay about the Jews of Egypt, Denise Douek Telio writes, “Alliance Israelite Schools were free and open to all religious denominations… My classmates were Jewish, Muslim and Christians girls. We went to each other homes to do our homework and to socialize.”

According to Encyclopedia Iranica, “[in l898] the Alliance finally succeeded in opening its first school for boys in Tehran. Joseph Cazès was appointed as the head teacher of its 350 pupils. Cazès also opened a school for girls with 150 pupils. The Alliance was warmly received by Persian authorities…On the eve of the 1979 revolution, the Alliance operated 7 schools in Tehran with 1,800 pupils and 4 schools [in other cities] with 1,286 pupils.”

Today, thousands of students are still being educated at around 50 Alliance Israélite Universelle institutes and schools — but Morocco is only Arab country still with an AIU school.

The historic schools in Israel still exist: the Alliance High School in Tel Aviv, Alliance Israélite Universelle High School in Haifa, Rene Cassin High School and the Braunshweig Conservative High School in Jerusalem.

There are three schools within the Mikve Israel Youth Village: a state high school and a religious state high school specializing in life and natural sciences, environmental sciences, and biotechnology; and the Raymond Lauwan French-Israeli high school established in 2007 as a joint initiative of the Israeli and French governments.

The AIU network also includes the School for the Deaf in Jerusalem where deaf students, Jewish and Arab, with various mental and physical disabilities study together in a unique model of coexistence.

You can read a lot more about the development of AIU’s school network throughout the Jewish communities in the Middle East, (including the education and modernization of women), in the book The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times. More images from the Egyptian Jewish community that was can be found at the Historical Society of Jews From Egypt site.

It’s also worth watching films like The Last Jews of Libya, From Babylon to Beverly Hills and The David Project’s excellent The Forgotten Refugees.

 

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