A fishy Rosh Hashana

September 28, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Religion 

Busy at home preparing for the three-day Rosh Hashana (two days straight into Shabbat) holiday and making a slew of delicacies (actually I’m at the computer while my wife is making the delicacies), I began to reminisce about the first Rosh Hashana spent in Israel many years ago.

It was a little traumatic because I came face to face with a fish head. My then-girlfriend ( now wife) and I had recently landed in the mystical Galilee city of Safed for a three-month student program in the Old City called Livnot U’lehibanot which combined physical labor and Jewish studies. (one of the best experiences you can ever have in Israel, if you’re interested)

For Rosh Hashana, they set the participants up with observant families around the city, and we found oursevles at the dinner table of the traditional Moroccan family. It was a huge contingent, with children, grand children, cousins, etc – and us.

We were introduced to a series of culinary traditions to mark the new year – lovely customs like eating apples and honey (believe it or not, the first time I had been exposed to this common practice), partaking of pomegranate seeds, and of course, the delicious, braided round hallot.

And because we were the guests for the evening, I was honored amid great flourish and fanfare, as the grandmother of the family, beaming with pride, carried a tray out of the kitchen and set it before me. And there I was, staring at the fish head, the ultimate symbol in their household of bringing in the new year with its blessing “May you be at the head of the new year and not its tail.”

The fish in question might have been a carp, or maybe a mackerel. I wouldn’t know, I was too concerned with staring at its eye there on the plate. Serving whole fish might be commonplace in Israel, but where I came from, filet was the name of the game.

Would I insult my hosts beyond repair if I refused to tuck into the morsel in front of me? Knowing that was unthinkable, I feigned elation and picked at a few pieces as far away from the eyeball as possible, and then graciously passed the plate around to the extended family gathered at the table.

I sighed, thinking I was home free. Then the sheep’s brain came out (maybe a little overkill on the “head of the year” theme) and the scenario repeated itself.

Thank goodness rabbit skulls weren’t next on the menu, which moved to the slightly more conventional main course of stewed beef with prunes on top of couscous. Slightly shaken, but not totally stirred by the experience, I survived my first Israeli Rosh Hashana, and – fish heads and sheep’s brains included – actually ended up staying in the country.

Hoping that all of you have a joyous Rosh Hashana and find yourself at the head of the new year.

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Nostalgia Sunday – Sound the Shofar

September 18, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, education, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Nostalgia Sunday, Religion, War 

A new exhibition, Sound the Shofar – A Witness to History, has opened at the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem.

This exhibition traces the shofar from animal horn to icon. On display are shofarot from around the world, each marking a pivotal event in history, a poignant personal story or the quest for religious freedom. The timing, is of course, perfect for the High Holidays.

The shofar is amongst the earliest musical instruments played by mankind. It is also one of the oldest and most recognizable symbols of Judaism, which has been in continual use for more than 3,000 years. Throughout the millennium, the shofar has been a powerful witness to the turbulent history of the Jewish people in both times of rejoicing and triumph, sorrow and devastation throughout Jewish history.

The exhibition displays a wide variety of shofarot and their depictions on a range of objects from ancient times to today. Among the ancient artifacts on display are: a two sided carved synagogue chancel screen depicting a Menorah, Shofar, Lulav and Ethrog from Ashkelon (4th-7th centuries CE); a Jewish Tombstone depicting Menorah, Shofar and Lulav from Caesarea (4rd – 7th centuries CE); a facsimile of the Rothschild Miscellany manuscript depicting a shofar blower in front of Jewish worshipers (15th century CE, Italy); a facsimile from the Mantiba Haggadah depicting the prophet Elijah sounding the shofar to announce the coming of the Messiah (1560 Italy).

The exhibit moves through history to display, for the first time in Israel, a shofar that belonged to Israel who was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Holocaust. In 1943 the Mizrahi family was captured and expelled to the Mechelen transit camp, where the Jews of Belgium were imprisoned before being sent to concentration and extermination camps. All their property including the shofar was left in their house. After the war ended, Esther, who survived together with her two children, returned to their home in Antwerp, where a few possessions were recovered including the shofar that belonged to her husband Israel.

Another special shofar on view is one which was blown at the western wall during the British Mandate period. Between the years 1930 – 1947 the Members of Brit Habirionim, Beitar and Etzel would blow the shofar at the western wall at the end of Yom Kippur, in spite of the prohibition imposed by the British Mandate. This exhibition includes an inspiring short documentary film (produced by Toldot Yisrael and the History Channel) about this courageous group of people who risked their lives to perform the mitzvah of blowing the shofar at the Kotel.

The exhibition includes artifacts on loan from museums, institutions and private collections, many of which have never been previously been on display, including the famous shofar blown on June 7th, 1967 by Rabbi Shlomo Goren at the Western Wall upon reunification of Jerusalem.

Sound the Shofar – A Witness to History will be on display at the from September 2011 through February 2012.

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Come Meet the “Other” at TEDxJaffa Today – Streaming Live!

September 7, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Science, Technology 

tedxjaffa TED

Watch the stream live today from Jaffa starting at 9 am EST.

It’s really easy to sit at your kitchen table in Brooklyn, Toronto, Vancouver, or Berkley and shoot off comments about the Middle East conflict. It’s harder when you live in it. It’s hard when you have to think twice about taking the bus, plane, or train because it might blow up, and it’s hard knowing that every person who shares your society with you are paying the majority of their taxes to a staggering defense budget.

I live in Israel. I live in Jaffa, Israel — a city next to Tel Aviv populated by Muslims, Christians and Jews. Some of us are atheists, some traditional and others defiantly religious. I chose to live here and it’s a crazy place. It’s not crazy because people here care about their religion, enough to fight over it or talk about it incessantly. It’s crazy because of its improbability.

In Jaffa, some Muslims call themselves Palestinians. Some Christians call themselves Israeli Palestinian Christian Arabs. The Jews are just Israelis of course, unless they come from Arab countries and they are Sephardic or those from Europe say they are Ashkenazi. You can find escaped donkeys galloping down the streets at midnight. You can find the best European chocolate cake beside a working man’s morning hummous joint. My husband says he wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find a dead body on our front porch: there is also a lot of crime in Jaffa.

But Jaffa has its charm. Its own rhythm is marked by the five calls to prayer, with the one at sunset telling my baby daughter (who is Jewish) it’s time to go to sleep. It’s got a roughness, and sharp corners, and just when you think it’s too hard to handle, you’ll catch a new smell reminding you of some other time from our collective memory when civilization began, somewhere around here.

But more than people know, Jaffa — the city of the Bible where Jonah disembarks from before getting swallowed by the whale and spat out on shore near Nineveh — is a lens through which the world can understand cultural diversity, and cultural freedom in Israel.

Today at my home the East West House we will help host TEDxJaffa under the theme the Desire to Know the Other. There is a strong line-up of people from Jaffa, like my musician husband Yisrael Borochov, but also people from Israel and the Palestinian Authority who will tell their personal and professional stories on working to know the other. One speaker survived a terror attack and was afraid to look in the mirror to see how much of her face was left; one speaker will be a successful Palestinian policeman turned businessman; and if you log on to our simulcast today (or see the videos later) you’ll meet Haya Samir, an Israeli Muslim whose family came to Israel as political refugees from Egypt. Raised as a Jew, she found out as a young woman that she was in fact a Muslim.

Haya is an Israeli diva. And we are so glad to know her. Today she will sing songs of the pioneering days in Israel – Debka Fantasia – before 1948 when young Jews met Bedouin and Arab shepherds. These pioneers longed for a culture that combined, not defined, the Middle East with European values. I think this is what the people in the Arab uprisings are coming to terms with.

Would you like to get off your chair and dance to a little music with us LIVE? Maybe meet someone whose views might change your worldview about the Middle East conflict?

The simulcast starts at at 9 am EST time today Wednesday if you are in New York City. Log on at the TEDxJaffa site to see it. Officially in Israel the event starts at 3.

Alli Meets Aladdin

The idea for TEDx in Jaffa started with my friend Alli Magidsohn, who is producing and curating the event. The fellow Jaffinian, who is from LA, was inspired to fulfill this dream after an encounter with a man (a genie?) in Sinai named Aladdin.

Her words: “We felt lucky to have the opportunity to meet and form a new friendship in an overall context that might have otherwise limited us as enemies and spoke about the area’s conflicts, spirituality, Love, and many other things together. His perspectives broadened my mind and this encounter made me realize that as an American Jew living in Israel, even opposite an Muslim Egyptian man, there is still so much more that we have in common than there is that separates us.

“Other encounters in Sinai, Israel and Palestine led to further ‘broadening’, deeper respect and more curiosity, and TEDxJaffa is the manifestation of this process of personal expansion. ‘The Desire to know The Other’, for me – not necessarily for the event’s speakers – isn’t about explicit things like politics or peace or coexistence, it’s really about that desire to look from the inside, outwards, and to try to take in, understand, or somehow be enriched by exposing oneself to another person’s experience.

Log in folks at 9 am if you are New York or Toronto. All other cities: the event’s at 3 PM + 7 hours EST. Link from here.

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New CD captures Kabbalat Shabbat in Tel Aviv

August 26, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Music, Religion 

The new CD from Tel Aviv's Beit Tefilah

It’s Friday in Israel and, as sun begins to set later this afternoon, more than 1,000 people will gather at the Tel Aviv Port to welcome the Sabbath Bride. It’s the weekly Kabbalat Shabbat service, run by the Tel Aviv-based Beit Tefilah Israel (“House of Israeli Prayer”), an organization which has set for itself the task of building ” an active Jewish community which speaks to the breadth of the secular public.”

Now, the egalitarian, pluralistic Beit Tefilah has released its first CD with music from their popular Friday service by the beach. The CD has 17 songs which are performed by the Beit Tefilah Ensemble, led by Atalya Lavi who participated as a contestant on the ninth season of “Kochav Nolad,” Israel’s version of American Idol.

The CD – called “A Tel Aviv Prayer” – includes both classic Kabbalat Shabbat liturgical works (such as Lecha Dodi and Adon Olam) and music composed to Israeli poetry (for example Haim Bialik’s Shabat HaMalka). There is even a Hebrew version of the Louis Armstrong song “What a Wonderful World” that substitutes for one of the psalms of Kabbalat Shabbat.

Beit Tefilah isn’t the first Israeli congregation to release an album of its music. Jerusalem’s Jewish Renewal community Nava Tehila did that already a few years back and has started work on a second CD.

The new Beit Tefilah CD is for sale online at http://www.btfila.bandcamp.com. If you want to try before you buy, every song is available to stream from the site too.

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The Ramadan way

August 25, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, Food, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Religion 

Speaking of Ramadan, I was having an interesting conversation about Ramadan with our butcher, Suleiman, over at SuperDeal in Baka. He was telling me that he leaves early for his home in Abu Tor most days of Ramadan, except for Thursday, when he cuts up many chickens for those preparing for Shabbat. He’s not the most religious Moslem, he admitted, and doesn’t head to prayers when he does go home early during the days of Ramadan. In fact, while his mother and wife spend “hours in the kitchen preparing all kind of complicated cooked dishes”, such as chicken or meat and rice, dozens of salads, decadent fruit trays, baklava, and all the other parts of these elaborate Iftar meals that come after sunset, he often prefers to steal outside and grab some chummous and falafel.

“That just suits me better after a long day of fasting,” says Suleiman. Not surprising, really, when I think about what I like to eat after a fast. I’m kind of an old Jewish man myself at those moments, loving nothing more than a shot of Scotch and some herring for my first taste of food. Then some eggs, a bagel perhaps, and a glass of OJ and I’m back to myself.

In any case, my conversation with Suleiman took me in a different direction for another story, about Ramadan observance and accommodation in Israel, for JTA. Read it here, and let me know if you’ve had your own Ramadan experiences.

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