Liz Taylor, ala ha’shalom

March 29, 2011 - 1:56 PM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Movies, Pop Culture, Religion 

Given all the world strife, haven’t had time to really focus on the death of Elizabeth Taylor, that screen icon who — who knew? — was such a longtime friend of Israel. Here she is in a photo from the Ben Gurion University archives, when she visited in 1983 — she also met with Prime Minister Menachem Begin during that trip.

Turns out, as I learned from Nathan Burstein’s Washington Post op-ed, that Liz converted to Judaism in 1959, supposedly before her wedding to Eddie Fischer but had been considering the move for some time, specifically after her third marriage to Mike Todd, who had been born Avrom Goldbogen.

And once she did convert, following a six-month conversion course with a local L.A. rabbi, she took it seriously, even if she seemed to take her marriages less than seriously. She purchased $100,000 in Israel Bonds in 1959, prompting the United Arab Republic to ban her movies; sang a Hebrew duet in Moscow, and appealed for refusenik Jews in Russia.

Here she is with Richard Burton on their 1975 trip to Israel, a short clip at the Western Wall:

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Building a better fruit

January 13, 2011 - 5:16 AM by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, Food, General, Social Justice, Technology 

They’re in top secret laboratories wearing white coats and working on various formulas, writing down codes and checking monitors. No, these Israelis aren’t manning our non-existent nuclear facilities somewhere we don’t know, they’re perfecting the pitaya.

Israeli farmers, working together with Ben-Gurion University, have come up with a new, improved version of the an exotic cactus fruit known as the ‘dragon fruit’ usually native to wet tropical climates like South America.

According to a Media Line story by Arieh O’Sullivan, the pitaya fruit has white pulp and is said to be pretty bland in flavor. But the Israeli scientists have managed to alter the pulp into shades of purple and red that are sweeter and more tantalizing.

They’ve even developed different versions of the fruit, which looks like a colorful artichoke, with layers of spiky leaves. Peel this off and the inside pulp has the texture of a kiwi fruit. The “Venus” has red pulp, the “Golden” (also known as “Apollo”) has yellow pulp. The smaller “Desert King” has a deep purple pulp.

The pitaya and other fruits and agricultural innovations will be displayed at the upcoming Agro-Mashov agriculture conference in Tel Aviv in early March, which is expected to draw thousands of farmers and researchers from around the world.

Haim Alush, the chief executive officer of Agro-Mashov, told the Media Line that the world was facing a “catastrophe” as it tried to feed a mushrooming population that has grown from two billion to seven billion in just 70 years.

“For years, Israel has been working to do agriculture in a part of the world with little water and a lack of arable farm land. Israelis have learned how to get higher yields from less land and water. We have groundbreaking innovations and Israelis want to teach the world,” Alush said.

Pitayas for everyone!

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Foto Friday – Ben Gurion’s University

October 15, 2010 - 9:05 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: coexistence, education, Foto Friday, General, Israeliness, Medical Breakthroughs, Picture of the Week, Technology 

The first semester of Israel’s 2010-2011 academic year opened this past week. There were little to no threats of a faculty or student strike for once — that pleasure was left to the Union of Local Authorities of Israel — and 293,000 students began studying on time at Israel’s 66 institutions of higher learning.

Of these, 228,740 young persons entered into or continued their first degree studies. More significantly, of this number, 88,500 are studying at colleges (35 academic and 23 teacher training colleges); this is the first time that this number exceeds registration at the seven universities where 75,200 students are registered for Bachelor’s degrees.

Ben Gurion University of the Negev stands out with more than 19,000 students, including 4,650 new ones. The number of students enrolled for a first degree rose, particularly in humanities and exact sciences; this may be due to new study tracks that allow for interdisciplinary studies — not an unusual notion for North Americans but a new concept here. Here’s a glimpse into the little university that has become the number one choice for undergraduates both Jewish and Arab from all over the country due in part to its research and development capabilities…

It’s ultramodern campus, shining like a beacon in the desert…

Its medical school, affiliated with Columbia University and Soroka Medical Center, which provides medical care to all populations throughout the region…

Encouragement of innovation…

And fulfillment of David Ben Gurion’s vision of the Negev as a testbed for science and R&D.

More photos by Dani Machlis can be found at BGU – The Year in Pictures. Information about the University is available on its website. And check out the BGU YouTube channel to see more amazing R&D, like these wall climbing robots developed at the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

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If you’re happy and you know it…

October 9, 2010 - 8:04 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: education, Life, Music 

Clap your hands! That, at least, is the recent advice from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev research. In this first study of hand-clapping songs, a Ben-Gurion researcher found a direct link between activities that induce hand-clapping of the development of skills in children, young adults, and, yes, university students.

Dr. Idit Sulkin, a member of BGU’s Music Science Lab in the arts department, said she found that children in first, second and third grades who spontaneously perform hand-clapping games in the school yard have neater handwriting, write better and make fewer spelling mistakes.

(I do remember being one of the cheerleaders during school dodgeball games; then again, my husband is a group singer and has terrible spelling…)

As part of the study, Dr. Sulkin — who was working on this research for her dissertation — visited several elementary school classrooms and studied the children while they were in a music appreciation program or learning hand-clapping songs — each over a period of 10 weeks.

“Within a very short period of time, the children who until then hadn’t taken part in such activities caught up in their cognitive abilities to those who did,” she said. But this finding only surfaced for the group of children undergoing hand-clapping songs training. The result led Sulkin to conclude that hand-clapping songs should be made an integral part of education for children aged six to 10, for the purpose of motor and cognitive training.

Sulkin’s original goal was to figure out why children are fascinated by singing and clapping up until the end of third grade, when suddenly those activities are abandoned and replaced with sports. She observed that the period in which they sing and clap is a transitional stage, and the relationship between music and intellectual development has been noted, leading parents to play Mozart while their children are in utero, or to become fans of Baby Einstein. But she also found that adults respond well to hand-clapping; university students who took part in her questionnaires found that after singing and clapping, they became more focused and less tense.

Worth trying, no? Join me and my boys one of these days on a walk. You’ll see that Dr. Sulkin’s onto something…

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Russian Roulette on the roads

August 9, 2010 - 11:15 AM by · 2 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Travel 

Whenever a horrible accident takes place on the roads here, we tsk tsk, say how horrible it is, and then go back to our daily death-defying adventures on the road.

The latest tragedy took place on Thursday when a minibus driver plowed through a train barrier into an oncoming locomotive near Kiryat Gat. Seven members of the Bernstein-Gotstein family from Beitar Illit were killed – Aryeh Bernstein, 43, and his wife Rivkah, 41, together with four of their children – their 21 year-old daughter, Malki Gotstein, who was pregnant, along with Mordechai, 9, Chaya 14, and Yochanan 16. Malki Gotstein’s one-and-a-half-year-old son, Mordechai, was also killed in the collision.

The driver of the minibus, Yashar Yeshurun, was injured in the crash
and was arrested while still hospitalized

“I have no explanation for this, I drive carefully,” he told police officers, as he reenacted the accident on Sunday.

“This will haunt me for the rest of my life, but people must know the truth is that I saw the train barrier only in the last seconds [before the crash] and could barely do anything, even press the brake pedal,” Yeshurun said.

According to police, however, Yeshurun was speeding as he approached the barrier, and was talking to one of the passengers – a deadly combination as it turned out.

A riveting account of the accident from the the point of view of a passenger on the train was published in The Jerusalem Post today, written by my friend Faye Bittker, a former colleague and currently a senior official at Ben-Gurion University. Her essay provides a harrowing look at the the grotesque and the mundane, and how the driving habits on our roads are affecting each one of us.

Like a scene from “The Poseidon Adventure,” confused passengers were left to figure out what had happened when their train from Tel Aviv to Beersheba came to an abrupt stop at 7:05 pm.

Outside, rescue crews had to deal with horrific wreckage and the death of a whole family. Inside, a full cast of clueless characters spent much of their time running up and down the aisles, though there was nowhere to go and very little we could do.

The train driver performed admirably in an otherwise impossible and tragic situation. He could not avoid hitting the minibus stuck on the tracks, but he did manage to slow the train and avoid injuries among the train’s passengers. Silence filled the air as the train lost power and stopped following impact. And then came a deafening organizational silence that left us all to our own devices – in this case, smart phones, digital radios and mobile computers – to figure out what was happening.

For two hours, from the moment of impact until we boarded another train, there was no official announcement or explanation about what had happened. No statement that there had been an accident.

It only gets worse the more you read, and leaves you wanting to scream out over the senseless loss of life.

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