Helping Israel While You Waste Time
Filed under: Blogging, General, Life, Pop Culture, Technology
There are some people (lots, actually) who really get into role-playing fantasy type games – nowadays, mostly online. They’re a waste of time, as far as I’m concerned. These are the same people who like thrill rides at amusement parks, I have noticed. Not me; I can’t be bothered with online games (who has time?) and for me, just driving down the highway is enough of a thrill ride!
But helping spread Israel’s message online is something I always have time for. And believe it or not, I discovered an online game that does exactly that! It’s called PMOG, “The Passively Multiplayer Online Game.” Basically, you take on “missions” that entail your surfing through internet in a guided format. The author of a mission assembles web site s/he wants to introduce people to, and you get points for visiting. You can also lay mines at sites, which explode (the screen shakes a little) when a fellow PMOGer surfs to the site (they lose points, too). You can also “leave some love,” ie points, for someone to pick up at the site. There are also associations, merit badges, weapons, defensive measures, etc. – all the “tools of the trade” that you would find on a fantasy game site, except this one takes place all over the internet.
The Israel connection in PMOG comes with the missions members can organize and leave for others. PMOG users who take missions (for which they earn points) are directed to sites by the mission organizers, the idea being that they discover sites – and information – they might not have known. A few enterprising people have built Israel missions. One, called “Israel media,” took me to sites like the Israel Internet Statistics, and a couple of pages about anti-Israel bias in the media. Another mission is sort of an Israel travelogue, taking users to sites describing sites in Israel.
Most of the missions in PMOG, it should be noted, are “fun” missions, like “Wizards and other Magical Beings,” “National Peanut Butter Day,” “Ukeleles,” etc. Of course, a game is supposed to be fun – but this one is educational, too. Why not some missions on Israeli medical advances, or hi-tech stories (I’ve got a couple I could contribute!). PMOG could be an interesting educational tool!
RepORTs from the teens
A network of high schools across Israel that emphasizes high-tech vocational training, ORT is an educational powerhouse, its 100,000-strong student body representing about one tenth of all Israeli high school students.
With six branches within rocket range in southern Israel, ORT estimates that 7000 of its pupils are currently under high risk of Hamas attacks.
ORT’s Ronson School in Ashkelon, which educates some 1800 students, has temporarily closed its doors due to this situation, necessitating special tutoring and commuting arrangements so that the 12th graders don’t fall too far behind.
In the meantime, the school’s Eye 2 Israel / Yama and student blogging (informational site in Hebrew only) projects have encouraged students to use their tech bent to help foment a positive image of Israelis in the blogosphere – a motivation close to Israelity’s heart.
One of their bloggers, 14-year-old Rebeca Mayer, is an immigrant from Cuba. Although her English isn’t the most polished, Mayer’s accounts of her day-to-day life are a poignant reminder that there are real people behind every headline. As she puts it in her blog, “I decided to open this blog so all of you out there will understand what we’re going threw here in Ashkelon.”
Writing from inside a bomb shelter, where she and her family have been spending lots of time lately, Mayer wrote on December 28:
I’m really board here cause there’s nothing to do, my little bro is playing with my grandma with a train.
….I wanted to go out today and buy some shoes, but I guess this plan would have to wait, it really sucks to live in this kind of reality I just hope everything will be ok.
More recently, this past Tuesday, she wrote about her feelings of personal connection to the IDF soldiers who had recently been killed in combat in Gaza:
I feel so responsible for there death, cause I know they died to defend me.
They were supposed to come home as heroes but they come back in a coffin.
Now nothing could change, I just hope they will be happy up there in heaven.
As of yesterday, Mayer was planning on going to Eilat for the weekend for some escape and fun. We hope she finds what she’s looking for.
Image Ashkelon courtesy Jason Turner from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Israeli Tots At 82 Kindergartens To Learn Green ABC’s
In a special ceremony, held in Bar-Ilan University earlier this month, some 48 green kindergartens located in the Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, central and southern districts of Israel were certified “green.”
An additional 34 kindergartens were certified earlier in the month, on December 3 in Haifa, 8 of which came from the Arab sector, reports the Ministry of Environmental Protection website. This is good news to our ears.
In all, 82 Israeli green kindergartens were certified in 2008, compared to 32 in 2007. But what does it take to make Israeli tots green? Do the ganenets feed them organic food? Do they learn about recycling? Maybe they plant trees?
In order to be officially certified, kindergartens must demonstrate their achievements in three areas:
- Environmental curriculum
- Rational use of resources
- Contribution to the community
According to the Ministry, kindergartens have a critical role to play in setting the educational infrastructure or basis for the understanding of basic concepts at the personal and social levels. “Cultivating environmental literacy in the kindergarten is of major importance since it is at this early age that we can try to instill positive attitudes toward the human and physical environment, in the present and in the future,” they write.
Accreditation of Green Kindergartens Come With $ Incentive
The aim of the “Green Kindergarten” program is to lead kindergartens through an educational process in which the children, kindergarten teachers, assistants and parents take part in incorporating environmental subjects into the kindergarten.
The accreditation process for Green Kindergartens was initiated in 2006 by the Ministry of Environmental Protection in cooperation with the Ministry of Education. Coming along with a cash incentive, going green can also boost enrollment (it’s a new thing moms and dads can brag about at the park). In Israel it seems that most kindergartens are privatized. So the added marketability of teaching tots to go green can be a selling point.
Recycling Corner in a Petach Tikva kindergarten
Small belts
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Life, Sports
One of Israeli schoolchildren’s favorite methods of exercise is martial arts. Thai boxing, kickboxing and judo are enormously popular, and karate is also huge. For most Israeli karate instructors, the teen and adult sets represent a tiny minority of their teaching time, with littler ones taking up the lion’s share.
A recent piece in Ha’aretz examines the phenomenon in depth, exploring the question of whether children aged four or five truly have much to gain by studying the martial arts. Also noteworthy is a list of potential benefits from martial arts training, which include increased self-esteem, increased levels of fitness, development of a sense of competition, fostering a sense of self-discipline, garnering a healthy outlet for letting out aggression, and other types of increased spiritual grounding.
The article also notes that according to the 2000 Sport Law, all phys-ed instructors must be licensed as sports instructors, which has increased the demand for certification courses like those offered at the prestigious Wingate Institute. Located near Netanya, Wingate offers instructors’ training on a high level, with an emphasis on educational techniques (the institute also houses training programs and facilities for Israel’s internationally exported athletes, including our Olympians).
Picking a good teacher, though, can be as important a decision as choosing when to get your kid started – check out these guys:
“After one or two training sessions I can tell parents about their child’s problems if there are any,” says Arthur Gribetz, the chief Tora dojo trainer in Jerusalem, a method based on Japanese karate. Gribetz notes that karate training “is very systematic and it teaches students to feel the body and the breath,” and therefore also helps decrease excess muscle tension, improves motor skills, teaches distinguishing between left and right and more.”
Shalom Avitan, chairman of the Karate-Shotokan Association in Israel, says that any sport in which there is correct training, with the appropriate trainer, contributes to a child’s development, but the acquisition of self-confidence is not to be taken for granted. “Self- confidence is built up over time,” says Avitan. “It is necessary to train for at least a year and a half or two years to start to see results, and that on condition that the trainer is a professional and aware of the children’s needs. If you throw a small child into combat with children who are bigger and more experienced than he is, this isn’t going to contribute to his self-confidence,” he says.
So no, you can’t just force your children to wax the car, scrub the floor, paint the fence and hope that they’ll be champions after a few weeks.
Image courtesy Tomer.Gabel from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
All politics are local…
Today, there are municipality elections throughout the country, including in my town of Modi’in. The news is certainly focusing on all the sexy elections such as the former head of the air force vs. the communist in Tel Aviv and the high tech mogul vs the Rabbi in Jerusalem but hey, there are important issues we are dealing with here in the suburbs as well.
My wife and I have been following our local election very closely. It’s only the second time I’ll be voting where the “situation” isn’t an issue. It’s quite refreshing actually weighing candidates on issues such schools, city expansion, economic growth, dog poop etc.
Now there are two parties we support, Shachar – a party of secular and religious residents whose main emphasis is on improving education – and the Greens – who are all about the environment, improving the quality of life and care deeply about the preservation of Modiin’s local archeological sites.
Mayor is a different story. The candidate I support has been polling fairly low. Even though the two leading candidates will probably have a run off and force another election I am still voting for the lower polling candidate who I believe not only would do a superior job, but has always been responsive to my concerns as a resident of Modiin. Someone mentioned today that one should never vote on strategy but rather who you believe will do the best job. I subcribe to that philosophy as evidence in my disastrous vote for Tafnit in the last national elections. Honestly, I’ll vote for whoever promises to establish quality dog runs in Modiin. I’ve been living here almost six years and my dog has gotten pretty anti-social due to the strict leash laws and the lack of open space for our pooches to run around. That’s my issue. Bring on the dog runs!
kIDs tALk NEWS: It is time the news is reported by the little people!
It is time to hear the news from kids! Enough of bias reporters and jaded stories…let’s hear what they have to say.
Ok…here you go. Check out what my video chug has been up to, reporting from the streets of Jerusalem. This news package is on cell phones. This is their first story of many to come. Also check out the blooper reel. And we want your feedback. Tell us what you think we should report. We would even be happy to report about your companies, non-profits, special events, interesting people, etc. Just let us know!
This post was originally published on The Big Felafel.
Guns & Peres
Filed under: General, Music, Politics, Pop Culture, coexistence
That Shimon Peres certainly knows how to throw a party. Israel’s octogenarian president is also the figurehead for the Peres Center for Peace, which at the end of the month is marking its 10th anniversary.
The Peres Center has implemented dozens of projects to facilitate cooperation between Israelis and their neighbors in the Arab world, among them:
* Over 55,000 Israeli and Palestinian children have participated in educational programs learning the values of peace and dialogue through theater, cinema and the arts.
* More than 1,000 Palestinian children receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals annually, when such treatment is unavailable in the Palestinian Authority, coordinated, organized and financed by the Peres Center for Peace. Over 5,600 children have been referred for treatment since the initiative’s launch.
* Over 2,000 Palestinian and Israeli children participate annually in the Twinned Peace Sport Schools program.
To celebrate their accomplishments, the organization is holding a three-day celebration from October 26-28, which will gather over 300 world leaders in the fields of politics, business, culture and sports. Sessions will address pressing questions on the global agenda. Panelists will include: former president of the World Bank James, President of FIFA Joseph Blatter, President of Real Madrid Ramón Calderón and Olympic gold medalist Edwin Moses, will participate in a panel on sport as a tool for building bridges; Hollywood actress Kathleen Turner and French actress Anouk Aimée will contribute to a panel on the use of culture in humanizing “the Other”.
But for some, the highlight of the party will be an invitation-only concert taking place on October 27th at the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Center
entitled ‘Believe: Celebrating a Decade of Peacebuilding Activities’. In addition to featuring homegrown performers like Achinoam Nini, Ran Dankner and Liel Kolet, the international guest list is what’s raising eyebrows, mine at least.
Sharing a stage will be decadent rock & roll guitar god Slash, late of Guns & Roses and currently with Velvet Revolver, veteran disco diva Donna Summer, Argentine singer Mecedes Sosa, and celebrated tenor Andrea Bocelli.
I’d love to see Peres get up and boogie to Summer singing “Love to Love You Baby” with a scorching solo from Slash (born Saul Hudson to a Jewish father and African American mother) and backing vocals from Sosa and Bocelli. That would indeed set a new standard for coexistence that would proudly propel the Peres Center into its second decade.
Who are you?
Filed under: General, Holidays, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Religion
One of the reasons my wife and I moved to Israel many years ago, was so that our children would grow up in a Jewish environment and help build the Jewish state.
It’s quite a surprise 20-odd years later (and I mean odd), that we’ve instead raised a brood of Israelis.
Sure they’re Jewish, and the chances that they’ll marry Jews is pretty darn high compared to their chances of even meeting a Jew in New England, but I think that they would identify themselves as ‘Israeli’ before they would ‘Jewish’ – just like many American Jews would call themselves ‘American’ before ‘Jewish’.
Of course, in Israel, it’s almost impossible to separate Jewishness and Israeliness. The national holidays are Jewish ones, the national institutions are all kosher – even when secular grade school kids learn grammar, the examples might be well-known Biblical verse. But as those elements become part of you and second nature – especially if you’ve grown up like that since birth – it just becomes another part of being Israeli.
They willingly go to the army, pay taxes, hike the trails, and listen to Asaf Avidan, but not because they feel a sense of redemption of Israel rising from the ashes of the Holocaust, or the homecoming after 2,000 years of Jewish exile. They do it because it’s their Israeli culture. Sure, they’re patriotic about their country, but only as they would be about any country they were born in and grew up in.
But, is that enough? What’s to keep a young Israeli here – with high taxes, miluim, security threats as a constant way of life? The superior quality of the coffee at the cafes and the nightlife in Tel Aviv? That may work for a while, but unless there’s that historical, religious underpinning.
My challenge for the new year is to do a better job than I’ve done at nstilling that feeling in my children that there’s a special mission and privilege of living here – and that, in the end, you can’t really separate Jewish and Israeli.
Ambitions of the non-pawns
Nearly half of the all time great chess champs are Jewish, Russians have special levels of love for the game, and “check mate,” the adage recited ritualistically by players upon achieving victory, is said to have been derived from Hebrew, so it’s only natural that the Israeli chess scene be vibrant and growing.
Alon Cohen-Revivo, 2008’s Jerusalem Chess Champion, is working hard to make sure that chess culture has a comfortable home in Jerusalem. His two-year-old organization, Jeru-Chess, has been making a considerable difference lately, according to a recent Jerusalem Post report. Together with the Municipality of Jerusalem, Jeru-Chess hosted a major International Chess Festival (pictured) this past July.
With a home base in the German Colony’s recently renovated International Cultural and Community Center, Jeru-Chess boasts a roster of around 60 regular members, and it has hosted workshops in about 30 schools, special needs groups, community centers and old age homes.
Cohen-Revivo looks at chess as a therapeutic endeavor.
“Several solid research studies show the beneficial effects of chess on mental health patients, CP patients, people with Alzheimer’s disease and Asperger’s syndrome,” says Cohen-Revivo, 35. “Chess is also a good outlet for children with ADHD.”
He also sees the game as a springboard for educational opportunities.
Mediation and listening skills are also useful in chess, he says. “I listen for the unmet needs of my pupils, what they need to improve. I also try to give a feeling of self-confidence, ability to contain and understand complexity, and, of course, pure chess knowledge.”
….Cohen-Revivo’s innovative teaching approach doesn’t end there. “The queen is like an octopus that can go eight different directions; she has a long arm and can move forward and backwards and sometimes on the diagonal,” he explains. “Danny Deen, a famous comic character, is the knight.
“I use a lot of metaphors and techniques that are relevant and effective,” he says. For example, “Sometimes kids only use pieces on one side of the board. I begin to shake the ‘dozing hand’ and make snoring sounds to wake up the sleeping pieces.”
Your move, Tel Aviv.
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