Not just any third birthday
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Religion, War
One of the most quickly forgotten aspects following any terror attack is the survivors. We all mourn the victims, obsess about the perpetrators, and move on, as those left behind attempt to pick up the pieces of their lives.
Three-year-old Moishe Holzberg has proven to be the exception. A year ago, Moishe’s parents, Rabbi Gavriel Holzberg, 29, and his wife Rivka, 28, were killed along with 170 other victims when Pakistani Islamic terrorists raided the Chabad house in Mumbai, India. The Holzbergs had lived in Mumbai for six years as official emissaries of the Chabad movement.
The two-year-old life of Moishe was saved when he was spirited away from the attack by his Indian nanny Sandra Samuel. He’s been raised at Kfar Chabad near Tel Aviv by his grandparents for the last year. And on Wednesday, the community hosted a memorial ceremony for the couple, which was attended by 2,000 people. During the event, Moishe celebrated his first haircut, a coming-of-age event for three-year-old boys, known as an “upshirin” in Yiddish or “chalaka” in Hebrew.
“Moshe may be without biological parents, but the entire Chabad family has adopted him,” the head of the Chabad Youth Organization in Israel, Rabbi Yosef Aharonov, told The Jerusalem Post which attended the event.
Across a blue-grey curtain on the wall of the womens’ section of the tent, dozens of blue and white balloons spelled out “Moishe, three years old.” Moishe himself was carried in by Sandra shortly before the beginning of the event, and stood before a gaggle of reporters and cameras, calmly, even lazily, taking in the spectacle.
Rabbi Holzberg’s father, Rabbi Nachman Holzberg, said that the outpouring of support for his family has been tremendous over the past year, and that Moishe was doing very well. Holzberg also expressed his hope that the tragedy “will only bring the entire world closer to redemption.”
Samuel, surrounded by a sea of reporters and swarmed by well-wishers from the moment she entered with Moishe, said that she was feeling a mix of emotions at the event, both great happiness that Moishe was doing well and sadness at the fact that his parents could not be with him.
Samuel said that “the baby is fine, he’s a normal kid, he plays, he jumps.”
With a mixture of sadness and joy, which, after all, is a regular recipe in Israel, the shortened lives of the Holzbergs and the hopefully long life of their son Moishe was celebrated in the only way Israeli know how – with all their hearts.
Yoga puts religious Israelis in an uncomfortable position
Filed under: A New Reality, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Religion, Sports
Today’s Western societies are into all kinds of Eastern recreational and spiritual pursuits. There are also scores of Israelis from multiple generations returning home from backpacking jaunts to India and elsewhere in the East on an ongoing basis. Combine the two phenomena, and the booming popularity of yoga in Israel seems like an obvious eventuality.
For Israelis who are interested in spirituality avenues that are new to them, regardless of potential conflict with their Jewish roots, yoga is hardly a problem. But for the increasing numbers of Israeli Orthodox Jews who are experimenting with flavors from other faiths and integrating them into their own traditional frameworks, yoga isn’t always a straightforward pursuit.
Other spiritual paths might be less problematic for religious Jews looking to pepper things up: Buddhism, for example, is often justified on the grounds that it is essentially a code of ethics with possibly nothing to teach in terms of deities. And other religions have their own potential beefs (pardon the apropos expression) with yoga. However, some Jewish theologians, including a well-publicized responsum by Chabad Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, have justified yoga practice among Jews on the grounds that one ought not throw the baby out with the bathwater – in other words, just because many yoga practitioners include chants dedicated to multiple deities in their practices, that doesn’t mean that the spirit-calming and body-stretching advantages of yoga ought to be avoided.
Another complication to the situation is that it might not be so straightforward that yoga’s Hindu chants to more than one god represent idolatry. Many other theologians have posited that since they all essentially represent manifestations of the one primary godhead, Brahman, the additional Hindu gods can be seen as analogous to Jewish mysticism’s concept of the sephirot, the kabalistic manifestations of the Jewish God’s various components of holiness.
Regardless, there are thousands of religious Israelis who are simply scared of yoga’s spiritual elements and prefer to focus on its exercise-based advantages. Case in point is Californian immigrant yogi Aviva Schmidt, whose yoga studio in Jerusalem, “Power Flow,” has been christened by Ha’aretz as “Israel’s first kosher power yoga studio.”
Located in Jerusalem’s posh Rehavia neighborhood, “Power Flow” specializes in power yoga, which is different from conventional yoga in that the exercises are quicker and more exhausting. “They call it yoga for athletes,” Schmidt said. “It’s not your slow, meditative and gentle yoga, it’s a workout.”
As Schmidt explains her approach to the conundrum….
“Yoga is based on Eastern tradition and focuses a lot on meditation. Different positions are worshipping different idols, which goes against Judaism. So I keep it very pareve: for example, I don’t say the names of the positions, there is no chanting, no ohming. I do focus on the breathing, as this is very important in yoga, but any kind of eastern philosophy stays outside.”
Hey, whatever floats your boat. We’ve heard of kosher cell phones and kosher sex, so kosher yoga? Why not.
Image of Israelis doing yoga courtesy zivpu from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Liverpool’s magical mystery tour comes to Tel Aviv
Two admirers 'meet the Beatles' in Tel Aviv/
Devoted to the mythological symbols of Liverpool -The Beatles and the Liverpool Football Cub – the exhibit, sponsored by Liverpool’s tourism association and on display until the end of the month, is aiming to encourage Israeli tourism in Liverpool.
According the organizers of Imagine Liverpool, Tel Aviv was chosen because there aren’t many cities in the world with such a large concentration of both Beatles and Liverpool soccer fans. One of Israel’s sons – Yossi Benayoun – is a star on the team, and of course, who isn’t a Beatles fan, as demonstrated by the Beatlemaniac reception Paul McCartney received here last year.
While the incredible photographs of the Fab Four shot in 1968 in Rishikesh, India by a young Canadian photographer Paul Saltzman are the real star of the exhibit, yesterday’s gala opening featured another star – Julia Baird, the half sister of John Lennon.
Baird runs the Cavern Club Tours, devoted to the location where The Beatles played regularly and were discovered by Brian Epstein. Amid the tiny quiche hors doeuvres and complimentary wine and Heineken beer, Baird talked about growing up in Liverpool nearby Lennon, and touted the attractions the city holds today.
Musical entertainment was provided by the always excellent Beatles cover band Magical Mystery Tour, and a ’splendid time for all’ was had. “Not bad at all,’ was Baird’s assessment of the band performing her late brother’s tunes.
The exhibition is at Dizengoff Center, 3rd floor of the
southern building (entry via gate 1, 3, 5 or 7). Open from 10:00 am to 9 pm. daily.
Israeli arms dealer goes Bollywood – uh oh
Sometimes, just now and again, a YouTube video comes along that is so crummy, that it’s almost a masterpiece. Dubbed the worst marketing movie ever made by the blogosphere, an honor it undoubtedly deserves, this piece by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems has got to be one of the most ill advised advertisements an Israeli company has ever made.
Undoubtedly, if you’re a defense company it must be hard to keep coming up with new and interesting ways to sell your products. I mean how many ways can you sell a missile?
Rafael execs decided they had to do something different, and so for last month’s Aero India 2009 show, they took their weapons, sprinkled them liberally with a seasoning of Bollywood and voila! A Bollywood-style movie featuring a man (Israel), and four dancing girls (India) in full Bollywood costumes dancing between a range of Rafael’s phallic shaped missiles.
I guess most missiles are shaped like this, but it’s not usually something you think about until you see men and women skipping suggestively between them.
The women sings: “I need to feel safe and sheltered. Security and protection. Commitment and perfection. Defense and dedication.” And the man chimes in: “I promise to defend you, fulfill your expectations. Shield you and support you. Meet my obligations.”
And the unforgettable chorus to this meaningful exchange? “Dinga dinga dee…”
Oh dear, oh dear.
The truth is Israel’s defense relationship with India is pretty darn strong these days – Israel recently became the country’s main defense supplier. And the government-owned Rafael is in a particularly good position. Just last August Rafael and Israel’s IAI signed a joint $2.5 billion deal with the Indian Ministry of Defense.
After a period of circling one another tentatively, the two countries have realized they have much in common – particularly in the wake of the Mumbai terror attack last November.
But that still leaves us with a question. Whatever possessed Rafael to make this movie? It’s a question Saurabh Joshi of the Web site StratPost asked a company representative at the Rafael stall. He was told that the video was intended to “help build familiarity between India and Israel and Rafael.”
Not everyone sees it like that. On Wired’s Danger room blog, Noah Shachtman called it “the most atrocious defense video of all time.” While on the blog DEW line, Stephen Trimble, called it a “catastrophic collision of Bollywood and the arms industry, and dared his readers to watch the video “and, if you’re able, immediately erase the awful tune from your brain.”
It’s harder than you think. Dinga dinga dee.
Fusion and ethno-preservation at the International Oud Festival
Jerusalem’s annual International Oud Festival is undoubtedly one of the highlights on the country’s cultural calendar. When it comes to Israeli performance art, often, the name of the game is “East meets West” (largely thanks to our country’s location and international alignments), and the Oud Festival is perhaps the finest example of what this theme has to offer.
Over the years, the festival has presented amazing fusion experiments, with elements thrown into the mix including the cantorial music of Syria, ancient Persian folk sounds, the contemporary folk-rock of Meir Banai, the para-liturgical poetry of the Ben Ish Chai, Egyptian post-war pop songs, Orphaned Land’s acoustic metal, the Greek blues, medieval Moroccan Sabbath table hymns, Dutchmen with laptops outputting layers of white noise, the sublime rhythmic textures of Zohar Fresco and guitar heroics courtesy of Turkish-bred rock god Berry Sakharof. The shows don’t always directly include the music of the Arabian fat-bellied lute we love to call the oud, but they are always spiritually grounded in an artistic landscape embodied symbolically by the namesake instrument.
In a trajectory that is arguably parallel to the growing popularity of ethnic music and para-liturgical poetry traditions (known collectively as the canon of piyut), over the past nine years, the Oud Festival has grown from a modest few shows held in a small auditorium each fall into a major two-week event, drawing sell-out crowds from all over the country, from all ages and from all walks of life.
This year, the festival was slightly less experimental and fusion-oriented, with an emphasis placed more on covering authentic ethnic territories new to the proceedings. This trend culminated at the end of last week with a performance by Divana (pictured), an ensemble hailing from the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan.
Divana draws from the ancient traditions of the Manghaniyar and Langa tribes, who historically served as bards to the local Rajasthani Brahmin and Rajput aristocracy, purveying sublime chants on the subjects of love, war and mysticism. The contemporary ensemble is among the last remaining descendents of this tradition, and hearing them play was a major treat. The six-piece included two string players, two vocalists and two percussionists one of whom flailed his arms about wildly while rapidly flicking mini wooden planks together with his fingers (the outcome more than slightly reminiscent of the old-time spoonmen.
The Divana show served as the closing performance of the 2008 Oud Festival, an ecstatic and poignant summing up of Israel’s status in the international cultural scene. Festival Artistic Director Effie Benaya was visibly moved as spoke about the bureaucratic struggles to obtain visas for the band’s personnel just days after the terror attacks in Bombay, and he apologized to the audience for the absence of Navtej Singh Sarna, the Indian ambassador to Israel, who had planned on attending but was regrettably stuck in traffic.
Foto Friday – Chabad in India
Filed under: Foto Friday, General, Israeliness, Life, Religion
There isn’t that much to say. Chabad Houses are known stops for Israeli backpackers on their post-army service trips. Whether in Katmandu, Bangkok or Mumbai, these are places where travelers can drop in, get a hot meal, perhaps even celebrate Passover or Sukkot with friends from home. Whatever animosity secular Israelis may hold towards the local haredi community all but vanishes when it comes to parents wanting a safe haven for their kids as they wander the big wide world. Now that sense of security has been irrevocably shattered. Here are a few images of Chabad in India from quieter times, taken from Chabad.org.
A sign in English and Hebrew points the way to Goa, India’s Chabad House. (Photo: Meir Alfasi)
School children run outside the Chabad House in the Colaba Market area of Bombay, India. (Photo: Menachem Gansbourg)
One of Goa’s many Jewish visitors prays while wearing tefillin. (Photo: Meir Alfasi)
A Jewish man puts on tefillin in the last minutes before sunset. (Photo: Meir Alfasi)
Israelis will doubtless continue their love affair with all things Indian, and Israel’s strategic relationship with India will undoubtedly be strengthened. Chabad-Lubavitch will continue to grow. But the greater ramifications of this traumatic event — an attack on Israel and Jews, Americans, Britons, and, by extension, Western civilization — are as yet unknown.
For those wishing to give immediate help, a fund has been established in memory of Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg.
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