The Pope in Israel: Great Live Radio Interview Wrap

Colleague Judy Lash Balint offers a great wrap-up on the Papal visit to Israel, and Palestinian Authority areas with veteran Seattle radio host Dave Ross on KIRO Radio, the CBS affiliate in the Pacific NW.

Listen here.

Holocaust Rememberance Day: The Children

From Haaretz:

"If not for the Holocaust, there would be as many as 32 million Jews worldwide, instead of the current 13 million, demographer Professor Sergio Della Pergola has written in a soon-to-be published article."

This coming Monday is Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day.

The central theme this year is Children in the Holocaust.

Information on Holocaust Remembrance Day, as well as online exhibits, educational materials, video testimony and more is available at www.yadvashem.org.

Jerusalem, Israel & Pals: splitsville?

Looking north towards central Jerusalem, from the capital's southernmost neighborhood, Gilo. I shot this photograph with a cellphone camera, and then tweaked it in Photoshop to get this somewhat dreamlike image. (Dave Bender)

Writer, columnist and blogger Judy Lash Balint weighs in with a well-crafted, detailed, and personal POV on the significance of reports about dividing Jerusalem:

When most tourists think of Jerusalem, they generally have in mind the Western Wall, the Israel Museum, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Ben Yehuda Mall and Yad Vashem. Sadly, tourists, like most Israeli Jews, don't spend much time in eastern Jerusalem--despite the fact that this part of the Holy City holds the most historical, spiritual and strategic significance for Jews and Christians.

But in the run-up to the Annapolis summit, as the Olmert and Bush administrations intone the old "two states for two peoples" mantra, and renewed declarations that a Palestinian state will have east Jerusalem as its capital go on, perhaps it's time to understand the dynamics of the eastern part of the city.

Until very recently, Israeli politicians both left and right cited "Jerusalem, the undivided capital of Israel" as the consensus mantra. Now, Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon, (the same Ramon who was convicted just six months ago on sexual harassment charges) is advancing the same unrealistic Camp David thinking on Jerusalem as that first raised by Ehud Barak in 2000. Let the Arabs have the Arab neighborhoods and the Jews will keep the Jewish areas, and the "Holy Basin" of Judaism and Christianity's holiest sites will be administered by joint international supervision, declares Ramon.

But, as anyone who has spent any time at all in Jerusalem's neighborhoods can attest, things on the ground are far more complex than that.

Read the rest and learn. Previous post featuring Balint.

(Full disclosure: Judy and I have worked together in the past on news coverage about Israel and PA areas)

Holocaust Memorial Day: online exhibitions

Please click here to view online exhibitions.

Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah in Hebrew) is a national day of commemoration in Israel, on which the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust are memorialized. It is a solemn day, beginning at sunset on the 27th of the month of Nisan (Sunday evening, April 15, 2007) and ending the following evening, according to the traditional Jewish custom of marking a day. Places of entertainment are closed and memorial ceremonies are held throughout the country.

The central ceremonies, in the evening and the following morning, are held at Yad Vashem and are broadcast on the television. Marking the start of the day, in the presence of the Acting President of the State of Israel and the Prime Minister, dignitaries, survivors, children of survivors and their families, gather together with the general public to take part in the memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem in which six torches, representing the six million murdered Jews, are lit. The following morning, the ceremony at Yad Vashem begins with the sounding of a siren for two minutes throughout the entire country. For the duration of the sounding, work is halted, people walking in the streets stop, cars pull off to the side of the road and everybody stands at silent attention in reverence to the victims of the Holocaust.

Learn more here.