This Just In: Israel Dismantles: World's Problems End

Arabs: Welcome to your new home. Jews: But where do we hang the mezuzas? (Photo: Pria Bender. All Rights Reserved)

Reposting the link to a classic satire (...at least I think it is), since it seems to be even more timely now than when it first came out.

"My cabinet and I had long discussions about world troubles, and we concluded that our critics are right - all the troubles can be traced back to us. So, in order to resolve "We are dismantling the Nation of Israel. I'm leaving for Poland next week."these issues, we felt it would be best to extend our withdrawal beyond Gaza to include the West Bank and Israel proper."

"We are dismantling the Nation of Israel. I'm leaving for Poland next week."

Read the rest: http://betbender.blogspot.com/2006/07/this-just-in-israel-dismantles-worlds_11.html

Efrat: Misty Morn'

Click the photo to see the larger version (Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)

A panoramic, chilly morning in the Judean hills at the community of Efrat, 20 minutes south of Jerusalem.

More photos here.

Israel Life: Jerusalem Cranes (photo)

Jerusalem construction cranes at sunset. (Photo: Pria Bender)

Israel Life: Why Tykes Shouldn't Drink Coffee

I mean, just look at those glassy eyes: forget the afternoon nap - this kid's wired for the week.


Hebrew banner: Z"HV = "Careful at crossings" (Photo: Dave Bender)

Israel: Hitchhiking Home

'Efrat: Misty Morn' Dave Bender, all rights reserved (Click the photo to embiggen for that panoramic look)

Not long ago, I hitchhiked my usual ride home from Jerusalem with an Efrat neighbor who was passing by the Gilo junction where everyone either catches a hitch, called a "tremp" in Hebrew, or an intercity bus - which comes by every 20 minutes or so.

It's usually much faster and often more interesting to hitch - and every time's a chance to meet someone new, learn something, often hear great music (speaking as a past radio programmer and DJ, folks in Gush Etzion and points south have awfully good musical taste) - and give someone a chance to rack up the mitzva points en route.

Dozens of riders, from teens to the elderly, regularly crowd together under the streetlamp alongside the bus bay, holding plastic shopping bags, backpacks and whatever else you'd lug along home after a day in town, at work or school.

They wait for rides to their communities, and - from firsthand experience - commonly not more that 10-15 minutes until a car or van going their way slows and shouts out the destination. The potential rider closest to the vehicle usually shouts out the destination for others who are going the same way.

Most evenings, there are two, three and sometimes even four vehicles pulling up at a time offering rides home. Amazingly, I haven't seen anyone hurt or a collision (yet...) as they clumsily merge back into the traffic lane alongside.

Guess that's just the way we roll in the Holy Land, so to speak...

After getting off a bus from in town, I stroll up to the junction and a car soon pulls up alongside.

The woman driver calls out, "Efrat;" I recognize her as a neighbor.

I get in, and a moment later a young woman walks up, carrying a infant, a car seat for the baby and a back pack.

Read that last sentence again, I'll wait...

...a slight young woman with a 1.5-mo.-old babe in arms, and baby gear, hitchhiked a ride with total strangers on a ride through the wild "West Bank," aka here, the hills of Judea.

Stop - hold that image.

She was headed to her village, Elazar, a short distance before Efrat along Rt. 60.

Our driver pulls out and we make small talk about visiting home towns overseas and family as we head off for the 14-km/9-mi drive along the two-lane road.

Our 15-min. southbound route under a brilliant full moon takes us into the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, past Bethlehem, Beit Jala and several other Palestinian Arab villages.

There have been numerous horrific shooting attacks against Jewish residents of our communities in the last several months, years, decades and more, but, on an evening like this, it somehow struck me as though we were somewhere in a would've, could've should've been small town, maybe somewhere in the rural U.S. dozens of years ago, before the idea of even a burly tough guy hitchhiking was an assumption of dangerous lunacy for either the driver or the ride.

Now think about that; hold that thought for a second.

Again, imagine the bond of trust, elemental "derech eretz" (innate decency, here), and healthy shared societal assumptions that brought together that vignette of the four of us, what it implies, and what it says about the hesed (grace), resilience and plain old decency and gumption of this society - as opposed to everything you read on the news about life here in Israel.

Now, could you envision such a scene like this anywhere else - really?

Shabbat Shalom.

Western Wall at Night ( Exclusive Panorama Photo)

Western Wall Plaza. Dave Bender (All Rights Reserved)
Click on photo for larger panorama.

"Folded notes of prayers, blessings and personal requests to the Almighty, pressed into the crevices of the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City. What happens when all the cracks between the Herodian -era stones are filled?

The answer is here: www.davebrianbender.com"

'From Jerusalem to God - by Kotelevator'

Click here for the full-sized image.

By Dave Bender JERUSALEM, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) -- Worshipers and tourists at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest site, will soon have a new way of approaching the Lord above: an elevator.
Read more: http://www.davebrianbender.com

Gaza flotilla: both sides vow new confrontations

By Dave Bender, Gur Salomon, Yuan Zhenyu

JERUSALEM, June 1 (Xinhua) -- A day after the Israeli commando' s deadly raid on the Gaza aid convoy, there is no sign of an end to the hype. Both Israeli officials and international activists are standing their ground and say they're preparing for the next round.

Israeli government on Tuesday began dealing with repercussions of the incident. While most of the pro-Gaza activists are still under detention, Israeli military, after strict security check, delivered several trucks of aid unloaded from the flotilla to the coastal enclave.

Read more.

Holocaust Remembrance Day: The 'Virtues of Memory'

Detail from a sculpture at the exhibit. (Photo: Dave Bender)

Holocaust Remembrance Day: The 'Virtues of Memory'

By Dave Bender

On April 12, Holocaust Remembrance Day, a new exhibition, “Virtues of Memory: Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity” will open at Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

The exhibition, “tries to explore for the first time how survivors actually remember a place we too-often said was indescribable,” according to Yehudit Shendar, who directs the center's art department and is senior art curator of Yad Vashem's Museums Division.

Virtues of Memory, “is an opportunity for all of us to try and understand what the survivors have experienced – this time, not with our ears, or with our word capacity, but rather with our eyes,” Shendar told reporters at a pre-opening exhibition.

“In my opinion, the Holocaust is one of the major characteristics of Jewishness today,” said Raul-Israel Teitelbaum, 80, a former Israeli journalist and painter. One of his paintings, a dark oil-on-canvas, “Boy at Bergen-Belsen,” is hosted at the exhibition.

“Other elements are sometimes disputed, but the Holocaust is one thing that actually crystallized the identity of Jews today. It's a part of the history, and a very hard history of the Jewish people,” Teitelbaum told reporters, standing alongside the painting.


Shen-Dar and Teitelbaum, stand beneath his painting, "Boy at Bergen-Belsen (Photo: Dave Bender)

“When I was very young, I was very busy with my daily life … with age, the memories come back,” Teitelbaum said, describing a pattern familiar to survivors, of painful memories they often tried to suppress over the intervening decades of rebuilding lives and families.

One of his horrific experiences is captured in the 67.2 x 42 cm. portrait of a gaunt young man, clad in torn blue rags and sitting on a stone in a muddy, stockaded courtyard in the camp. In the agonizing scene, his back is turned away from the viewer and his face is unseen.

“I think about an intimate moment in Bergen-Belsen. It was when we got our daily ration of bread, and all of us would try to hide it from the others there, and I was trying to show this moment,” said Teitelbaum, who now lives as a retiree in Jerusalem.

Teitelbaum was born in Kosovo, Yugoslavia in 1931, and was an only child. He was imprisoned in the hellish death camp when he was 13-years-old, along with his mother and father.

He and his mother managed to survive there until the Nazi surrendered to Allied forces. Their father did not.

Teitelbaum remained in Yugoslavia after the war, in order to finish his schooling. He then made his way to pre-state Israel, where he settled and worked as a journalist for the next 30 years at the Yediot Aharonot newspaper.

“...and now I am very active to tell my story to my granddaughter and her friends,” the now silver-haired and robust Teitelbaum said, in recognition of a sobering, unavoidable fact: When he and his generation are gone, there will no longer be anyone left alive to pass the memory of the horror, and the vision of the hope, on to the next generation.

Teitelbaum's memories and artistic vision are an integral theme of this year’s Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day events in Israel.

The artwork of 300 survivors, including paintings, wood and metal sculpture and mixed-media are the first time such a show has ever been attempted.


(Photo: Dave Bender)

“We are so accustomed to think about the Holocaust in black-and-white,” Shen-Dar told reporters viewing the vivid images and sculpture arrayed throughout the expansive hall, “but the 'black-and-white' was the camera of the perpetrator – not what the victims have seen.”

But, “colors don't mean that something is happy,” Shen-Dar cautions.

“It just means that it was real. It was not on another planet, it was right here on our planet with greens and reds and blues, that we all know well.” That awful reality is something Shen-Dar and her colleagues at Yad Vashem are struggling hard to memorialize, and tell the world. They are in a race against age, and in the face of Holocaust denial, and renewed outbreaks of antisemitism worldwide.

Shen-Dar and her team assembled the hundreds of artifacts out of the collection of thousands of object d' art stored at Yad Vashem in the six decades since World War II.

“No, no. They were certainly human beings. Uniforms, boots,” writes Israeli poet, Dan Pagis, in one of many vivid quotes about the Holocaust experience inscribed over the sections of the exhibition.

Shen-Dar says that quote is prophetic, since many of the images feature the same Nazi uniform elements again and again.

“That is to tell us that the perpetrators were not some outside creatures. They were real people,” Shen-Dar reminds the reporters.

“Unfortunately, too many times we say that they don't belong to the human race,” she says of the Nazis. That the death and labor camp tormentors, “are not part of what we call, 'humanity.' But they were.”

“They were human beings, some of them very well educated,” Shen-Dar said. “And they did what they did with a clear mind and an ideology, and thus, we should not spare them by saying 'they were beasts.'”

Finally, according to Shen-Dar, the exhibit does not detract from the visceral experience the survivors went through, or allow an gauzy artistic aesthetic to lessen the elemental impact of the images:

“I would say the reality of these works of art is quite blunt, and they spare nothing” she says of the works of art. “This tells you that they believed that the reality needs to be seen as is. Not beautified, not adorned, and not spared from us.”

“I believe that part of the power of this exhibition,” Shen-Dar concludes, “is to allow this voice to take the stage.”

Since Israel officially follows the Hebrew lunar-based calendar, the opening ceremony for Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day begins Sunday evening, and concludes Monday evening.

Israel's President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are scheduled to address the ceremony, and Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, Chairman of the Yad Vashem Council and himself a survivor will kindle the Memorial Torch.

The exhibition will be on display for a year.

(An edited version of this story appears in China's People's Daily Online)

Netanyahu Touts 1st Year in Office

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu points to a PowerPoint presentation at a press conference held at the Prime Minister's Office, Apr, 7, 2010. Netanyahu touted his government's initiatives during its first year in office, during the 32nd Knesset session. All Rights Reserved, Dave Bender, 2010.

By Dave Bender

"'The whole world is not against us,' Israel's embattled prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday at a press conference touting a list of accomplishments in his government's first year in office.

"This, despite a bloody deadlock with Palestinians, nuclear trouble brewing with Teheran, and a gnawing diplomatic spat with Washington."

The rest of this article is posted here: http://www.davebrianbender.com

(VIDEO) Israel: 30 countries at mass-casualty, NBC drill

"Preparing for a germ warfare attack, Israel stages its largest ever drill on emergency preparedness as hundreds of emergency response experts from around the world attend a simulated biological attack on Tel Aviv."

Israel: Just Jew it (developing post)

Which is to say that I'm returning to Israel, to resettle after three amazing years working and living here in Georgia among some pretty amazing folks, both in Atlanta and elsewhere, statewide.


Atlanta skyline. (Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)

Rav Kook wrote:

"When people are asked why they are unwilling to settle in Eretz Yisrael [The Land of Israel] right now, they have all types of cheshbonot - calculations - as to why now is not the time.

One says his chesbon is that his children need to finish school or college; another's chesbon is that he has to vest his pension, and so on.

If we look in the Torah, though, we will see that before the Jewish people entered Eretz Yisrael, they first killed the King of Chesbon.

Once the King of Chesbon is killed, the decision to move to Eretz Yisrael becomes easy."

In more contemporary terms:

This post will be developed and expanded, as I try to get more nuanced feelings about this whole process of being here and there down on pap- 'er, blog...


Sunset panorama outside the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem's Old City. (Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)

Comments welcome.

(Video) BBC Porcine Aviation Moment: Gaza & Sderot

From the Beeb: A celebrated (going by the accent and Belfast reference, Irish) UK soldier takes his own professional "boots-on-the-ground" look at Gaza and Sderot - and comes to (for Bush House, as least) surprising conclusions that refute The Goldstone report about last year's battle, and incidentally, much of the BBC's own programming about the conflict:

A year ago the Israeli army was readying itself to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, after a three-week campaign which led to accusations of war crimes.

The Israelis said they launched their assault because they could no longer tolerate the indiscriminate rocket attacks which were being launched on Israel from inside Gaza.

One year on, celebrated Gulf War veteran Colonel Tim Collins travelled to Gaza for a soldier's view of the conflict.

Broadcast on Tuesday 19 January 2010.

The un-embeddable video is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8470100.stm

Anyone with an embed link out there?

(H-T: EoZ)

Jerusalem Old City Panorama (Photo)

Click the photo for a much larger image.

Jaffa Gate, a chief entrance to Jerusalem's Old City, looking towards the fading sunset, and western Jerusalem during Hanukkah, 2009.

"David's Tower" is at the left, and Jerusalem's landmark King David Hotel is seen in the distance, to the left of the menorah. (Dave Bender: All rights reserved)

Israel: Getting Beyond 'Exhaustion' & 'Puppy Love'

An elderly man taking a break on his morning walk, leans against the security barrier in Jerusalem's southern Gilo neighborhood. The several mile long concrete wall protects residents in the facing apartments from gunfire from Arab Beit Jala (see in in the distance), adjacent to Bethlehem. This barrier is not the same as the disputed "Security Barrier," that snakes roughly along the 1967 cease fire line in parts of Judea and Samaria, also known as "West Bank," but was erected for similar reasons: to stop bullets from reaching civilians and schools (in this photo, there's one directly behind the camera) More on this story here. (Photo: Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)

A powerful pairing - or pairing off - of opinions about the Jewish State:

In "How I’m Losing My Love For Israel," Jay Michaelson, writing in The Forward admits:

"To paraphrase a recent Jewish organizational tagline, I’ve “hugged and wrestled with Israel” for 20 years now. At first, it was all embrace: Zionist songs and culture nourished me like mother’s milk, and on my first trip to Israel I kissed the tarmac at Ben Gurion, as did the other USY (United Synagogue Youth) kids.

"Eventually, the wrestling came to the fore, particularly as I became more conscious of Palestinians, settlements and religious-secular divides. In 2002, I wrote about being “a leftist and a Zionist” and how difficult it was to maintain those dual political identities. And for several years, I’ve argued for a more nuanced approach to Israel advocacy and education than the hail of falafel balls and the bludgeon of Taglit-Birthright.

"But lately I’ve noticed that I’m becoming a candidate for advocacy myself. I’ve loved Israel for decades, lived there for three years, and studied in detail the subtleties of its society and conflicts. And so it is with the sadness that accompanies the end of any affair that I notice my love is starting to wane."

Daniel Gordis replies:

"The truth is, you and I agree about a lot. We’re both worried about some of what’s happening to Israeli society. We’re both tired of all the equivocating (though probably for different reasons). We’d both love some real leadership around here. We’d both like peace. And we’re both exhausted."

"Maybe it’s time we all moved beyond puppy love and ventured into something more mature, a sort of love that knows that the object of our love cannot, and should not, remain unchanged year after year, decade after decade."

Very worth reading.

'Tisha B'av' & Beating the Odds (video)

...not a new video, but just some salient, extremely well-parsed thoughts by Israel's ambassador to the United States, New Jersey-born and raised Dr. Michael Oren. Appropriately enough, he's weighing intertwined and contrasting Diaspora Jewish and Israeli fates, leading up through the "Nine Days," and culminating in the Tisha B'av fast this Wednesday/Thursday. Worth watching:

Hit Israeli tv show: 'Dos'i dating do's and don't's' in Jerusalem

Fellow blogger and Jerusalemite, Brian Blum, comes up with an excellent look at a new Israeli tv program detailing social interactions among the young, knitted kipa crowd; from the "just hanging out together," to the "tefillin date," set.

In his take on the series Srugim (knitted kipas/yarmulkes), he says: " Imagine Melrose Place…with yarmulkes."

Having been a part of that scene at several periods over the years, and judging by the clips I viewed on their site -- it looks like a winner:

"A new TV show that debuted earlier this month on the Israeli satellite company YES is the talk of the town across certain sectors of southern Jerusalem. "Srugim" (in English: "knitted kippas") is an extraordinarily accurate depiction of the religious singles scene in Jerusalem.

"Set in our own neighborhood (Katamon and the German Colony in particular), the show chronicles the trials and tribulations of trying to find one's place in the grueling "swamp" that represents the modern Orthodox world in Jerusalem.

"Though the show is about Israel singles, Anglos in the city will easily recognize their own lives, between coffee dates at local cafes, shul hopping and the ubiquitous plastic bags containing quiches, humus and drinks that singles carry around on Shabbat as they head to a group meal with other like minded young people.

"Srugim is peppered with location shots of local hangouts. And the dumpy apartments with their tiny kitchens will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who's ever been single in Jerusalem."

It must be a bit deja vu'ish living in the small neighborhood where it's filmed: Observant immigrants and many, many other Israeli singles that I know from the 'hood could very easily wander into a shot and be mistaken for the actors.

Worth a watch, even without the English since it's in Hebrew.

Great post, Brian.