Jerusalem's 'Un-Holyland'

"Sickness Land" (Photo: Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)

Jerusalem's Holyland Park luxury apartment complex is under harsh legal and media scrutiny over alleged bribes paid to a string of senior Israeli figures to allow its construction.

The Hebrew letters to the left of the streetlamp had originally spelled out "Holyland." But a protester added a segment to the first letter on the right - "hay," changing it to, "chet." Now the sign says "Cholyland" - a most excellent pun, meaning "Sickness Land" - in this case, of the political and moral variety:

Those under investigation include former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupoliansky and a series of other government and business officials.

The Jerusalem Post has a great article and graphic by opponents of the project.

My Interview on the Previous 'Mohammed Cartoon Scandal'

My interview with an expert in the previous "Mohammed cartoon scandal" (one in a developing series, sadly, apparently...):

Israel at 62: Fireworks!

(Photos: Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)

Israel at 62: Fireworks
Originally uploaded by Dave Bender

I shot these from a party held at the home of some new friends', overlooking Kfar Saba's central square.

Shot with my Samsung Omnia i910, using the "fireworks" setting, and lightly p'shopped for crop, color correction.


(Photos: Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)


(Photos: Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)


(Photos: Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)


(Photos: Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)


(Photos: Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)

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: 'Jerusalem Blues' guitarist: Just Riff It

Natan Zohar is about the best electric street busker, riffing over hip backup, through Hendrixy blues changes and freeform jazz on a blonde Strat, on a windy, freezing afternoon in Jerusalem, well, that I've ever come across... And the tiny dancer at 2:24 - pure delight. Enjoy! (Shot on my Omnia cameraphone - apologies for the audio)

You Must Read This Post. Now. (Really)

From the keyboard of a ridiculously talented screenwriter wife of friend of mine:

"Today I scanned all the faces on the bus and I felt relatively safe.

"You know why? Because we got them. The bombmakers and the masterminds and the organizers and all the eighteen year olds who couldn't wait to get recruited. We got them all, pretty well. We took them on, and we dismantled their networks and we rocketed their bomb factories and we listened to their phone calls and blocked their bank accounts, and when any of their top brass forgot to be vigilant, we assassinated the hell out of them.

"As well as doing all of this, there was the small and simple matter of involving our children in this fight. That's right, all our little boys, the ones who had been playing with meccano and lego and playmobile on the living room floor. The ones who loved reading Tintin and Asterix or the Israeli equivalent, and who gobbled their Frosties for breakfast every morning before getting the bus to school. All our beautiful boys - the ones who were on Ritalin and the ones who weren't, the ones who loved football and the ones who were too nerdy for sports.

"The ones who wore kipppot and tzitzit and the ones who didn't. We waited till they turned eighteen and then we put them in uniform and trained them to use weapons and taught them to speak Arabic, and they went into every one of those viper's nest towns like Jenin and Ramallah and Nablus, usually during the night, and they arrested every single person hiding a weapon or in possession of explosives. When your children were at university doing law or medicine or engineering, our children were in those towns. Every night."

Read the rest.

Irrefutable Proof the Mossad Was Behind Dubai!

They've started selling the t-shirt:

"SALES OF Mossad-themed T-shirts, available by mail order, have risen tenfold since the Israeli spy agency was linked to last month’s assassination in Dubai.

"Despite the fact that Israeli leaders are refusing to confirm or deny Mossad involvement, orders for the garments have flooded in over the past few weeks – from Israelis and particularly from diaspora Jews."

Also: ¡¡pooɯ ɯıɹnd ǝɥʇ uı ʇǝƃ oʇ ƃuıʇɹɐʇs Heh.

(H-T: EoZ)

(Audio Exclusive) Israelis, Palestinians 'Lawyer Up' For Battle

Nitzana Darshan-Leitner making a point to the audience during her address at the recent Jerusalem Conference. (Photo: Dave Bender, All Rights Reserved)

Nitzana Darshan-Leitner, an Israeli right-wing activist attorney, runs the Shurat Hadin Law Center. She told the recent Jerusalem Conference, and Dave Bender about what is increasingly being used as a courtroom cudgel against the Jewish State: "Lawfare," and how she's turning the legal battle against Israel on it's foes.

The interview, and her surprising comments are here: http://www.davebrianbender.com

(Video) Tracking Jews Back to 'Abraham's DNA'

JLTV's Brad Pomerance reports on Author Jon Entine's Book "Abraham's DNA: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People."