Precious sleeeep

So - moments before going to bed tonight I semi-remembered (then verified with my good friend the internizzle) that daylight saving in Israel ends tonight. Although I normally mourn the end of DST, in this instance I'm rather pleased since I have to get up early tomorrow to shlep back to Arad. One hour more of precious sleep! How fortunate!

Walk sit pray stand pray sing sit eat stand walk sit pray stand eat more drink sleep (Repeat x 3)

And so ends three days of Jewish Holiday! This Year, Erev Rosh Hashana (the eve of the New Year) fell on Wednesday Night. This means that Thursday and Friday were Rosh Hashana (I) and (II). Then, we roll right over into Shabbat (Friday evening and Saturday). In Jerusalem terms this means that everything closes for three straight days, and most people (the religiously observant at least) engage in the sequence of activity described above.

Two days of New Year? Yes, that's right. Why, I hear you ask? Hmm, good question. This is one that I've wondered about for several years. You see, I am aware that many Jewish Holidays are traditionally celebrated for two days OUTSIDE Israel (the first/second night passover seder, for example). Why? Because in times past, the Hebrew calendar depended on witnesses in Jerusalem appearing before the Sanhedrin to report that they'd sighted a new moon, and hence the beginning of a new month. If no moon was sighted (let's say it was cloudy), the month would be deemed to begin on the next day - and it would be clear on which night each Jewish holiday for that month would fall. However, Jews exiled in Babylonia couldn't necessarily know that a new moon had been sighted in Jerusalem and hence they would celebrate two nights in a row, to ensure they didn't get the date wrong.

So, let's now put aside the fact that we no longer need witnesses to tell us when there is a new moon. WHY would this two-day rule apply in Israel? According to my research on the Internizzle,

"On Rosh HaShana this problem was compounded. Since Rosh HaShana was the first day of the month, immediately upon the Sanhedrin's declaration it would be Yom Tov (actually earlier because of the doubt). It would therefore be prohibited for the messengers to leave the city limits (techum) of Jerusalem. Thus no one outside of Jerusalem would know when the Yom Tov began. It was therefore necessary for all residents of Israel as well to keep two days of Rosh HaShana.

BUT - further reading shows that in Israel, once a "fixed" calendar had been introduced in the 4th century, Rosh Hashana become a one-day affair INSIDE Israel and remained a two-day chag OUTSIDE Israel. According to Rabbi David Bar-Hayim, whose article I found on the web, it was only in the 12th Century that the two-day observance was re-introduced back into practice in Israel by some powerful European rebbes who migrated back to Israel. It's all quite interesting - you can read more about it here

Jerusalem Week 2007

Shana Tovah U'Metuka to all the J-crew out there!
Shout-out to Oren!

I'm writing this posting from the Holy City of Jerusalem where I've been for the past week, spanning the final days of 5767 and the first few of 5768. It's been a very interesting week of walking tours and visits to various sites.



Some highlights:

- Touring the Christian Quarter of the Old City, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and visiting various churches on the Mount of Olives

- A walking tour of Abu Tor, an old Arab Neighbourhood, and the Haas Promenade which gives a commanding view of the whole city of Jerusalem. (I've been there before but it's always impressive)

- A day looking into the world of the Haredim (Ultra-Orthodox) society, including a guided walking tour of Mea She'arim and surrounding shtetls

- Visiting ZAKA - a religious volunteer organisation that goes to the site of terrorist attacks, accidents, car crashes etc and helps to aid survivors and to recover every body part and piece of tissue so that those who have died can be given a proper burial

- Visiting Hadassah Hospital and learning how they deal with mass casualty events (Israel is, unfortunately, world-leading in their preparedness for these kinds of emergencies)

- Going to a friend's Very Orthodox wedding!

I have been getting a little slack on the photo-taking, but you can see a few pics on my Facebook album here

Goodbye King George!

Not the Monarch - the Address.

Woe unto me, tomorrow is our last day living in the Rooftop Ghetto apartment at 37 King George!! This marks the end of our PSJ Internship period. It's been a great 2+ months. Living in central Tel Aviv was fabulous, even with the suffocating humidity. I enjoyed my internships, even though they didn't particularly relate to my professional experience (well actually #2 did but I haven't blogged about it yet, and didn't manage to progress with it as much as I'd hoped).

I'm very happy with what I did for the Heschel Center. The website isn't complete yet, but that's largely due to the fact that we need a graphic designer to help us to realise our "vision". If you want you can check out the work in progress, that is, the website. Please note that it's not finished yet!! (But if you see bugs you are welcome to let me know).

OH and if you want to be on the mailing list to receive the exciting Heschel Newsletter that I created, post a comment or email me and I will add you to the list!

From here it's onto Jerusalem for a week of WUJS activities, then a break for Rosh Hashanah (I think I'll be in Jerusalem participating in some nice Kesher Outreach courtesy of HUC!). Then back to Arad for the final 2-3 days of BBQs, "graduation", packing up our rooms, etc. Then I'll be couch-surfing for a month or so... with a possibility of a house-and-cat-sitting position for a couple of weeks in the middle... FINGERS CROSSED!

Tiyul B'Tsafon (Trip in the North)

Last week we had a week in the North of Israel. Highlights included two hiking trips in the Golan Heights, along streams that feed into Lake Kinneret; on one section of the first hike, you had to actually swim through a waterhole to get across. I didn't take my camera so unfortunately I haven't got any photos from that day. Another day we hiked the Banias stream, where there were also many optional swimming opportunities. We came across an old tank, Syrian, along the streambed. No-one's quite sure when or how it fell down there, but I guess it was probably in 67.

We also had the chance to visit two important somewhat unnerving lookout points. First the Ben Tal lookout, which overlooks the Syrian border (I remember coming here in 2001), and second, a lookout hill in the Northeast of the country which looks over Lebanon. Standing there, one can see quite clearly, only a few kilometres away, a huge Hezbollah flag flying on the hill.


We did heaps of other things too; live floating down the Jordan River on inner tubes; visiting the Rosh Hanikra caves, and going to Rosh Pinna and Safed/Zfat. Yada yada yada....it was a good week!

Rachel and the Watermelon: A Love Story

Blog vs. Facebook

Yes, my blog has been rather dormant lately. I see the problem as twofold: First, I am becoming increasingly lazy. And B) Facebook has reduced my ability to write updates about my activities to one or two sentence "status updates". I will continue my lazy ways by posting for you my Facebook Status updates for the past couple of weeks (In reverse order) :) THEN - this is the fun part - you get to IMAGINE all the stuff in between the status updates! Instead of me telling you in boring detail what I've been doing, YOU CAN JUST MAKE IT UP FOR YOURSELF BASED ON THESE CLUES! Isn't that great? Isn't Facebook SO much better than a blog?

Today
Rachel is eating the newest bestest watermelon YET! 11:27pm
Rachel is possibly eating too much fruit. 7:36pm
Rachel is developing a very unhealthy dependence on spinal adjustment. 12:24am

August 25
Rachel is sorry she made Laura walk home 5 kms. 11:57pm

August 24
Rachel is eating popping chocolate. 11:57pm

August 23
Rachel is in Haifa for the weekend. 11:43pm

August 19
Rachel is going away on a tiyul for a week...bye! 7:30am

August 18
Rachel is hoping to have a bucket-tube some day. 2:08am

August 17
Rachel is a name in the bible (not the Bolstad bit). 10:44am

August 16
Rachel is dot dot dot. 10:56pm

August 15
Rachel is cooking eggplant for the first time in her LIFE. 7:05pm

Rachel is only listening to NZ music today. Starting with The Black Seeds. 9:08am
August 14
Rachel is only wanting to listen to Beck today. Only Beck. Perhaps even only Guero and Guerolito. 3:45pm

August 12
Rachel is spider pig, spider pig, does whatever a spider pig does. 11:14am

August 10
Rachel is part Lisa, part Homer, and a little bit Ralph. 1:03am

August 9
Rachel is unable to clean her room. Why? One word: entropy. 10:24am

August 8
Rachel is so bad at sleeping she even dreams that she is sleeping restlessly... 3:10am

Rachel is waiting. 2:02am

August 6
Rachel is puzzled by friends who say things like "oh sorry, I'm just not a Facebook person". 6:53pm

August 5
Rachel is hoping to enter a watermelon-eating contest. 10:28pm

August 4
Rachel is going to the beach to get even more sand permanently embedded in even more obscure parts of her body. 2:24pm

August 3
Rachel is having a nap. 4:53pm

August 2
Rachel is drinking a homemade watermelon cocktail and she is a drink-making GENIUS. 11:12pm


July 31
Rachel is making identikit pictures AND gorging on Watermelon. 6:48pm

Rachel is making identikit pictures. 10:24am

Wellystalgia

I am a famous photographer! Ok, not really, but one of my photos of Days Bay has been chosen for inclusion in this cool little web application called Shmaps Wellington. If you go to "Trips and Activities" and "The Great Outdoors" and "Days Bay" there you will find two pics - one by me!! Famous!! And I didn't do anything... they just found the photo on Flickr and asked if they could use it for their shmap.
Anyway cruising this site is making me go all Wellystalgiac :)

Internship #1: The Heschel Centre

Apologies that I've been a little slack on the blogfront lately...busy...lazy...you know....
Anyhoo, here's the first overdue posting about my PSJ internships. Internship #1 is for an organisation called the The Heschel Center. Their focus is sustainability education and leadership - they do so many interesting things, from operating a "Green Schools Network" to supporting local governments to develop policies and projects geared towards bringing Israel towards a more sustainable future. My main projects there relate to redevelopment of the English-language website, and newsletters for English-speaking supporters and donors to update them on all the fabulous work being undertaken by the Heschel Center. For the first month, I have a fellow intern working with me (Emilie from Northern California), and for the second month I'll be flying solo. In between the website and newsletters, all kinds of other jobs pop up, including editing reports, producing a promotional postcard/folder, etc. I like the people in the office, and the kitchen setup is very great for making coffee and chatting. The office is only about 15 mins walk from my apartment - as a matter of fact it's probably about the same distance as it was from my Mt Vic flat to NZCER! I walk down this street called Nachalat Binyamin, which seems to comprise about 10 solid blocks of fabric stores. Seriously, almost every store seems to be a fabric store. For 10 blocks. One of these mornings I'm going to take some photos to show you.

Our Slum

...And here is the slum next door, where we sometimes go to pick up someone's weak but unsecured wifi signal.......

Our Apartment

Here's a few photos of the inside of our apartment; my room is the one with the purple towel hanging over the back of the chair.

Elegant Slumming

Tomorrow it’ll be a week since I moved to Tel Aviv to start phase two of my WUJS programme – the PSJ (Peace and Social Justice) internship. Although it’s only been a week there’s lots to say about this new chapter in my Israel adventures, so I’ll try to work through them in a systematic kind of way….one blogpost at a time….

THE APARTMENT
I’m living with 3 other WUJys in an apartment on King George St, which, if you don’t know Tel Aviv, is very central to all the good stuff – the markets where you can buy fresh produce, jeans, bread, tchachkas, and whatever else your heart desires; cool cafes and shops.The beach isn’t so far…. (OK, so it’s kind of a shlep on foot but not for a hardened Welly walker!). The apartment itself is pretty small for four people, but fortunately two of our roomies have kind of taken to living elsewhere so it’s mostly just me and Laura, a cool Canadian social worker. The apartment interior is brand new; the fridge, toilet, and pretty much everything else still had the “brand new” labels and stickers on them when we moved in. The apartment backs onto a little park, with some fun kiddie playground equipment and a dog exercise area. We are on the 4th floor, with no elevator, which means shlepping up the stairs every day…which is probably a good thing as that’s about the most exercise I’m getting these days….apart from swinging on the playground swings of course!

In the apartment, there’s a door in the living room that opens onto an open roof/balcony thing. This might have had great potential for evening lounging, except for the fact that it is a complete garbage heap. Really. See, the building adjoining ours is a completely abandoned slumville. Meaning: it’s a dirty dirty mess filled with abandoned dirty and broken furniture. There is more dirty broken abandoned furniture on the roof/balcony that connects our building to theirs, not to mention large piles of bashed up gib board. I assume this came from our apartment when they were ripping out all the old dirty crap before transforming it into the modern chic interior we have today. Fortunately, Laura and I are doing our best to redecorate the apartment so that it’s more in keeping with our environs. We call our style “ghetto”. This look is achieved by finding various not-too-dirty additional elements of furnishing and dragging them into our apartment to make it more homely and/or practical. Thus far we have brought in a couple of mattresses, and a filthy broken wardrobe which we cleaned up and used to string up a “privacy curtain” for Laura, whose bed is in the living room. There are some dress mirrors in the slum that would be nice, if we could figure out how to unscrew them from the wall…..

Anyway all in all there isn’t much to complain about, apart from the LACK OF INTERNET (this shall be the subject of another blogposting), and the location could hardly be better. Oh – importantly the shower has great water pressure. I thought I should mention that, especially in case Greg is reading this….

Family time...

Mum and dad have been visiting for the last week and a bit, keeping me entertained while I'm on my mid-semester vacation. Although they're not here for that long, we've managed to do a lot of different things, including:

* Lazing around by the pool at a Hotel by the Dead Sea with my "adopted" Arad family (pictured)- very needed after a long trip from New Zealand via Bangkok....

* Two days in the area near Haifa, where we visited an artist's village called Ein Hod, also The Atlit Detention Camp, where Jewish refugees were put by the British during the British Mandate period (prior to 1948), swam at Habonim beach, met friends in Haifa for dinner, and had a quick peer at the famous Bahai Gardens


* An afternoon in Safed, an ancient mountaintop town which gave birth to much of the mystical Kabbalistic tradition

* Driving up the Hula valley - highlight, the Naot outlet factory shop, where I bought some very nice pink sandals...

* Sunset and Dinner on the beautiful Golan Heights with our friends Razia and Ekel

* Walking around the excavated remains of the ancient city of Bet She'an, followed by a wander through the somewhat-touristy-yet-actually-impressive scale models of Mini Israel (Their slogan is brilliant :"See it all....see it SMALL!")



* Wandering around the Old City of Jerusalem on foot, and touring around the whole city on a sightseeing bus

* Catching up with friends JoEllen and Shoshanna in Jerusalem, eating well, and torturing my poor dad with the endless quest for the perfect pair of earrings (which requires us to look in every shop, of course....)

* Drinking endless cups of delicious Mint Tea

Mum and dad only have a couple more days here, and tomorrow we're off to Tel Aviv. It's been very fun having them here to visit, and I acknowledged the importance of their long long journey by snubbing the Israeli Prime Minister in order to hang with them instead! (True story). In two days' time, boo hoo, they have to return to New Zealand, and I will be moving into an apartment on King George St. Here's hoping (for my sake and yours) that I'll have a good internizzle situation in my new home....

Last week in Arad... :'(

I can hardly believe it, but I only have 5 more days until the end of the first half of WUJS. This means only 5 more days of full-time living in Arad! I have quite mixed feelings about it; on one hand, I am VERY excited about moving to Tel Aviv to start my PSJ Internship (this will be the subject of future postings), and to live a little more in the "real world" of Israel. On the other hand, I have grown very attached to my little desert hometown, and the WUJS routine, and there are many things I am going to miss....

Anyway, this week has been yet another busy one. I had two fieldtrip days that I really want to write about:

TUESDAY
This week, a theme of our learning has been "The Holocaust in Israeli Consciousness". Like many people, until now I have always associated Holocaust memorialisation in Israel with Yad Vashem, which I visited in 2001 on Birthright. While I think Yad Vashem is an excellent and important place for all visitors to Israel to see, one can't deny that it is a deeply harrowing experience to spend a day there. This week, with WUJS, we travelled not to Yad Vashem but to a place Massuah up near Netanya. I'd not heard of this place before. As their website explains,

Massuah considers education the most significant way to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. Its educational approach raises fundamental questions about the essence of humanity, the people and the state, education, and culture, which lead to issues that are relevant to the world in which today’s young people live.

We had a few discussion workshops with the Massuah educators, and we also visited a couple of exhibitions at their museum, all of which were thought-provoking. The most remarkable event of the day, however, was our session with a Holocaust survivor, Shlomo Perl, whose unbelievable story was turned into a well-known film, Europa, Europa!. To briefly summarise, Shlomo survived the Holocaust by pretending to be an ethnic German, and incredibly found himself enlisted into a prestigious school for the elite Hitler youth! For four years he lived with a bizarre dual identity - Josef the German Hitler Youth, and Shlomo, the hidden Jewish boy that he was, worrying that he could be discovered at any moment. I hadn't seen the film before, so this story was completely new to me. Shlomo told us a little bit about what had happened to him, and then we watched the second half of the film with him. All I can say is, if you haven't seen this film, go and lay your hands on a copy ASAP.

WEDNESDAY
On Wednesday we had a whole-day PSJ seminar about civil rights in Israel. For this, we visited three different organisations in Jerusalem. First, the Israel Religious Action Centre. Next, Open House which is a community centre for gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual people in Jerusalem. This was a timely visit, as Open House has been at the centre of a significant controversy in Jerusalem for the last few years. Namely, they are the organisers of the annual Gay Pride parade which has the Orthodox religious leaders of Jerusalem up in arms. We watched a DVD about last year's attempt to have the parade - which was fought bitterly against by some members of the ultra-orthodox community and religious members of the city council, to the point that the police were too worried about security and forced the parade to be cancelled and replaced by a rally in a local stadium. What I saw in the DVD - the intolerant, cold-hearted, cruel way in which the gay and lesbian community was treated by the parade's opponents - the death threats, the inhuman things that were said - convinced me how important it was that this year's parade should go ahead. Some of the most disturbing scenes were of an anti-parade rabbi going into the West Bank to meet with Muslim Clerics, not on a peace-building mission, but to unite together against their (perceived) common enemy - the GLBT community. Sigh. By contrast, the GLBT community itself presented an inspiring model of Israeli society in which Jews, Palestinians, gay and straight people, religious and secular, everyone, whoever they are can coexist peacefully and warmly with one another.

I said our visit was timely - it was in fact the day before the 2007 parade which, I just read online, went ahead in a largely peaceful manner, thank goodness!

The final stop on our tour was to a place called Mavoi Satum. This was also a very very important place to visit. However to explain what they do, I also have to explain a bit about how "marriage" works according to Jewish Law (Halakhah). (Readers who already know, never mind!). But now it's kind of late and this posting is already kind of long, so it's going to have to wait for another time I think.....

Jen, this is 4 u!

Kibbutz life

So, months and months ago when I started telling people in NZ I was coming to Israel, at least half of the time people asked "Oh, are you going on a kibbutz?". And I would explain that no, I was going on a study-and-volunteering programme called WUJS, in a small town in the desert, etc etc.

However this past weekend, we did have a kibbutz experience - of sorts. We were lucky enough to spend a few days at the beautiful Kibbutz Ketura, deep in the southern Arava desert valley. But if you've start picturing me out picking dates or mucking out cowsheds, I'm afraid I'll have to disabuse you of that imagery. Our Kibbutz stay was purely educational. We did have to get up super-super early, but not to attend to agricultural matters. Instead, we had a Friday morning Desert Arts workshop. There were three options: Desert photography, Desert Painting, and Desert Midrash. I chose painting - over the last few months I have become deeply enamoured of the desert, and have been heard to lament on more than one occasion that I haven't any paints which I might use to feebly attempt to capture some of the indescribably beautiful lights and colours before my eyes. So a few hours with watercolour paints seemed like an opportunity too good to pass up. Unfortunately I remembered almost nothing my mum had ever taught me about working with watercolours, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience...



The rest of our time on Kibbutz was very relaxing. Ketura is a religiously pluralist community with "egalitarian" Shabbat services, and it was very nice to experience a Ketura Shabbat. We had ample free time to spend at Ketura's AMAZING swimming pool, and we had a few other activities designed to give us an insight into Kibbutz life (for example, we did a simluated "Kibbutz democracy" exercise in which we debated and voted as "kibbutz members" on real issues that have come up in this or other kibbutzim in the past. Shortly before we left Ketura late Saturday evening, we had a tour around the whole kibbutz, which has an impressive agricultural industry including dates, dairy cows, and a world-leading algae factory! Our final stop was at the cowsheds, where we were lucky enough to discover one of the cows in the process of giving birth! Sadly she was not far advanced enough for us to see the whole birth, and although she was working fairly hard to push it out, we had to leave her with just the two hooves of her calf poking out into the world.

Nahum Goldmann Fellowship Programme

So I am back in Arad after 8 days at the 19th Nahum Goldmann Fellowship Programme. It was a very densely packed week-and-a-bit; filled with seminars and discussion groups from morning to night.

I was thinking about whether I could summarize some of the highlights or content of the Fellowship, but I'm so tired right now I just can't think straight. I had to leave a little bit early, in order to get back to Arad for my WUJS programme, so sadly I am missing the closing banquet tonight :( As is often the case, some of the best moments of the week came about in the social interactions and conversations between Fellows. I have made some new friends, including some awesome Israelis, who I'll definitely be staying in touch with while I'm living in Tel Aviv; and friends from Europe and the USA who I may visit in my post-Israel travels.

The last couple of nights a few of us took to Lake Kinneret (a.k.a The Sea of Galilee) for evening swims and beach bonfires. Every day I was transfixed by the beauty of the lake - the colours of the light and the landscape seemed to change every time I looked. I regret that I was a little slack in terms of taking photos, but since I'll be up there again in a few weeks, I figure there will be more opportunities. And first I have to deal with my photo backlog from the Negev Tiyul and Eilat... time to start some uploading, methinks!

Oy, such a shlep!

Friends and blogfans will already be familiar with my exceptional capacity for fake losing stuff. This week I had my first fake lose since arriving in Israel. As I mentioned in my last posting, I spent a few days in Eilat (the southern tip of Israel), at the very recommendable Beit Haarava hostel (Clean bathrooms, very friendly staff...). On Sunday morning, I was on the bus on my way back to Arad (via Be'er Sheva), only 30 minutes into a 3-4 hour bus trip, when I realised I didn't have my cellphone. Crisis!! But funnily enough, for some strange reason that morning I'd picked up one of the Hostel's card and put it in my pocket. So, putting on my most earnest please-help-me-I'm-from-New-Zealand expression, I borrowed a cellphone from a fellow passenger and called the Hostel. The manager found my phone at the table where I'd had breakfast and then we tried to work out what to do. Two of my WUJy friends were still at the Hostel so we agreed that when they woke up he'd give them the phone and I should call it to arrange a plan. Lucky that I actually knew my own phone number! So the rest of the bus ride I kept calling and calling until I could speak to one of the friends. The phone ended up with Melanie, who I spoke with just as she was boarding the bus to Haifa.

My original plan had been to spend the night in Arad, then go to Tel Aviv in the morning for a meeting regarding my PSJ internship, then to meet a bus at Ben Gurion Airport to be taken up to Kinneret for the Nahum Goldmann Fellowship Programme. But since I was phone-less (and hence practically paralysed) I altered my plans to include a train trip from Tel Aviv to Haifa to pick up the phone, then bussing and taxing to Teveria and Kinneret. So yesterday and the day before, I spent approximately: 8.5 hours on buses, 1 hour on a train, and 1 hour in taxis. I have travelled so much of Israel in two days!

From this experience I have learned several things. 1) Once again, Israel is SMALL! 2) The please-help-me-I'm-from-New-Zealand face really works 3) Things always work out OK, and 4)Of all the things you can fake-lose, a cellphone is perhaps not the most important (c.f. wallet, passport), but is certainly one of the most logistically inconvenient things to organise to get back! How do you even arrange a place to meet with someone when you don't have a phone?? And how on EARTH did people get by when travelling in the past??

South - North

In the next week I'm going to be travelling the country almost from end-to-end. Tomorrow we leave EARLY (6.30am) to start our 3-day hiking tiyul in the southern Negev - in the sweltering heat, I fear..... We'll finish on Thursday evening in Eilat, on the Red Sea, where I'll be spending the weekend. On Sunday or Monday I'll head northwards, to Kinneret (or "The Sea of Galilee") for a week of Nahum Goldman Fellowship Programme. Friends and family will recall that I spent a week on this same programme in Mumbai India, back in 2005 (see cool photo montage!)

I will try to post updates when I can, in the meantime blogfans, keep the comments and emails coming, I love love LOVE to hear from you :)

Bruchin

Here is a pic from the Bruchin settlement in the West Bank. You can always see more photos on my Flickr site (see link on right hand side of the screen....)