The Monster landmark of Jerusalem

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Theme Day at worldwide City Daily Photo bloggers group today is LANDMARK.

My favorite landmark in new Jerusalem is The Monster! 

It's a giant slide loved by kids and by their parents and even grandparents as well.
The neighborhood folks make a birthday party for the sculpture every year. 

Jerusalem's "Golem" was created in 1973 in the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood by sculptress Niki de Saint Phalle as a gift to the children of Jerusalem.
A UC San Diego website says that de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) "is best known for her oversized figures which embrace contradictory qualities such as good and evil, modern and primitive, sacred and profane, play and terror."

But no one calls it Golem.
We call it HaMifletset, Hebrew for "the monster."
It is a landmark.

The bottom doubles as a sand box.
The sheer size of the cavernous slide can be frightening the first time a little boy sees it.
But my grandsons gradually learned to accept and love the Monster.
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(More pictures at my earlier posts.)
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 UPDATE Nov. 3:  Google gave Niki a doodle in honor of her 84th birthday!
Unfortunately, as a result of inhaling toxic polyester fumes while creating her artwork, she suffered from emphysema, from which she died in 2002 at the age of 71.

(Hat tip to my fellow Israeli blogger Yael for the doodle tip. Visit her delightful blog, "More or less, simple life of a grandmother.")

Bialik, our national poet, has a birthday

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Today was the 141st birthday of Israel's national poet, Haim Nachman Bialik.
Meitar Library had a special story hour followed by a coloring session on the subject.

I took Eyal and Libby.
Libby enjoyed it because she had just learned to sing Bialik's songs in her pre-kindergarten class.

Even today's Google doodle was dedicated to Bialik's poem, Ken Latsipor (Bird's Nest).

See the words and translation here, with a very interesting "Revisiting Bialik: A Radical Mizrahi Reading of the Jewish National Poet."
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"Jew, speak Hebrew!" **

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(** Slogan in the language battle of the Jews in pre-State Israel)

Google gave us a new doodle today in honor of  155 years since the birth of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern spoken Hebrew.

The doodle incorporates some of the words he coined:
glida  meaning ice cream
buba for doll
millon meaning dictionary, from the root milla, word.

Even before Theodor Herzl envisioned a Jewish State, even before the whole Zionist Movement,  Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was a visionary.
The word of God came to him in the 1870s at Kasr il Yahud, the crossing point of the Israelites through the Jordan River into the promised land.

"A clear, incandescent light flashed before my eyes

and a mighty inner voice sounded in my ears:

‘the resurrection of Israel on its ancestral soil.’"

 "The Jewish People [Am Yisrael]  in its own land and in its own language," became the young man's driving force and he moved from Europe to Jerusalem in 1881.

His grandson, Rabbi Ben-Yehuda, now living in the USA, summarizes thus:

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a pre-Zionist visionary and pioneer of Jewish national renaissance and resettlement in Eretz-Yisrael, was a writer, lexicographer, newspaper editor, teacher (first to teacher an entire curriculum in Hebrew) and statesman. He founded "Va'ad Halashon" - the parent of today's Academy of the Hebrew Language and the National Hebrew Library. He authored the "Ben-Yehuda Dictionary and Thesaurus of the Hebrew Language, Ancient and Modern" . . . , a seventeen volume tome that is the most complete Hebrew language research tool in existence. He is recognized as "the man who revived the Hebrew Language."

 I am just now discovering that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda the grandson has a wealth of little-known inside information available about his famous grandfather:
For the biography book see http://fulfillment-of-prophecy.com/
and for articles on his webpage go here.
You can also watch the Rabbi giving a fascinating lecture on his grandfather to a group of Christian Zionists,  in five segments, starting here.

And for some music try Chava Albertstein's singing of the modern song about Eliezer Ben-Yehuda that every Israeli child knows.
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(A post for Our World Tuesday.)

Shalom Kitah aleph

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Google had a special logo today for the first day of school in Israel.
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For the first time ever, school started in August instead of on September 1.
Also a first, a victory of last year's social justice movement--little kids aged 3 and 4 can now attend pre-kindergarten tuition-free.
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Over two million K-12 pupils headed back to school today.

May all our kids learn a lot and enjoy being together.
And may they stay safe in this coming year of uncertainty.
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