Jerusalem's Christian treasures take a trip back home to Europe (until July 14)

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UPDATE 2, April 19:   A short video by the Franciscan Media Center  about the Treasure of the Holy Sepulchre exhibit became available just now:
http://www.terrasanctablog.org/2013/04/19/holy-sepulcher-exhibit-opens-at-versailles/
You can choose your language. 

Recently I ventured into this nice Franciscan museum  in the Old City for the first time.

This old (17th century?)  scale model*  of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, crafted from olive wood, ebony, and ivory, is one of the many unusual things on display.

It's a good thing I saw this while it was still in Jerusalem, because recently it and 250 other "unknown" Christian masterpieces were carefully crated up and shipped to Europe and as of yesterday are  being shown at the Chateau de Versailles!
Yes, in Paris!

You can click to read more about it,  see a slideshow, and  view a video at the website of the Palace:  http://en.chateauversailles.fr/news-/events/expositions/tresor-du-saint-sepulcre-en

And the Custody of the Holy Land explains it thus: 

The Treasure of the Holy Sepulchre in Paris

Paris, 16th April 2013

An important exhibition of Christian treasures from Jerusalem opens today in Versailles, in the presence of the Custos of the Holy Land, Fra Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Guardian of Bethlehem, Fra Stéphane Milovitch and the Franciscan friars of the Commissary of Paris.

The Halls of the Crusades in the Palace of Versailles, just outside Paris, house an exhibition called Treasure of the Holy Sepulchre. Gifts from European Royal Courts to Jerusalem from 16th April to 14th July.
This is a particular event: for the first time 250 “unknown” masterpieces that were sent to Jerusalem over the centuries are on display in one place. They are offered to the public for three months by the Friars Minor of the Custody of the Holy Land, who still use many of these precious implements at the most solemn celebrations in the basilica which encloses the Calvary and the empty tomb of our Risen Lord.

The pieces are sumptuous chalices, crucifixes, lamps, candelabra, ciboria and liturgical vestments given by European sovereigns as a mark of devotion to the Saviour, but also to assert the power of their lineage and nation.

The works will be displayed according to their origin – in particular from the Holy Roman Empire, the kingdoms of Spain, France and Portugal, the Republic of Genoa – showing how the European court rivalled in generosity.

Open every day, except Monday, from 9 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., the exhibition is organized in collaboration with the General Council of the Hauts-de-Seine Department and also has a second venue: the House of Chateaubriand, in Châtenay-Malabry. Here the public will be able to admire nine pictures, also belonging to the Custody. The lengthy work of preparation for the Paris exhibition began three years ago and in the end will also be of benefit for the nascent Terra Sancta Museum, which the Custody intends opening in Jerusalem in 2015.

* UPDATE: Meanwhile I find this good information at http://www.christusrex.org/www1/ofm/sbf/SBFmsm.html:

 A striking example of more recent Palestinian art occupies the central spot of the northern hall. It is a small model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with inlaid work, in olive wood and mother of pearl, from the 17th-18th century.
The model represents the Basilica of the Resurrection after the Crusader restoration of the 12th Century, separated from the surrounding buildings. During the 17th century a number of similar devotional objects were produced by craftsmen in Bethlehem and sold to western pilgrims as souvernirs of their pilgrimage. 
The craftsmen based their work on the detailed plans of the sacred edifice drawn and published by the Franciscan Architect Fr. Bernardin Amico, who served the monasteries of Bethlehem and Jerusalem from 1593 to 1597.
Various sections of the roofing can be lifted, so that the inside can be seen.
 The model which is one of best preserved, is an excellent example of the type of work initiated by the Franciscans in Bethlehem, in the handicraft of applying mother of pearl inlay to olive wood.

Carpal bones and curiosity

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"C" is for curious children, cranking levers to make bones articulate.

At Jerusalem's nice old natural history museum.
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For ABC Wednesday.
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Oi what a schnoz!

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Here is a "cute" ossuary I saw at the Eretz Israel Museum near Tel Aviv.
It was discovered in Peki'in, in northern Israel.
The bone box is from the Late Chalcolithic period, i.e. about 4000 BCE.

The museum calls it a "double-faced ossuary, modeled and painted."


They write

The human figure is distinct for its head sculptured in the round with a marked mouth.
The exaggerated nose, typical of the selective facial features of the period, possible symbolized the breath of life.
In the ossuaries it may have been an expression for the dead person's revival in the afterlife.

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A post for Taphophile Tragics and Our World Tuesday.
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Mammals of Israel, stuffed

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While the grandkids were visiting, I finally had an incentive to go check out the old Nature Museum in Jerusalem's German Colony.
Here are some of Israel's most common mammals, all of which I have seen in the wild.

Once I met a big porcupine in the woods in the dark of night.
Luckily it was in a hurry to dig down into its burrow.
I could hear its quills rattling as it ran.

My old friend, the jackal.
So many of them here in the hills and even in my backyard.

One evening I saw from afar a hyena down at the spring.

And there are still wild boars, too!
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All for Camera Critters meme.
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Jet lag in a highchair

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It may seem gruesome to some, but my grandkids were interested in looking at the baby skeleton.
In this photo for Weekend Reflections you can see Eyal and Libby at the bottom.

Just a few days ago daughter Naomi and I took the kids to Jerusalem's old (and old-style) Nature Museum.

Fresh photo from Naomi and Guy's blog

But today the family is already enroute to Australia, luckily with a 24-hour stopover in Seoul.

Remember how you saw little Libby napping on the deck floor of the Science Museum?
Well, here she is right now, giving in to jet lag, somewhere in Korea.
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I'd like to be ... under the sea ...

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Back in 2005, when grandson Dean was still small enough to fit inside, the Australian Museum in Sydney had a wonderful little corner called the Music Cave.

He loved tapping the brightly-colored gong-like aquatic animals with the stick.
Each one gave a different tone.
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City Daily Photo bloggers around the world are posting BRIGHT COLORS today for Theme Day.
Click here to view thumbnails for all participants
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Bringing heaven down to earth

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On Monday the Israel Museum will open its doors (ALL the doors, not just a few like now) to the public after three years and one hundred million dollars worth of improvements to the 20-acre campus.

I was there just a few weeks ago and you still saw construction everywhere.
Hope they finish on time.

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I don't know WHAT the workmen were doing to or adding to Picasso's "Profiles," which has been in the Billy Rose Art Garden since 1967.

Behind the Picasso you can see Robert Indiana's "Ahava," our Hebrew counterpart to his famous "LOVE." (More about it at my Valentine's Day post.)

Look, something new!

The guard would not let me get any closer.

The sky--on the bottom!

Bringing heaven down to earth for SkyWatch Friday and Weekend Reflections!

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And the guard leaning back on his chair, legs crossed, just sitting and . . . well . . . guarding.

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The 5-meter-tall polished steel hourglass was commissioned from the London-based Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor (who as a teenager came to live in Israel a while and whose mother was Jewish, BTW).

He also made what Chicagoans like to call The Bean.

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"Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem” reflects and inverts the Jerusalem sky and the Jerusalem landscape.

This is likely a play on the duality of the heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jerusalem.

In Hebrew we say Yerushalaim shel ma'alah, Yerushalaim shel matah, literally--Jerusalem of above and Jerusalem of below.

This new sculpture really turns our world on its head!

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The New York Times explains how the Israel Museum is changing the way things will be shown to us. It is a whole new approach.

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Counting the omer with objects of the spirit

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Omer and Objects of the Spirit -- for O Day at ABC Wednesday.

I saw this at the Jewish art museum at Hechal Shlomo in Jerusalem and was delighted to learn that it is a modern, artistic version of an omer calendar!

The acrylic on wood creation is called Saphyr, Sefirat haOmer counter [sefira means "counting" in Hebrew].

American artist Tobi Kahn made it in 2002.

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Saphyr is a 7 x 7 sculptural grid with 49 pegs that mark the 49-day interval between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot, between the commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

This 49-day period begins on the second day of Passover – when an omer , or measure of barley, was offered at the Temple in Jerusalem – and ends on the day the wheat harvest began. Symbolically, the time between the two holidays traces the path from physical freedom (the Exodus) to spiritual freedom attained by the acceptance of the Torah.

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Special calendars are used to count off the seven weeks of the omer.

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Since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, we can no longer bring the offering.

Instead, we now "count the omer" each night during this period by saying a blessing and enumerating the day.

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The omer also became a time of semi-mourning during which many observant Jews refrain from cutting their hair, listening to music, or celebrating marriages.

After nightfall tonight, we will recite "Today is twenty-nine days, which is four weeks and one day of the omer." That means you can see many men in my village, who normally are clean-shaven, with quite a beard by now.

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The mourning is normally associated with a 2nd century plague said to have decimated the "24,000" disciples of Rabbi Akiva who died "because they did not treat each other with respect."

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It has been suggested (at the Jewish Museum in New York website) that "Each peg on Kahn's counter is unique, but they all fit together as a whole, their combined form suggesting the rooftops of a village. The dark color of the work reflects the mood of the omer period."

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The interior of each of the compartments, designed to hold the sculpted counting pegs, is painted gold to symbolize the spiritual journey embodied in the interval between the two holidays of Passover and Shavuot.

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Richard McBee, talking about "Reinventing Ritual at The Jewish Museum," offers this:

"The wooden pegs are sculpted in unique shapes, each a different miniature sculpture that in its own way represents the uniqueness of each day as we perform G-d's commandments. Here counting becomes a physical act, forcing us to feel the difference of each day and place it in the next slot. This very uniqueness comes together as we count. The counting of the Omer represents the relationship between a person and his or her community. Beginning with one, we become an ordered multitude. Kahn's message is direct: each day and each person counts."

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Imagine having a dozen

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Well, no, my grandchildren are not replicating by the dozen as this photo for James' Weekend Reflections would have you believe.

It is just Eyal having fun at Jerusalem's Science Museum.
He and his big brother Dean and their parents were back in Israel for a visit one year ago.

On Wednesday Eyal himself became an older brother.

He is two and a half now.

Aww, look how tender he looks holding his baby sister.

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Thank you, all my blog-friends, for the warm wishes you wrote today and yesterday. Naomi and Guy are enjoying them too.

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Baby's name will be Libby. In Hebrew, the word libi means "my heart."

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Reflecting on the shtender

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Perhaps in anticipation of "Weekend Reflections" this old carving was displayed with a mirror behind it at the Jewish Art Museum in Jerusalem's Hechal Shlomo.

The traditional Jewish prayer and study lectern or podium is called by its better Yiddish name: shtender.
Like most Yiddish words, it does not translate well.
When you are praying and studying the holy books all day and half of the night, like the yeshiva "seminarians" do, you really need a shtender.
When you get tired of sitting, you stand; when you get tired of standing, you sit.
The shtender rocks with you. The shtender leans with you. Or, it stands firm when it has to.
It has room inside and on top to hold your many books.
There's even a footrest.
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Soon, just before sunset, it will be time to light the candles and welcome the Sabbath.
The old wooden Jew from long ago joins me in wishing you Shabbat shalom, Sabbath peace.
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Update: I went back to the museum this week and was surprised to see that the man at the shtender was a lot smaller than I had remembered him from my first visit. Funny how things "grow on you."
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UPDATE Jan. 2015:  Everything you ever wanted to know about shtenders at the You're Not Crazy blog.
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Ahava

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It turns out that Valentine's Day is called Yom HaAhava in Israel, i.e. Love Day.
And this year the 30th of Shvat happened to fall on February 14, so today is Family Day as well.
(30 Shvat is the yahrzeit of Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah Women.)

Dean and Eyal loved playing in this part of the Sculpture Garden. And why not? The letters spell ahava, Hebrew for LOVE.
Robert Indiana designed "Ahava" especially for the Israel Museum. The artist avoided his usual bold colors here because the sculpture is positioned in a way that makes it possible to sky-watch through the letters.
It is said that this angle alludes to the marriage of heaven and earth, with love.

I love how the big brother lovingly embraces his little brother, helping him down from the big sculpture.

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Wishing you all a happy day filled with love.

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Remembering

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For today's International Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Holocaust --

Sometimes art says it better than words.

At the museum in Hechal Shlomo, seat of the Chief Rabbinate, in Jerusalem.

The assembled elements.

And from all this brokenness and after the screams . . .

. . . our people's hope--Jerusalem--appears.

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And those too soon dead, perhaps they see the Heavenly Jerusalem.

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X, O, and the K-word

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The challenge of letter X comes around again today at ABC Wednesday meme.

Tic-tac-toe is not the only fun way to use X and O.

Remember the era when we still wrote letters on stationery--and signed them with XOXO under our signature?
OK, it's easy to imagine hugging arms looking like the O. That is a recent North American addition to XOXO.
But how did X come to stand for "kiss"?
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Apparently this custom started in the early Christian era. To sign with "X" gave a document the validity of a sworn oath. The X was the first Greek letter of the Greek name Xristos (Jesus) and the X cross mark symbolized the cross.
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Many people were illiterate until even as recently as 150 years ago. So signing X took the place of a full signature. To show the importance of the mark, people would kiss it, just like they reverently put their lips to a Bible or crucifix.
This practice led to the idea of X representing a kiss.
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To Jews, however, X was an evil sign (as Leo Rosten recounts in The Joys of Yiddish) which represented the horrors of crucifixion [Jesus was not the only Jew crucified by the Romans, remember] as well as being the symbol of their Christian oppressors.
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So when waves of Jews, many of them illiterate or writing only non-Latin alphabets, entered Ellis Island in New York, they refused to sign the immigration forms with the customary X.
Instead they drew a circle.
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The Yiddish word for "circle" is kikel (pronounced ky-kel).
The American immigration inspectors started calling anyone who signed with an O a "kikel." Soon this was shortened to "kike."
Jewish-American merchants continued to sign with O instead of X for several decades, spreading the nickname kike wherever they went as a natural result.
At that time it was not a bad word. Only later did it develop into a racial slur.
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Apropos, you might also enjoy (?) my previous X-letter post; it's about xenophobia. :-)
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Chanuka menorahs from all over the world

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How would you like to kindle the Chanuka lights in this strange stone vessel from Persia?
The Jewish Art Museum at Hechal Shlomo lists it as a 19th century menorah for Chanuka and Shabbat.

(Please click on the photos if you'd like to see the details.)

I visited last Thursday, just a few days before a special display for Chanuka week was arranged.
So I have no idea what the menorah under wraps was for.

But the one next to it was as tall as me.

Such a differance a few centuries can make in the designs.

In and on the case are both old and modern chanukiyot.

"Hanukkah Lamp, Baghdad, Iraq, 18th century, brass, cast"

The oddest chanukiya I found was this brass one from 18th century Austria.

The double-headed eagle with cannon at his feet, is it not an unusual choice for a Jewish ceremonial object?

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This week our world in Israel revolves around Chanuka observances and festivities (kids have vacation from school for the holiday), so this is what I have to share at the bloggers' worldwide meme, "That's My World."

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More cisterns

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The lively kitten in the flowerpot was playing hide-and-seek with a litter-mate.
She is my contribution to Camera Critters meme today. However, the other photos are in response to the many readers who got excited about cisterns in new Jerusalem in yesterday's post.

Jews began moving out of the overcrowded walled Old City in 1860, when the first Jewish neighborhood in new Jerusalem was built. Many of the new houses where built around a courtyard which could be locked at night for better protection. Robber bands and wild animals were a danger then, outside the city wall.

Big cisterns were built underground.

Today the openings into the cisterns are plastered shut or locked. Some pumps have become quite decorative.

The three photos above (which are clickable, as usual) show the courtyard of the late Rabbi Kook's yeshiva and of the Museum of Psalms.

The slight curve signals the vault of a cistern below the street.

The two photos above are from the old neighborhood of Nachlaot.

The complex of city center neighborhoods, officially known as Lev Ha-Ir (meaning the heart of the city), was declared an area to be conserved. The are quite charming now.

Can you imagine the hardworking mothers who once gathered here draw water and to wash the laundry and exchange the latest news?

A courtyard of one of the many the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods near the market. Often all the houses surrounding the courtyard made up one little "neighborhood," with a name of its own.

They have big families. With all the little kids playing outside, the openings to the deep cisterns are today carefully blocked.

The beautiful cistern roof in Sergei Courtyard!

The building houses the Jerusalem branch of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel.

As we said yesterday, the SPNI is campaigning to have City Hall allow the re-opening of some of Jerusalem's 11,000 cisterns so that rainwater can be caught and held and used, instead of going down the drain.

After five straight years of drought, we need to conserve any rain that might come.

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Ramadan and the Jerusalem qibla

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The new moon was sighted. Ramadan has begun.
Ramadan kareem to all our Muslim blogger-friends.
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Coming this year as it does in the heat of summer [as in, Robin's Summer Stock], the holy month must be a great challenge to observant Muslims, who may neither eat nor drink from sunrise to sunset.
This is a copy of part of an old mosque in the Tower of David Museum of Jerusalem History.
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The minbar is a stepped pulpit from which the imam preaches.
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The mihrab is a niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the qibla, that is, the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca and hence the direction that Muslims should face when praying.

But it was not always so.
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Like Jews then and now, the earliest Muslims also prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, specifically, facing the Haram e-Sharif (what we call the Temple Mount).
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To quote Wikipedia --
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"This first qibla was used for over 13 years, from 610 CE until 623 CE. . . .
According to accounts from the prophet Muhammad's companions, the change happened very suddenly during the noon prayer in Medina, in a mosque now known as Masjid al-Qiblatain (Mosque of the Two Qiblahs). Muhammad was leading the prayer when he received revelations from Allah instructing him to take the Kaaba as the Qiblah.
According to the historical accounts, Muhammad, who had been facing Jerusalem, upon receiving this revelation, immediately turned around to face Mecca, and those praying behind him also did so."
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And the rest is history.
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UPDATE: Sarah of Mashhad (IRAN) Daily Photos
has contributed new information and also personal insights in a comment. Don't miss it!
And now good input is given also by "Green," whom I am sure you all remember.
Thank you, my young friends, for sharing your knowledge and opinions.
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Sky love

Last Friday Jerusalem's sky still had some clouds.
Visiting daughter Naomi and I took the kids to the Israel Museum.
These "kids" stand on the roof and welcome young visitors to the Youth Wing.

Dean and Eyal loved playing in this part of the Sculpture Garden. And why not? The letters spell ahava, Hebrew for LOVE.

Robert Indiana designed "Ahava" especially for the Israel Museum. The artist avoided his usual bold colors here because the sculpture is positioned in a way that makes it possible to sky-watch through the letters.

It is said that this angle alludes to the marriage of heaven and earth, with love.

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OK, I have to turn off the lights now. Israel is finally observing Earth Hour in all our big cities, starting tonight at 8:00 in Tel Aviv, 8:10 in Jerusalem, etc.
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Another round of SkyWatch Friday is starting tonight. Take a look.

Terrific grandson

Tantalizing toys.

Tic-tac-toe at Jerusalem's Science Museum.

Tunnel at the zoo.

Taking the trail to Grandma's house.
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