Sometimes a bench is needed

RuneE, at his beautiful blog Visual Norway, is inviting us all to join in an informal meme on Fridays. The subject is benches.
My friend on this bench is reflecting on a special exhibit at Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Shoah.
We in Jerusalem offer sympathy to the family of Officer Stephen Johns, the guard shot down on Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum--a black man killed by a white supremacist and anti-Semite.
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Sleeping cranes

Just across the valley, Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center is constantly expanding. Never-ending construction on the hilltop.
The illuminated cranes look quite pretty against the evening sky.
I guess they have to be very visible to the helicopter pilots. The round helipad is bathed in blue.
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Happy SkyWatch Friday to all who contribute their presence with a photo or a visit.

CORRECTION !

ATTENTION READERS !
Mea culpa--I am guilty of a big mistake in yesterday's post and offer my apology to you and to the Ecole Biblique. I assumed that the burials in the crypt were of people's ashes. NOT true! It is the normal burial (of a body in a casket) of deceased Brothers.
The text following my photo of the crypt has been duly corrected.
Professor Strugnell's ashes, brought from America, are the only ashes.

Dina, Dina, why did you assume something without checking the facts?
I had never seen multi-story burial. I have much to learn . . .
Sincere thanks to Fr. Jean-Michel de Tarragon of the Ecole for pointing out my error, and (mercifully) in a kind and friendly manner. Thank God for teachers such as he.

Returning in an urn

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The story of the urn begins at the prestigious École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem. On March 31 I was privileged to attend part of their Qumran Day, a day of lectures in memory of John Strugnell.
Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls the scholars at the School of Biblical and Archeological Studies have been deeply involved in the translation and interpretation of the texts. The original Scrolls team was appointed in the early 1950s by Jordan. (The Ecole is on Nablus Road in East Jerusalem, formerly Jordanian territory.) Young Strugnell came to the Scrolls Project in 1955 from Oxford. By 1987 he was editor-in-chief.

Photo courtesy of Fr. Jean-Michel de Tarragon

Strugnell taught at Harvard School of Divinity, but he spent his summers working on the scroll fragments at the Ecole Biblique. So it seemed right that after his death, late in 2007, his ashes would be brought from the United States to Jerusalem.
The Ecole is with the Priory of St. Stephen. Its monks are the teachers. The Dominicans are the Order of Preachers.
Here in the photo (courtesy of Fr. Jean-Michel) the brothers sing from the rite (in Latin and French) as a schola (choir) in the burial place.

Photo by Fr. Jean-Michel

Holy water was sprinkled toward the place of the entombment.

Photo by Fr. Jean-Michel

In the urn--John Strugnell's ashes.

Inside the wall in the crypt are the mortal remains of the deceased Brothers. The body is placed in a simple wooden casket. The marble marker bears the Brother's name, date of birth, date of monastic profession of vows, and date of death.

The present Dominican monastery (from the late 19th century) is built over remains of a 5th century Byzantine monastic complex. Back then the dead were buried in these ancient tombs cut in the rock. The body was buried. Cremation is not and was not allowed in Judaism and it took centuries for Christianity to begin to allow it.

You photo bloggers will enjoy meeting Brother Jean-Michel de Tarragon, here shooting with the big camera.

After getting his PhD (on Ugaritic Religious Cuneiforms Texts) at the Sorbonne, he came here and made Jerusalem his home. Until recently he served as the Prior of St. Stephen's Priory.

When he is not in a class teaching, he does photography for the institute.

He is also very enthusiastic about his project of converting between 15,000 and 18,000 glass plate negatives (from the really old-fashioned cameras) into digital pictures on compact disc.

St. Stephen's has accumulated the world's biggest private collection of old photos of Israel.

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Amazing to see the 19th and early 20th century photos of life here in this land! The country is lucky to have Frere Jean-Michel in Jerusalem.
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Interesting stuff:

A Jerusalem Post article about Professor Father Tarragon and the monastery

Ecole Biblique website in French and English
A new critique by Geza Vermes on the controversy surrounding both Strugnell and the handling of the translation and publication of the DSS
Photo of Qumran caves where the scrolls were discovered

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Κύριε ἐλέησον

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At the center of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands this edicule, and inside is the tomb where Jesus was buried (according to Catholic and Orthodox tradition).

This is a rare photo of the edicule with no crowds standing in line to enter it. Early morning today.

But yesterday this same place was much more colorful, with red vestments bringing to mind the red tongues of fire.
The Orthodox churches were celebrating Pentecost.

The prostration is because of the liturgy of the day.

The Greek Orthodox have three sets of kneeling prayers for Pentecost.
The first is a prayer of great repentance; the second prayer is a call to the Holy Spirit to help the faithful follow the right path during their life; and the third prayer is to remember those who have gone before.

Some selected lines from the liturgy:

DEACON: For those who incline their hearts as well as the knee before the Lord, let us pray to the Lord.
CANTOR: Lord, have mercy.

DEACON: That He will accept our act of kneeling as incense before Him, let us pray to the Lord.
CANTOR: Lord, have mercy.

. . .

DEACON: Again, on bended knees, let us pray to the Lord.
CANTOR: Lord, have mercy. Kyrie eleison.

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(For views of other worlds by other bloggers please visit That's My World Tuesday.)
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The moon rises for all

Come, have a look at the evening sky.
Long before we get to see the moon, our neighbors over on top of the next mountain see it rising. The neighbors are a moshav (village) and an IDF base. They see the moon come up over several Arab villages which are just over the Green Line (the 1967 border), in the West Bank already.

I make just a quarter turn to the east and there is Jerusalem twinkling on the horizon across the valley!

Happy full moon viewing to all of you tonight!

Praying with a mantis

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--
Only this and nothing more."
. . .

. . .
Soon again I heard a tapping something louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is and this mystery explore--
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;--
'Tis the wind and nothing more.
. . .

from "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe

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Would that I could write such poetry. But I too, in the midnight silence, heard a sudden TIK at my window.
It turned out to be a visitation by a big praying mantis!
Strange . . . I was praying a bit before going to bed when the Mantis religiosa (his scientific name) appeared. It was nice to have someone to pray with.
Especially since mantis is Greek for prophet.
Luckily there was a screen between us. A mechitza maybe?
;-)
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You're invited to the Camera-Critters meme to see other bloggers' animals.

Blessing the bread

Welcoming the Friday evening Sabbath at a friend's house. She has the custom of making a communal blessing over the challah.


Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha-olam
Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the Universe

hamotzi lechem min ha'aretz. (Amein).
who brings forth bread from the earth.
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Shabbat shalom, Sabbath peace, to you and all.

Sky, moon, and mysterious straw bales

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Something new was added to my local sky and usual moon for today's SkyWatch Friday.
Where did all these straw bales come from?! This mountain moshav/village has no big livestock, only laying hens.

The bales suddenly appeared in back of my neighbors' house, across the street.

This is the new neighbor who is into permaculture, organic farming, raw food, etc. Click here to see the beautiful garden spiral they made last year.

You think they might build a straw bale house?!

Maybe we (well, I mean they) will have a herd of donkeys?! I wish!!

Or maybe the bales will just become long benches to sit on . . .

I'll keep you informed.

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Eitsah-gebers (#3 in a series)

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Thanks for bearing with me for two days of heavy posts. I do appreciate your sage comments and encouraging words.
So now for something lighter!

 Presenting . . . No. 3 in the series "How many men does it take to open a manhole?"

I watched this team giving advice, pulling and prying, hammering and measuring, until finally the personal access panel came off.
(Yes, a reader once told me this is the politically correct way to say manhole cover.)
 Jookim and other crawling bugs scurried every which way, blinded by the sudden light of day.

The little street is Rehov HaKotel, Western Wall Road, in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's walled Old City.
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To see other funny advice-givers gathered around manholes, click here for Hadassah and here for the Supreme Court.
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Time factor and Turning Point Three targil

Today ABC Wednesday's T is for Turning Point Three.
This is the code name for the week-long nation-wide preparedness targil (Hebrew for drill/exercise) being run by Israel's Home Front Command.

At 11:00 this morning the country's 2,300 air raid sirens sounded.
 I made it a point to be at a public place just then, namely, my Kupat Cholim medical clinic in Jerusalem.
Sure enough, we the public and the staff were instructed to go down the stairs to the basement. I never knew there was a bomb shelter there.
Here is the metal, air-tight door in the picture.
As you can see, the staff had turned the protected space into a kitchen and break room.

T is for time factor!

Israeli households (well, mine NOT included) recently received this handy and reassuring (LOL) refrigerator magnet.
Click to enlarge and you will see that we in and around Jerusalem are in the best location if the missiles begin in-coming from Gaza and/or Syria and Lebanon and/or Iran.
 We supposedly will have three whole minutes of warning. Yay!
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To see more about the Turning Point drill and other Facts of [Israeli] Life, please see my previous post. Toda (= thanks)!
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Facts of (Israeli) life

The bloggers of That's My World Tuesday invite you to their local world.
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All this week Israel is even stranger than it is normally.
We are having a preparedness drill named "Turning Point 3."
It is to practice what would (or should) be done by the authorities and the people in the worst-case scenario--simultaneous incoming missiles from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and even Iran, accompanied by terror attacks from the West Bank.

Every air raid siren in the country will go off at 11:00 a.m. Tuesday.
For the first time ever, the Home Front Command wants all citizens to practice taking cover inside the nearest shelter or protected space.

The black things you see above are built into all the new apartment buildings (since 1992).

The secure space's walls are made of steel reinforced concrete and the door has an air-tight seal.

There can be one inside the residence and also one on every floor of the building.

The old underground bomb shelters in the middle of my village. I think these public shelters are no longer in use.

The shelter next to our kindergarten does, however, look well maintained, even painted sky blue with clouds.

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I think the newest and most interesting innovation is this (in today's Jerusalem Post):

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"For the first time in such an exercise, the IDF Home Front Command will also test a new system that issues warning of incoming missile attacks to private cell phones. The IDF is also reviewing technology that would enable it to send little 'pop-up' screens to computers that are connected to the Internet.
Developed by Israeli hi-tech company eVigilo, the system connects to existing cellular antennas and is able to send messages to all phones that are being supported by the antenna. This enables the system to send warnings from areas as large as the entire country to just several city blocks, where the missile is predicted to land.
'Israelis have around 10 million cell phones and we plan to take advantage of them during an emergency,' explained OC Home Front Command Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan."

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Can you imagine, you are sitting and blogging when suddenly a box pops up on your computer screen saying "A missile is on its way to your neighborhood and will strike in X seconds (or X minutes)" !

Well friends, that's my world. Oi, such a world!

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Feet

A Jewish foot in Judea happily no longer under the heel of Imperial Rome.
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At Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem.

Dairy goats and a cheesemaker, for Shavuot!

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Yesterday we celebrated the Jewish holiday of Shavuot on which it is traditional to eat dairy food, and LOTS of it.
In the past week Israelis purchased THREE times the normal amount of cheeses and dairy products.

Nothing can beat goat and sheep cheese--in taste, texture, and appearance.

These are the young bucks which will sire the does which will produce the milk which will be transformed into cheese.

But this is the master cheesemaker and only he knows how to create the delicious prize-winning artisan cheeses of many varieties!
Shai Seltzer learned to make cheese thirty years ago and ever since, to quote the farm's lovely website, "Shai has won acclaim worldwide as an instructor and mentor of dairy goat farming and cheese making."
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Learn about the cheese in the cave and the specially-bred herd, about the hills that have known agriculture for 6,000 years, and about Shai--all at the website (linked above).

Or, take a hike or a drive up the mountain and meet this fascinating man in person.
Follow the sign with the doe that says goat cheese.
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You might want to click and enlarge this photo.
Even zoomed in, it looks far away. It is the view across the valley, from my hill in the Jerusalem Hills, looking toward Har Eitan mountain.

You see the little white dots in the center, in the middle of nowhere?
That is where Shai lives and works.
He built it all from scratch years ago. A real pioneer.

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Besides being Shavuot, today is also the day for our bloggers' weekly animal meme, Camera-Critters Sunday.
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Double celebration

Happy Shavuot holiday and Shabbat shalom, Sabbath peace, to you tonight.
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A blessed Shavuot

"On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled. Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God. They took their stand at the foot of the mountain." -- Exodus 19:16-17

This is just the view from one side of my village. But when it looks all dramatic in the sky I like to imagine that the next ridge is Mount Sinai and that God is answering Moses in the thunder and that I am there to witness the moments of fear and trembling!

You see?! Moses did receive the tablets of the Ten Commandments!

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Today is not only SkyWatch Friday but also the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.

The Feast of Weeks is also called the Time of the Giving of the Torah, the Festival of the First Fruits, and the Harvest Festival. Shavuot commemorates the people's pilgrimage to Jerusalem to bring first crops to the Temple. Tomorrow the Ten Commandments will be read in synagogues and also the Book of Ruth, telling the story of Ruth the Moabitess who followed Naomi and became Jewish.

On Shavuot it is the tradition to eat dairy foods, wear white, and study Torah throughout the night. Happy holiday!

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P.S. To see how I discovered the tablets of the Covenant in a Swiss lake, please click here.
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The olive tree and the laundry lines

A street of a different stripe

ABC Wednesday post. See if you can guess which letter the group is on today. ;-)

Silly stripes on this girl's pants and top! Was she in pyjamas? Was she a jailbird?
She was perched on a stone wall together with her laptop, at the end of a shaded side street in one of Jerusalem's old neighborhoods near the shuk.
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Such was her street! Wouldn't YOU too prefer to sit in the sun and savor some privacy out on the stone wall, instead of sitting behind the shutters in one of these little apartments?
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So why the tin on several of the old buildings, you say? It is the old way of keeping some of the cold and rain at a distance in Jerusalem's chilly winters. Simple and cheap.

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A window of peace

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While exploring Jerusalem together, my visiting grandsons and I discovered this by chance!
We just happened to wander into the library of the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University.

Measuring 16 x 6 meters/yards, this creation is among the largest stained glass windows ever made.
Mordechai Ardon was one of the great painters of Israel. Towards the end of his life the message of peace became his focus, and he addressed his work to war-weary Israel. The theme of his window, executed in 1980-84 for the National Library of Israel, is the prophet Isaiah's vision (Isaiah 2:2-4) of eternal peace at the End of Days.

In the photo above, broken modern weapons and shells are turned into spades. "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

"And many peoples shall come and say: 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.' " The left panel depicts the roads taken by the nations on their way up to Jerusalem. Each road is marked by the verse, "Come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord…" in several different languages and alphabets including Latin, Greek, and Arabic.
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The red middle panel is my favorite.
At the bottom is Jerusalem's city wall as mentioned in Isaiah. But look carefully! The wall is not of stone; it is a spiritual wall, the Scroll of Isaiah itself, which was discovered at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls!
The parchment floating above the "wall" reads "And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares."
The network of blue circles and lines is the Kabbalistic Tree of Sefirot, a symbol of the mystical Divine Presence (Shechinah) over the city. The composition of Sefirot made of concentric circles is also derived from the Book of Zohar.

On the east side of the National Library, facing the rising sun, the stained glass window covers the entire wall of the mezzanine lobby to the General Reading Room.
The building houses the National Library of Israel, the National Library of the Jewish People,
and the main research-level Humanities Library of the Hebrew University.
As the Philately Service wrote when it issued stamps of Ardon's windows,
"The close connection between the subject of the windows - Jerusalem - and their position in the library, the hall of the eternal spirit of Jewishness and Humanism, is obvious. It was the artist himself who chose this place for his creation and it was the place itself which gave him inspiration."
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Here is the entire stained glass window in a photo from the Library website.
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The assembling was carried out by master-craftsman Charles Marc at the "Atelier Simon" in Rheims, France. It took two years to complete.
Although nearly 90, Mordechai Ardon participated actively in the execution of his great work.

UPDATE: See Ardon and about Ardon and his window in this 1990 video.
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Other guided tours of beautiful places in the world will be available from tonight at the friendly meme That's My World Tuesday. You're welcome to join or visit.
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Safety dungeon, confession

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As a former translator I had to laugh at this rendering of the Hebrew term bor bitachon! Normally it is translated "safety pit." (You find them at every public place in Israel. It is a barrel buried in the ground, with a lid, in which to put a found suspicious object , e.g. a bomb, until the police sapper arrives. )
But Safety Dungeon???

This sign was there for the Pontifical Mass which was celebrated on Franciscan property in Jerusalem's Kidron Valley.
Click to enlarge and you can see their emblem, the crossed arms of Jesus and St. Francis.
So what did I find amusing? Well, in a moment of (Jewish) collective memory I imagined dungeons of the Inquisition; I wondered if the sign's translator-friar had unconsciously been influenced by the vocabulary of his inquisitor brothers from the Middle Ages, like, in a moment of (Catholic) collective memory.

Thank God, nothing and no one was put down in the dungeon during Mass on May 14.
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I do have a confession, however. I erred.
When reporting to you about Pope Benedict's Mass (here, here, here, and here) I assumed, since there were no statistics afterward in the media, that the place built specially for the event (to hold 6,000 people) was pretty much full.
A few days ago the newspapers suddenly announced that Church officials were "perplexed" about the low turnout for the Jerusalem Mass.
 It seems that only 3,000 (or 3,500 according to the Franciscan website) of us got through the gate.
Sorry about that. I must remember the old rule: Assume nothing.
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