Re-dedicating the 16th century Jaffa Gate

.
Lots of reporters and photographers were on the ground at noon today, just outside the Old City wall.

For several months Jaffa Gate has been shrouded in mystery, in a big black covering.

This morning a shiny clean and restored Jaffa Gate was revealed and re-dedicated.

(It was first dedicated in 1538 by the builder of the walls of the Old City, Sultan Suleiman, ruler of the Ottoman Empire. )

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat asked questions about the conservation work and got answers from the Israel Antiquities Authority.

There were speeches given to the small crowd sitting on folding chairs.
Here IAA director Shuka Dorfman is speaking.

The mayor went on about making Jerusalem more attractive to pilgrims and visitors. In fact, he seemed to use that good -ahem- Hebrew word atraktivi in every sentence.

The ribbon-cutting was done with a golden scissors.

The officials and bosses (the three in the center) insisted on giving photo-ops and credit to the hard-working men who actually did the work on the stones with their hands, up on the scaffolds in all kinds of weather.

As an archaeology fieldworker, I appreciated that very much.

Thanks crew, the Jaffa Gate looks a lot cleaner and safer and stronger now!

.

More on the dedication ceremony at the Jerusalem Post.

.

Naomi, nu? News?

.

"Nursing Corner" says the sign on this wooden booth at the Hebrew University.
I guess some mothers appreciate a little privacy.
.
In time for ABC Wednesday, N words are much on our mind now.
Words like nursing, neonate/newborn, nativity, natal . . .
.
Naomi, my daugher, my neshama, will give birth any day now to her third lovely child. In Australia, their new home.
.
Naomi, never-ending source of nachat!
The Jewish nachat is that calm sense of pride and joy and pleasure brought on by the achievements of your offspring.
No lack of nachat from my nice children, God bless them.
.

The pyramids of the soul's eternal life

.
Did you know there are pyramids in Jerusalem?!

In antiquity, pyramids were the symbol of the soul and eternal life.

This sculpture by Bezalel Schatz is planted in a channel (that once had water) representing the Nile.

Our Society for the Protection of Nature guide yesterday said that no one seems to know what it is supposed to symbolize. Strange. When she said Nile I immediately thought bullrushes. No?

Enter into the valley.

The entrance has a lone olive tree of peace and the name Yad LaBanim.

Inside one pyramid we find the reason for it all--the names of the Jerusalemites who fell defending their city and country.

The place is Beit Yad LaBanim, the memorial house for the sons.

Every city has a Yad LaBanim for their fallen, full of photos and archives and exhibits.
.

Sit still a while on the bench and ponder their sacrifice.

Let us think of their families today, on Israel's Memorial Day for the defenders and for the victims of terror.

On this day especially, society becomes one big grieving “family,” known in Hebrew as mishpachat hashchol.

.

At 7:45 tonight the remembrance day will end and we make the sudden transition to the joy of Israel's 62nd Independence Day.

You can't have one without the other.

.

Such is my world for That's MyWorld Tuesday.

.

United in remembering

With a one-minute siren at 8:00 pm, Israel's Memorial Day for fallen soldiers and terror victims began tonight. The first ceremony was at the Western Wall.

Flowers and a small flag with black ribbon were placed on the graves of all the fallen soldiers by the Defense Ministry. Tomorrow there will be many ceremonies at the many military cemeteries.

It is the saddest of days, when we all feel a need to come together, to support one another in the loss of our 22,684 dead.
.

A bridge to the Holyland

.
A bridge for Louis la Vache's new Sunday Bridge Series.

In August (2008) the sun would rise over the bridge just after 6:30, as I got off the bus and started walking up the steep hill to my archaeology work.

The roads were still empty at that hour.

At 2:30 p.m., when I finished work, the traffic looked like this.

I had to walk all the way up to the dig on top of the mountain.

The bridge was built recently to give the residents of the Holyland Park apartments quicker access to the roads below as they zip out of their underground parking lot.

.

Last Sunday I posted about the scandal that had broken about the bribes and fraud involved in getting permission to build so densely and so high into the poor Jerusalem skyline.

Meanwhile, a few days ago previous mayor of Jerusalem Lupolianski was arrested for suspected bribe-taking in the case, and former Prime Minister Olmert is going to be questioned about his suspected part, too.

Oi . . .

.

Mysterious stars in the reflection

.

Except for the mirror image writing and the little "stars," you would hardly guess that this is a reflection in a store window.
But it is, and it was snapped for James and his group at Weekend Reflections.
.
The buildings are the FUCHSBERG JERUSALEM CENTER of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
There is a synagogue, a yeshiva, a learning center, a guest house, a residence hall, and who knows what else.

A Swiss German missionary group built the first building in 1897.

After 1948 the Hebrew University library moved from the Mt. Scopus campus to this building (and also to Terra Santa, right across the street).

In 1972 the Conservative Movement in the U.S. bought the houses and created a compound. But in Israel Conservative Jews prefer to be call Masorati, meaning traditional. They have 50 congregations in Israel.

.

Tender young things

.
Tender young things seen at the monastery.
.
For Camera-Critters Sunday.
.

First and only Palestinian beer

.

Shabbat shalom. I just came home from a great barbeque at a friend's garden.

Must have been forty people there celebrating our mutual friend's birthday.

It was my first time to see (and drink) Taybeh beer.

Taybeh means delicious in Arabic, and it was!

The Wikipedia article about this beer says that it "follows a classic style of the way monks brewed beer in the Middle Ages in order to fortify themselves during their fasting."

.

Taybeh Brewery is a Palestinian brewery founded in 1994 by brothers Nadim and David Khoury and their father Canaan.

Taybeh is a Christian Arab village in the West Bank, 20 miles north of Jerusalem.

You can take a video tour of the brewing process and meet Khoury at their website.

.

It made me happy, both having one bottle and thinking that here was a Palestinian initiative that succeeded.

.
UPDATE 2013: They are doing well and the beer is now sold in Japan and Germany and maybe soon in the USA.
See the brewery and the town in this video .
.
UPDATE Jan. 22, 2014: They starting making white beer now, too.  See http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/First-White-Beer-Reaches-the-Palestinian-Market-339029
.
.

Better for your health

.
"The smoking corner" (pinat ha-ishun) outside Hadassah hospital.
.
If you enlarge this photo, you can enjoy the fact that this religious Jew is using the bench and shelter and the free moment to study, perhaps a page of Talmud.
.

Our colorful market

.
The artist lady of Shuk Mahaneh Yehuda paints the market like it is--the fish monger, the legume seller, and even the clothing boutique.

The last time I saw her was in July (as posted in "The easel life in Jerusalem").
It was good to find her again.
And this time I was even able to ask her permission for a photo, instead of taking a picture in stealth mode.
.

Mounted police

.
During Passover vacation week I was happy to catch sight of two beautiful horses going down Agron, a busy street in Jerusalem.

The trailer was being towed by this police truck.

On the door is written "Mounted Police Unit, Jerusalem District."
.

You don't see them out and about very often when the situation is calm.

The photo above and the one below are from Palm Sunday 2007.

The mounted police were part of the security for the throngs of pilgrims walking from the Mount of Olives down to the Old City.
.

Mighty nice horses those mounted police have!

And that is my M for ABC Wednesday.

.

Across the valley

.
From sunset to sunset it has been a long and heavy day. The Holocaust memorial day always is.

All these buildings spread out on Mt. Herzl are Yad VaShem, Israel's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
From the looks of the crane, they are adding even more to it.
An impressive aerial photo is at their website.
.
I wish there had never been a reason to build such a memorial place.

But my world today, for That's My World Tuesday, was not only the sadness of Yad VaShem and Auschwitz and Yom HaShoah.

I stood at the highest point of Jerusalem's Har Nof neighborhood to take the first photo. If you turn the camera a quarter turn to the right, this second picture is what you see.
Hadassah Medical Organization, a place of healing, teaching, and learning!
And on the hilltop beyond the hospital--my moshav, a place of new life for the new immigrants who founded the village in 1950!
.

O the Chimneys

.
The siren just now sounded for Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Day.
The shorter, blunter name we usually call this day is Yom HaShoah.

When I lived in Switzerland as a volunteer, this was the view from my window.
It is nothing more sinister than an incinerator that burns people's garbage in order to heat their water.
But there at the foot of the Jura Mountains, I discovered that my sense of the Jewish collective memory is strong and unavoidable.
I could never see the smoke and the chimney without being reminded of Nobel Prize winner Nelly Sach's poem "O the Chimneys."
Here are its opening lines:
.
O die Schornsteine
Auf den sinnreich erdachten Wohnungen des Todes,
Als Israels Leib zog aufgelöst in Rauch
Durch die Luft –
.Oh those smokestacks
Above the abodes of death, so ingeniously devised,
When Israel’s body, dissolved into smoke, was drifting
Through the air--

(translated by Reinhold Grimm)
.
The entire poem, in German and English, appears in the book German 20th Century Poetry.
.

High up bridges and low-down scandals

.
Today I'd like to join Louis la Vache's Sunday Bridge Series but also to combine it with a little rant.

Sky bridges, also called skyways, catwalks, or skywalks, connect these apartment buildings.
In case they don't count as a bridge proper, the photo also shows a traffic bridge over the main road.
This is the back side of the same Holyland Park at dawn, in 2008.
Then we were doing salvage digs up there, clearing the area of antiquities before the construction bulldozers and cranes moved in.
(To see what we found, and how, in those Canaanite shaft tombs click on my label "Archaeology.")

Just about everyone who drives by wonders how this huge project was ever permitted to mar the skyline of Jerusalem. Jerusalemites call it a monstrosity.

It is said that the only ones who like it are the residents of the 642 apartments. From their windows and balconies, they are the only ones who don't have to see the outside of the complex. They see only the stunning view of Jerusalem, the surrounding hills, and probably even the desert.
.
A few days ago the media ban was lifted on a big investigation of a scandalous scandal; and then we, the people, suddenly understood how the towering Holyland monstrosity ever got off the ground.
Land developers allegedly paid hundreds of thousands of shekels in bribes to public officials to get approval for it. :(
.
Judge Avraham Haiman described the affair as “one of the most severe instances of public corruption in Israel’s history, which will send shock waves throughout the country and which has caused irreversible damage to the public interest.”
.
If only the hill could revert to being just a quiet 4,000 year old Canaanite cemetery . . . .
.

Sharing a bench

.
Face to face, two felines in Chile Square, Jerusalem.
The lion is the symbol of Jerusalem, while the stray cat can be found everywhere in Israel.

This picture has a shadow for Hey Harriet's Shadow Shot meme, an animal for Camera-Critters, and a bench for bench-collectors RuneE and Vogon Poet.

.

When I sat down to drink water, this surprisingly friendly feline proceeded to walk back and forth across my lap.

.

For Poland

.
The White Eagle, the symbol of Poland, wears black today.
There will be seven days of mourning.
What a terrible tragedy. How can a country, in the brief seconds of a plane crash, lose its president and his wife and so many of its top leaders??
I can't even imagine such a disaster.

President Lech Kaczynski was a firm friend of Poland's Jewish community, which has enjoyed a revival in recent years after it was nearly wiped out in the Holocaust and later suffered from communist-era repression.
In 2008 he became the first head of state to attend a religious service at a synagogue in Poland. As mayor of Warsaw, he promoted a planned museum on Jewish history by donating city land to the project.

.

May President Kaczynski and all the victims of this crash now rest in peace. God help the Poles as they try to come to terms with this and rebuild the government.

.

(The monument pictured is on Jerusalem's Mount Herzl. It remembers the Jews who fought and died serving in the Polish army during World War II.)

.

Yeshivot

.
All morning I was wandering around the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Givat Shaul Bet and Har Nof, seeing some things for the first time. What I actually came for was to see Deir Yassin, but that is not a story to go into right now, just before Shabbat.

It was a day for reflection.
There was even a shot for James' Weekend Reflections.

Here is the whole tall beit midrash or yeshiva.

It seemed like every block had at least one yeshiva and sometimes even several yeshivot.

Did I mention that Har Nof is a religious neighborhood of Orthodox Jews?

This yeshiva belongs to the Vizhnitz Hasidic dynasty.

The new Beth Ramchal, which appears to be built right inside one of the old quarries of Deir Yassin.

.

Shabbat shalom. Let's try to have Sabbath peace.

.

Clouds, hills, and art

.
Jerusalem's sky turned cloudy and moody today, in time for SkyWatch Friday.

They say that Calder's "Homage to Jerusalem--Stabile" was meant to resemble the Jerusalem Hills.
The artist chose this spot high on Mount Herzl, overlooking Ein Kerem and the many little mountains.
.
Sitting waiting for the bus today, I saw for the first time just how well the red slope parallels the first green slope.

It's a wonderful place for skywatching.

.

An Italian lion in Zion

.
The "Jerusalem--The Built Heritage" sign says this corner building, completed in 1936, fuses neo-classicism with modernism and was designed by Marcello Piacentini, a renowned Italian architect of the modern monumentalist style.
It was built by the Italian Generali insurance company. Since the mid 1940s it has housed Israeli government offices and no longer has any connection with Assicurazioni Generali.
.
But we still call it the Generali Building and it is a well-loved landmark on Jaffa Road, thanks largely to the sculpted winged lion on the roof.
Enlarge the photo to enjoy the lion with his book!

While reading about the Generali Building today, I was delighted to learn that the symbol of Assicurazioni Generali was derived from the flag of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, (which was dissolved by Napoleon three decades before the company was founded).

.

Any Italians or Latin-scholars out there who can tell us what is written in the book?

.