Dona Tower and a strange tree

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For Weekend Reflections here is a quite new office building with its Hebrew name, Migdal Dona, reflected in mirror image.
It has a nice elliptical shape, eh?
It stands in the far-western Givat Shaul neighborhood of Jerusalem.
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Here it is as seen from a 3rd floor window in Beit Hakerem.
I had to stick my arm out through the bars of a window, point and shoot, and hope for the best.
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Actually it was the tree I was after, with its spiky orange-colored flowers and compound fern-like leaves.
This is the only one of its kind I've ever seen.
Anyone know what kind it is?
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(Other interesting things in Givat Shaul are in three earlier posts.)
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UPDATE: I believe Diane in Australia has solved the mystery!
The tree seems to be a silky oak (or silk oak), Grevillea robusta, a member of the Protea family, a native to Australia.
Nice photo of the unusual flowers here.
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Quarries in Israel

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A quest for quarries today, for ABC Wednesday.

First, let's see two ancient masonry stone quarries in Jerusalem.
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The photo above was taken underground during the Jerusalem Light Festival, hence the eerie blue color.
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This is the huge quarry beneath the Old City from which Herod the Great took the "Herodian stones" needed to renovate the Temple and its retaining walls, including the Western Wall.
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We call it Zedekiah's Cave, but, as a fascinating article in The New York Times says,

"For the Freemasons, the cave is definitely Solomon's quarry, making it one of the most revered, perhaps the most revered, site of their international secret society. The organization considers King Solomon the first Freemason, and its tradition of doctrines, passwords and symbols derives from the building of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. In the absence of the Temple, Freemasons revere the quarry, and they hold an elaborate ceremony inside the cave once a year. "

This thousands of years old quarry was found when I worked at a salvage dig of a Canaanite cemetery.

Today the area is covered by the awful Holyland Park residences.

Moving on to modern quarries, here's one in the Givat Shaul neighborhood.

It looks like the cement mixers fill up on site and drive out to their construction site.

Today the apartments and yeshivas have come right up against the old quarries.

The area used to be Dir Yassin . . . .

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Further north, toward Haifa, this quarry is biting into Mount Carmel.

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The Jerusalem Post reported in 2008 that our Minister of National Infrastructures "warned that there would be shortages in raw materials by 2020. There are currently 80 working quarries in Israel, and about a thousand which have been tapped out and are in need of rehabilitation. However no new quarry has been approved by the national planning council in the last 14 years."
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But my favorite quarry photo is this memory of the great five days I lived in the village of Darajat, studying Arabic.

(For more about it, see under my label Darajat.)

Our Bedouin hosts took our small group up the mountain for a hike and to see the quarry in the Negev desert where they work.

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Hope you don't have dust in your eyes after looking at all these quarries. Shalom!

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Yeshivot

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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.

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

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Goodbye to bread

Enjoy it while you can. From this Friday until the end of next week (most) Jews will not be tasting any bread at all.
Instead, during the whole week of Passover we will eat "the bread of affliction," matza.
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Here you see the huge Angel Bakeries--the silos, flour mill, production lines.
Angel distributes its loaves and rolls all over the country and also supplies the prisons and the Israel Defense Force.
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