Cool campus cats

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Cats are EVERYWHERE on the campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. 
Even indoors, it now appears! 
This one was feeling right at home inside the Student Administration Building. 

When she saw me sit down near her, the kitty perked up, assessing me: would I be a good source of food and cuddles? 
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(Linking to Camera-Critters.)
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Sleepy cats share their bench with me

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 I tried not to wake the fluffy sleeping cat, but his was the only bench I could find for my picnic.

The cats at the Open Museum in Omer Industrial Park all seem to feel protected and are laid back and pettable.

And apparently also well-fed because they didn't beg while I sat between two of them and ate my cheese sandwich.
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(Linking to Camera-Critters.)
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A cat warming up by the firewood

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Siamese cat sunning on a bench by the woodpile on a chilly Austrian afternoon.
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(Linking to Camera Critters.)
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The other Calatrava bridge

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For ABC Wednesday we have benches on a busy bridge.
Note the glass-paved deck.

The pedestrian Y-bridge by Santiago Calatrava spans busy Jabotinsky Road in Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv.
It was built in 2005, before his more famous Bridge of Strings in Jerusalem.

The view from the bridge: an urban park and a residential area.
On the other side of the road is Rabin Medical Center/Beilinson Hospital, which has grown immensely since I worked there years ago.
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(Linking to Wordless Wednesday, my first time.)
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Street furniture

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Apparently lately Tel Aviv Municipality has been putting out lounge chairs along various sidewalks.
Could be more comfortable than that mega-bench. 
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(Linking to OurWorld Tuesday.)
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Happening now: Tel Aviv's White Night

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The man sleeping on this bench won't be getting much sleep tonight.
Tel Aviv is having its annual White Night with dozens of free outdoor and indoor  music and cultural events going on till morning.
UNESCO proclaimed Tel Aviv's White City a World Cultural Heritage site in 2003, and since then the White Night has happened every last Thursday of June.
In the White City district there will be decorative illumination of Bauhaus buildings, which is what the world recognition is all about. 
This year's White Night events are a tribute to European culture and are being held in cooperation with the European Union and its member states, featuring artists and chefs from Europe. 
See Ynetnews for a list of the activities.
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I'm back home in Meitar, getting a good night's sleep here in the quiet Negev desert.  :)
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Healing Garden at the Medical Center

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Next to the helicopter landing pad,  in between the sprawled-out buildings of big Soroka  Medical Center in Beer Sheva,  is this sculpture-filled garden.
In Hebrew its name is Gan Roga', meaning a garden of calmness and relaxation.
In English it became the Legacy Heritage Healing Garden.

Legacy Heritage Fund's motto is  "the light of the past will illuminate the future."

Benches to welcome patients or their visitors.
Shade is needed on the hot days in the Negev desert.
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(For ABC Wednesday,  M is for Medical Center.)
(And also linking to signs, signs .)
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Mirror mirror on the organ, who is the fairest one of all?

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Finally I found a reflection for James' Weekend Reflection meme.
And it's none other that my son, Edo!
(The photo is enlargeable with two separate clicks, ahem!)

The mirror is for the organist to see the orchestra conductor.

The beautiful new organ was recently installed in the Elma Arts Complex Luxury Hotel in Zichron Ya'akov, on our Mediterranean coast.
See the organ in situ in its 450-seat auditorium at their website.

Our excellent tour-of-Elma guide, Gilat  (my step-daughter, who has a high position there), pointed out inter alia that Israel has fifty or sixty pipe organs.
But most of them are in churches.
Elma's organ is the only one in the country purpose-built for a concert hall.

I'll have more for you about the organ and the hotel in the coming days!
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UPDATE June 25:  See video of Cameron Carpenter playing this organ as only he can!
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Sitting in the light of Merav

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A sitting corner at the Sde Boker campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

A local stone is embedded right in the table.
The metal sign says "In memory of Merav Ziv, our student in the Desert Ecology Department."

She died in 1999 in the field,* on a research trip, after falling from her bike.

Her family funds a Merav Ziv Graduate Student Award for Excellence in Ecology and there is an annual symposium on her name.
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* UPDATE DEC. 2017:  Not exactly, apparently.  Please see the comment below from Avi about the date and sad real cause of Merav's death.  May her memory be for a blessing.
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Gimme shelter!

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Gaza militants could hardly wait for today's 5-hour "humanitarian truce" to end.
Right now, promptly at 2:59 pm, they started firing  rockets again toward southern Israel.

I took advantage of the tenuous quiet to leave the house (and its reassuring bomb shelter) and walk over to the supermarket, as my food stock was running low after ten days of conflict.

But I knew that the Red Alert siren could blare any minute.
I planned my walking route according to the protection available along the way.
In the parts where there are no houses, I constantly looked around and decided where I would find shelter within the one and a half minutes between siren and explosion.

Maybe I'd crawl into this culvert in the wadi, under the street?
Ah, but if I got hurt no one would ever find me down there . . . 

Maybe I could lie prone, hands over my head (as we are instructed), alongside this solid rock by the olive tree?
If a rocket hits the ground, the shrapnel shoots upward in an arch; so the lower you are to the ground, the less chance of getting hurt. 

How about lying under this bench?
Despite its holes, it would maybe catch the bigger falling debris.

Did you know?
When an Iron Dome missile intercepts a Gaza rocket high in the sky, they break up into many pieces, large and small.
These sharp, jagged fragments of hot metal rain down for up to ten minutes.
They can and do injure people and animals, damage buildings and vehicles and agriculture, and start fires in the city or in the fields.

In case you have never seen how Iron Dome chases the rockets, watch two dramatic videos from today.
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(And for latest news of the conflict, follow the liveblog at Times of Israel.  Switch on "auto-refresh.)
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(Linking to SkyWatch Friday.)
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Pseudo seashore

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 S is for seashore.
Sure, but in Beer Sheva, in the Negev desert??

Pretend you see blue sea and sky and sand.

Imagine these are soft lounges to lie on and sunbathe.

Surf this pipeline (in your dreams).

So funny, Beer Sheva is trying to brand itself as the Water City (Ir HaMayim).
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(Linking to ABC Wednesday and Signs, signs.)
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Zachor -- remember

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Even the benches record sad memories in this area of Yad Vashem overlooking Jerusalem.

Yad Vashem this year is putting a special focus on the fate of Hungarian Jewry, “a tragic example of the swift and ruthless efficiency of the Germans and their local sympathisers during the latter period of the war.”

Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day 2014

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Yom Hashoah  began Sunday evening and continues on Monday.
A heavy day in Israel.
This year the central theme is 
Jews “On the Edge”
1944: Between Annihilation and Liberation

Dr. Dina Porat, Chief Historian of Yad Vashem, writes

 Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance
Day 5754 (2014) is marked by the situation of
the Jews in 1944 – exactly 70 years ago. The
expression “on the edge," taken from Nathan
Alterman's poem “Joy of the Poor," very aptly
expresses the feeling which prevailed that year
among the Jews of Europe, who were in the
throes of a double race on which their very lives
depended. On the one hand, cities from east to
west, such as Vilna and Minsk, Warsaw and
Riga, Belgrade and Sofia, Paris and Rome, were
being liberated from the yoke of Nazi Germany;
the Red Army was advancing, and the western
Allies continued to bombard Germany, their
landing in Normandy tipping the scales still further. 
On the other hand, in the same year,
the Jews of Hungary were sent to Auschwitz,
the Lodz and Kovno ghettos were liquidated,
the last of their former inmates were deported
and murdered, and death marches were initiated
from the liberated territories to the heart of what
remained of the “Third Reich.” It was a year in
which everything depended on the scales of
time, and the Jews remaining in Europe were
asking themselves: will the Red Army from the
east and the Allies from the west arrive before
the Germans come to murder whoever is still
alive? Or, as Alterman wrote, which ending
will come first? Events were occurring fast,
one after the other, raising serious questions
in their wake. . . . 

Dr. Porat's essay continues here, in the Yad Vashem Jerusalem Quarterly Magazine 
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See also some short Yad Vashem videos for the memorial day.
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The old bench in bright sun

The old bench at the entrance is about the only thing in the dim and cavernous Church of the Holy Sepulchre that ever gets direct sunlight.

Here is the bench as seen from Calvary, one flight of steps up.

More about it at http://jerusalemhillsdailyphoto.blogspot.co.il/2009/08/simple-bench-in-complicated-church.html .
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Since moving to Meitar in the Negev desert last August I quite miss being about to roam around the Holy Sepulchre and the Old City at will.
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UPDATE: Read the fascinating story of the two Muslim families entrusted with the key to the Holy Sepulchre since 1187! 
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(Linking to Our World Tuesday.)
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Don't get my goat, said the goat on the bench

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A goat showing off its goatee at the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem.
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(For Camera Critters Sunday.)
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A tree weeps

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In Meitar's small cemetery a tree weeps,  sap running down fence stones.
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Tomorrow Israel will bury Arik Sharon on a hill at his Shikmim Ranch in the Negev, next to his wife.
Today TV showed the preparations for the funeral there.
As I watched a backhoe digging the grave and men lining the deep hole with cinder blocks, the reality hit home--Israel is losing "dor tashach," the generation of 1948, of "nefilim" (giants),  the Palmach generation, the founders of our State.
One by one they are returning to the earth of the Land they loved. 
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See any of the Israeli papers for more on Ariel Sharon and the state of the Nation:
The Times of Israel,   The Jerusalem Post,  Haaretz,   Ynetnews.
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Two teens

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The military section of Meitar's small cemetery has "only" four graves.
We are just a small community, begun in 1984, with a present population of about 7,500.

But then, perhaps other sons and daughters of Meitar are buried on Mount Herzl, the national military cemetery in Jerusalem.   I don't know.   I hope not.
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Yesterday a young soldier, Private Eden Attias, was buried in Upper Nazareth, his home town.
He was only 18 or 19  and the teenager who stabbed him was even younger.
Eden was asleep in the bus when the bus made a pit  stop at Afula when fellow bus passenger  Hussein Rawarda from Jenin knifed him.

 http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.557753
 and
 http://www.idfblog.com/2013/11/13/terrorist-stabs-idf-soldier-to-death-on-israeli-bus/
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R + R in B-S

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R is for resting place on a Beer Sheva sidewalk.

Sit, relax a while, IF you can stand the hot sun,  if you don't mind those grasses tickling the back of your neck. 
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(Linking to ABC Wednesday.)
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Water Music

 

Two grandmas sit on the bench near one of Beer Sheva's many shpritzing fountains. 

To their right is the Samuel Rubin Music Conservatory.

Israel Arts Directory website informs us that it is a

Municipal Conservatory which teaches western music (keyboard, stringed instruments, wind instruments, music theory) to young people aged 6 to 18 years. The majority of its students are high-school students who attend the Conservatory several times each week to study music, working towards high-school matriculation. With its excellent auditorium the Conservatory is an important regional centre for musical activity. It is the home of the Israel Be’er Sheva Sinfonietta  and also hosts regular concert series, conferences, seminars, masterclasses and other activities.

 (For Our World Tuesday meme.)

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Off in a corner, by the fountain

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Be'er Sheva, the landlocked city in the Negev desert, has started trying to brand itself as Israel's "water city."

All around this nice fountain near City Hall are cozy seating ensembles.

This couple was enjoying the morning with some knitting and newspaper reading.
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The "born for love" bench

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B is for bench in Botanical Gardens of Jerusalem.
You can enlarge the photo once or twice to read to whom it is dedicated.

The bench proclaims

"We are all born for love.  It is the principle of existence, and its only end."

--Benjamin Disraeli

(A post for ABC Wednesday  and Signs, Signs.)

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