Anne Frank's memorial in the forest

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In the final hour of daylight my town's touring group just made it to Ya'ar HaKedoshim, the Holocaust Martyrs Forest.

On the path leading to the new (2011) memorial to Anne Frank were signposts quoting her famous diary.

"The memorial is a sculpture created by designer Piet Cohen, and is the form of a room made of rusted steel. In the corner of the structure sits an uncomfortably high stool, from where the viewer can see an engraved image of the famed chestnut tree which Anne Frank wrote about so lovingly in her diary. The viewing experience is meant to recreate the feeling of imprisonment, isolation and discomfort while looking longingly through a window at the world outside." *

If you are ever in the Jerusalem Hills, look for this sign and follow it into the forest.
It is a moving experience.

* For  very interesting details about the Anne Frank Memorial Park and about the Martyrs Forest with  its six million trees, please see the Jewish National Fund/Keren Kayemet page
http://www.kkl-jnf.org/people-and-environment/kkl-jnf-projects-partners/dfu-2012/holocaust-martyrs-forest-anne-frank-memorial/
especially now, just a day after Yom Hashoah.
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Sculptures at sunset

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Art in between two Brutalist buildings at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev!

The light of the setting sun (see it in the tree?) silhouetted them nicely.

The BGU booklet Beyond the Classroom about the sculptures on campus offers this:

Three Fanfare Trumpeters and a Climber
Ofra Zimbalista
2014, cast aluminum, life-size figures
Three musicians scale the side of a building, representing a group  going in a single chosen direction.   On a nearby building, the W.A. Minkoff Senate Hall, an individual chooses to climb a new, previously unexplored peak. 

Click the photos if you'd like to see them bigger.
There are three other posts in the blog with more sculptures by the same Ofra Zimbalista z"l.
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(Linking to Our World Tuesday.  And T is for Trumpeters for ABC Wednesday.)

UPDATE March 2021: Campus sculptures explained in a short video from the university:
https://youtu.be/pSvG64edFws
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In the shadow of the chess game

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Face to Face with My Father (The Chess Players), by Zvika Lachman.

As happens all too often in Israel, the sign makers couldn't get it just right.

One of the cats at Omer Open Museum considered it a good source of shade.
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Here is a Lachman exhibit catalog.
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(Linking to Our World Tuesday.)
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Music of the spheres?

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 Satellite Dish, 1999-2000, by Ofra Zimbalista at the Omer Open Museum.

We have seen two other blue people of this artist: one lady with a flute and one holding a perforated umbrella.
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Beer Sheva's Holocaust Memorial

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The United Nations decided that January 27, the day on which Auschwitz was liberated, should be the International Day in memory of the victims of the Holocaust.
Israel has its own day, in the spring, to remember the Shoah.

This is Beer Sheva's memorial square "to remember the victims of the Holocaust."
The four words written in Hebrew are from the Book of Esther 9:28 and mean
"Their memory will not fade from their descendants"
or in a different translation,
"The memorial of them should not perish from their seed."
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Making circles in the sky

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Can you remember the last time you drew circles with a compass?
From many decades ago I remember the sharpness of the metal point and the pencil lead.

This giant compass welcomes workers and visitors to a hi-tech company, one of many on the sprawling campus of the Omer Industrial Park near Beer Sheva.

Linking to ABC Wednesday and to SkyWatch Friday -- making circles in the sky.  :)
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Bronze bicycle, bare bum

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As promised, here we are at the Open Museum which is part of the hi-tech industrial park near Omer, in the Negev.

This sculpture is especially for today's ABC Wednesday.
B is for bronze bicycle and bare bum.

Too bad BICYCLE is so hard for Israelis to spell.
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Sitting with a cello

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My town, Meitar, has many roundabouts and each one has something beautiful in it.

But my favorite is the cellist.

Enlarge the photos and you'll see she is sitting on two wooden boxes.

( B word for ABC Wednesday.)
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The Monster landmark of Jerusalem

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Theme Day at worldwide City Daily Photo bloggers group today is LANDMARK.

My favorite landmark in new Jerusalem is The Monster! 

It's a giant slide loved by kids and by their parents and even grandparents as well.
The neighborhood folks make a birthday party for the sculpture every year. 

Jerusalem's "Golem" was created in 1973 in the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood by sculptress Niki de Saint Phalle as a gift to the children of Jerusalem.
A UC San Diego website says that de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) "is best known for her oversized figures which embrace contradictory qualities such as good and evil, modern and primitive, sacred and profane, play and terror."

But no one calls it Golem.
We call it HaMifletset, Hebrew for "the monster."
It is a landmark.

The bottom doubles as a sand box.
The sheer size of the cavernous slide can be frightening the first time a little boy sees it.
But my grandsons gradually learned to accept and love the Monster.
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(More pictures at my earlier posts.)
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 UPDATE Nov. 3:  Google gave Niki a doodle in honor of her 84th birthday!
Unfortunately, as a result of inhaling toxic polyester fumes while creating her artwork, she suffered from emphysema, from which she died in 2002 at the age of 71.

(Hat tip to my fellow Israeli blogger Yael for the doodle tip. Visit her delightful blog, "More or less, simple life of a grandmother.")

Even horses do the rain dance

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Jumpin' for joy to finally see clouds in our sky!
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Linking to SkyWatch Friday.
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Battering ram

Sometimes you feel like the battering ram, and other times you just feel battered. 

An air raid siren blared for the first time in my town in the Negev this morning at 6:00.
Now we had a second alert at 6:00 pm.
We sat for ten minutes in the house's bomb shelter and waited for the boom that--thank God--never came.

If you want to keep up with the news from Israel and Gaza as it happens, this live update is a good resource.

The monumental sculpture "Battering Ram"  is by Dror Eshed, 2004, in the Ben Shemen Forest.

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(Linking to Our World Tuesday.)

Don Quixote rides again

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D is for Don Quixote.
Zeevik Gottlieb made the unusual sculpture and it was part of the Humor and Satire exhibition along Jerusalem's  Mamilla Avenue  last year.
Looks like the knight errant carries his own windmill that he plucked from a modern wind farm, no? 

LOGON, the Light Opera Group of the Negev, will be staging the musical "Don Quixote, Man of La Mancha."
In English! 
It will open in Beer Sheva on February 27 and will  tour major cities in Israel.
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(Linking to ABC Wednesday.)
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P.S.  See a video of The Impossible Dream song with Peter O'Toole, of blessed memory, as Don Quixote. 

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(Linking to James' Weekend Reflections.)
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Inside a tree!

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Happy Tu BiShvat!
The birthday or New Year of trees in Israel.
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For more about this happy Jewish holiday visit my previous posts.
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Sculptures in the middle of nowhere

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Random roadside sculptures in the Negev desert.

(Photographed from a moving bus, so please click and enlarge to see them clearer.)
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For SkyWatch Friday.
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Our dove of peace in the Rabin Neighborhood

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Here's my grandson Dean under the wings of a white dove.
The statue is in a roundabout in Meitar's Rabin Neighborhood.
At the base are the famous words Shalom chaver (Goodbye friend) with which President Clinton ended his eulogy at the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Last night some 33,000 young people, members of Israel's youth movements, gathered in  Tel Aviv to mark 18 years since the assassination.
The ceremony, titled “Remembering the murder, fighting for democracy,” was held at Rabin Square, where Rabin was shot during a peace rally on November 4, 1995 by a right-wing Israeli extremist.

A 2-minute video from last night's rally is in the Jerusalem Post  and another article is in The Times of Israel.
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Signals in the sky and horses below

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Giant horses in a Beer Sheva roundabout and an even taller army/police tower in the sky in back of them.

From the other direction.
You can enlarge the photos with two clicks.
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Linking to SkyWatch Friday.
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Clouds on the water, water in the clouds

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The cafe behind the sculpture could be a nice place to sip coffee and watch the reflected clouds drift by.
The Israel Museum is very spread out and offers various little restaurants along the way. 
I myself prefer sitting  outside and eating a PB&J sandwich from home.

Israel is having cold, cloudy, even rainy days this week--unusual for April.
Yesterday the top of Mt. Hermon had 2 cm of SNOW.

(A post for Weekend Reflections.)
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Get a grip

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Today I bought myself a present:  my very own pliers.
But I was surprised the hardware store only had ones with plastic coating on the handles.
I remembered my volunteer years (1996-2002) when I worked and lived at Heifer Ranch in Arkansas.
My work in livestock  often demanded fixing or opening or closing something out in the field or in barns or pens, and the one and only tool that went everywhere with me was a simple pair of pliers.
Its bare metal handles could double as a lever or a hammer or a poker or whatever.

I was proud to wear the pliers in a holster on my belt, sort of like a status symbol for us  two or three volunteers privileged to work with the animals.

 

Anyway, the pliers reminded me of something strange  I recently discovered in the sculpture garden of the Israel Museum.

(Like always you can enlarge the photos.)

I couldn't find the identifying tag for the metal creation.

The gate was half-hidden in the flowering rosemary bushes.

Couldn't find pliers on the sculpture.
But the deformed handle of a pickaxe gave a kvetch to my sometimes-archaeology-worker's heart.
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UPDATE: Don't miss the Spooky Men's Chorale singing "Don't Stand Between a Man and His Tool"! 
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Sowing light and joy

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For PsalmChallenge, hosted by Robert Geiss in Athens, here is

PSALM 97 

1. It is the LORD Who is king! Let the earth be glad, let the many distant lands rejoice.

2. Cloud and storm cloud round about Him, righteousness and judgment are the foundation of His throne.

3. Fire goes before Him, burning His foes round about.

4. His lightning bolts have lit up the world; the earth saw it and trembled;

5. mountains melting like wax in facing the LORD, in facing the Lord of all the earth.

6. The heavens have proclaimed His righteousness and all the peoples have seen His glory.

 

7. Let all who worship graven images, who boast of their idols, be dismayed; all you gods, prostrate yourselves to Him.

8. Zion heard and rejoiced; the towns of Judah were glad because of Your judgments, O LORD.

9. For You, O LORD, are Most High, above all the earth; You have taken the highest place, above all gods.

10. Lovers of the LORD, hate evil! He is the guardian of the lives of His devoted ones; from the hand of the wicked He saves them.

11. Light is sown for the righteous and for those who are upright of heart, joy.

12. Rejoice, O righteous ones, in the LORD and give thanks to His holy name. 

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Translation by Rabbi Benjamin J. Segal.  See also his commentary. 

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Photos:

Melting candles on a hot day in a grotto where many pilgrims and tourists come to pray.

"The god Nanauatzin" by Yifah Adir,  Mamilla mall exhibition.

An illuminated date palm tree near the Old City wall.

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