Showing posts with label remember. Show all posts
Showing posts with label remember. Show all posts

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Remembering with flowers

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Today I saw bunches of flowers stuck into the plaque on the wall of the Generali Building on Jaffa Road.
I looked more closely and found the date 3.3.1996.
So, today is the 15th anniversary of the death of the 19 people named on the plaque.
A terrorist's bomb exploded on their bus.
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There are many such memorial signs all around Jerusalem that list victims' names and the number of the bus route.
Most are from the bad old days of suicide bombers during the first and second intifadas.
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Thursday, November 11, 2010

November 11 remembering

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For Armistice / Remembrance / Veterans Day let me show you where some of the soldiers of the Great War are buried or memorialized in Jerusalem.
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At the outbreak of the First World War, Israel (then called Palestine) was part of the Ottoman Empire, and it was not entered by Allied forces until December 1916.
The advance to Jerusalem took a further year.
The Turks surrendered the city to British General Allenby (but first to two British army cooks) in December 1917.
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The Jerusalem War Cemetery is the British military cemetery on Mount Scopus.
Of the 2,515 Commonwealth burials of the First World War in the cemetery, 100 of them are unidentified.
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For more about this beautiful place, see my posts under ANZAC.
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On Mt. Zion, in the backyard of Bishop Gobat School, under lock and key, is the Jerusalem Protestant Cemetery.
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It was owned by the British and German religious congregations and contained the graves of 114 British soldiers, buried from March to December 1917 by the enemy, and then, until February 1918, by the British forces.
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(Many famous Christian civilians are buried here as well.)
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The Protestant cemetery even has this (enlarge the photo if you can read German) for 15 members of the local congregations who joined the German-Austrian Wehrmacht and lost their life during World War I.
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In the Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot, you will find (if you know what to look for) a small park in front of a playground.
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The Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission was set up only toward the end of World War I. Before they starting making centralized and uniform cemeteries, it was common for their soldiers to be buried near the battlefield where they fell.
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So, as Yad Ben-Zvi Walking Tour Guide explains about these markers shown in the photo above,
"In World War I, the bodies of 290 Turkish soldiers were buried nearby in a common grave. Between July 1918 and June 1920 Indian soldiers serving in the British army were interred close to the common grave of the Turks.
They were buried in two different common graves since 31 of them were Muslims and 47 were Hindus, Sikhs, and Gurkhas.
The tombstone over the Muslim grave bears an inscription from the Koran, while above the other common grave is an inscription in Sanskrit.
The names . . . are recorded in the chapel of the British cemetery on Mount Scopus."
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Sigh . . . so many young men, sent from far corners of the world to fight and die and be buried in the Holy Land.
Let us remember them.
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Monday, September 27, 2010

More on Mount Herzl

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Come in.
Let's walk around and sit and absorb the peace and silence and sense of reverence that enfold the cemetery on a normal day.

(A strange choice for That's My World, you think?)
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The metal gates of Mt. Herzl military cemetery are like the gates at the Knesset and Yad Vashem.
The stones of the entrance were brought from all parts of Israel to express the idea that all remember and appreciate the soldiers buried here in Jerusalem.
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These are just some of the moving places on Mt. Herzl.
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Let's sit low on the stone bench and unite with those whose memory lives on here.
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The soldiers' graves are in small groupings to express the idea that in one way their sacrifice was individual.
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The cemetery has an east-west orientation to follow the practice of burying Jewish dead with their feet pointing in the direction of Jerusalem's ancient Temple.
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Jerusalem's military cemetery together with Yad Vashem and Mt. Herzl the national burial place for Israel's leaders make up Har HaZikaron, the Mount of Remembrance.
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The site encapsulates the last century of Jewish national history.
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The large number of casualties in the War of Independence, 6,000 (1% of the Jewish population at the time), made the need for a new cemetery obvious.
The first remains were transferred here in 1949 from temporary burial grounds.
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Just beyond, you can see the hills where battles were fought in the various wars.
So close . . .
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These clusters of shaded benches are near the exit.
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I imagine people who have just attended a funeral or a memorial service might like to linger and talk together before going out to the bustling world.
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Right next to the exit gate is this corner for the seudat avelim, the meal for the bereaved, that follows a funeral.
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If you'd like to see more, please click on the label "Mt. Herzl."

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Bridging the Suez Canal

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The annual memorial ceremony for the soldiers we lost during the Yom Kippur War was held at Mt. Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem one week ago, the day after Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

I did not have the heart to come and sit among the families of the fallen.
I came after they had gone home, as the flags, the podium, and the posters of old war photographs were being taken down.

Egypt attacked Israeli positions in the Sinai in full force on October 6, 1973 and took us by surprise.
The Egyptian Army put down several Soviet-made floating bridges and crossed the Suez Canal.
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It took several days for Israel to call up the reserves and get organized and to bring up material to enable a crossing.
Many army engineers were killed by enemy fire while constructing the pontoon bridges and roller bridges that would span the canal.
After more than 140 of our tanks had driven across into Egypt, Egyptian shells hit one of the floating bridges as more tanks were crossing on it, and dozens of our tanks and their crews fell into the water of the Suez.
It was a horrible war with too many mistakes and way too many casualties.
In the 19 days before the ceasefire, 2,521 Israeli soldiers were killed, 293 were captured, and over 7,000 were wounded.
The losses among Egyptian and Syrian troops were several times these numbers.
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The photo above shows not only the seats where the bereaved families had sat for the memorial service but also a group of IDF recruits who were not even born yet during the Yom Kippur War.
The 18-year-olds were being taken on a guided tour of the national military cemetery, being taught the history by their commander.
I always wonder how it makes them feel to see the still empty spaces.
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Mt. Herzl, the cemetery, is like an open book of Israel's history, very moving.
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The photo of a photo of the bridge is for Sunday Bridges over in peaceful San Francisco.
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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

If I forget you, O Jerusalem . . .

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If I have to choose I-words for ABC Wednesday, they can only be these:
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"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her skill . . .
אִם-אֶשְׁכָּחֵךְ יְרוּשָׁלִָם-- תִּשְׁכַּח יְמִינִי.
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Even today, after the ingathering of the exiles, after our immigration to Israel, after the rebuilding of Jerusalem, after partial redemption, we still remind ourselves of this verse and the next verse of the Psalm:
"Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy."
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You find Psalm 137:5 quoted everywhere, even on T shirts!
See the one on the left, next to the red Coca Cola shirt? (Give a click to the photo.)
These are gifts for Christian tourists at Yardenit Baptism Site gift shop.
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When you take an intercity bus and arrive at Jerusalem's Central Bus Station, this is the first thing you see when you get off the bus:
"IF I FORGET YOU, O JERUSALEM, LET MY RIGHT HAND FORGET HER CUNNING . . . "
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That is a door on the right of the photo, so you can understand how big the words are.
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One family has the reminder to remember hanging on their door, next to the garlic, in the old Jerusalem neighborhood of Mishkenot Shaananim.

In an earlier post we talked about this tile reminder of the destruction of the Temple and of the necessity to remember Jerusalem even, or especially, by the rivers of Babylon.
It's in the stairwell of an old house in Romema ( remember?).
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For centuries the longing for Jerusalem was in the forefront of the Jewish consciousness.
Let's hope that Jerusalem will always be thought of with love by people everywhere for countless generations to come.
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Saturday, September 11, 2010

Jerusalem's September 11 memorial

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I like this Mother and Child Center at Hadassah Medical Center mostly because of the flags.
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We in Israel are especially united in memory with the people of the United States today.
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I urge you to watch a 4-minute video of the dedication of the September 11 memorial sculpture and plaza in the Jerusalem Hills.
Its plaque reads

"A REMINDER OF SHARED LOSS AND A CALL FOR PEACE AMONG NATIONS."
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The names of the 9/11 victims are written there, in the Jerusalem Forest, that we may remember.
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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Appropriate for Av 9

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For today's ABC Wednesday let "A" be for Av, for today is Tisha B'Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av.

As we saw in the previous post, this is a sad day on which many Jews fast and mourn the destruction of ancient Jerusalem and of her First and Second Temples.

Recently I explored the Romema neighborhood with its grand old houses, begun in 1921.

Something about this building--maybe the open door with the star of David or the sunlight on the old tiles or a sense of mystery--beckoned me to enter and go up the stairs.
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The house seemed to be shared by four families now.
Four apartments.

But what surprised and moved me even more was what I found on the wall, near the ceiling.
The Hebrew on the tiles translates to
A REMEMBRANCE OF THE DESTRUCTION [i.e. of the Temple]
IF I FORGET YOU O JERUSALEM, LET MY RIGHT HAND FORGET HER CUNNING [Psalm 137:5].
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The famous Psalm 137 illustrated!
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"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
'Sing us one of the songs of Zion! . . . ' "
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This is so appropriate for today, Tisha B'Av, the day on which the Temple was destroyed and following which many of Jerusalem's Jews were taken to exile in Babylon!
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When I returned home from Romema, I Googled and made yet another moving discovery!
Aviva Bar-Am wrote this about this same house:
"Following the fall of the Second Temple, sages of the period declared that every new building must carry a reminder of that destruction: an unpainted area measuring one cubit by one cubit . . . . Many religious Jews take this edict literally and leave an unplastered or black square on their walls. The picture you see embedded into the wall of Fishman-Maimon’s residence--ceramic tiles showing the River of Babylon, harps and weeping willows--[is one of these]."
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Furthermore, our Museum of Italian Jewish Art shows an example in carved marble and says,
"Writings of this kind were common in Germany and Poland, while in Italian synagogues, as well as private houses, part of a wall was usually left unplastered in order to remember the destruction of the Temple."
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So . . . we remember and do not forget.
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UPDATE 2014: 
Another nice explanation is here, at Jewish Treats.
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Monday, July 19, 2010

Titus at the gate

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Soon Israel goes into collective mourning.
Restaurants and places of entertainment will be closed tonight.
Tomorrow the stock market will not open.
Observant Jews (at least those whose health permits fasting in this heat) will not drink or eat from 7:42 p.m. Monday until 8:15 p.m. Tuesday.
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All this is to remember the calamities that befell the Jewish People over the past several thousand years on this very day, the 9th of Av, Tisha B'Av.

Chief among them is the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. and of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.

This diorama in the museum of Hechal Shlomo shows details of how the Roman troops commanded by Titus, son of Emperor Vespasian, storm the city walls of Jerusalem in the year 70.
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The figures and war machines are all in miniature, so please click the photos to understand the detail.
See the siege tower and the catapult?

The battering ram battered the gates.
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Actually the Romans worked from February until August, breaching the first wall and the second wall, and finally entering the city in order to burn and raze the Temple.

Josephus writes that during that siege of Jerusalem General Titus, at one point, crucified 500 or more Jews a day. So many Jews were crucified outside the walls that "there was not enough room for the crosses and not enough crosses for the bodies" (Wars of the Jews 5:11.1).
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Sigh . . .
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All this happened 1,940 years ago but it is still part of our world, for That's MyWorld Tuesday.
Someone wiser than me once said that Jews have memory, not history.
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(For less gruesome pictures, please see my posts about Tisha B'Av at the Western Wall and reading Jeremiah's Lamentations by candlelight.)
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Sunday, May 30, 2010

Machal and American Memorial Day

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Photo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahal_(Israel)

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This weekend the United States observes Memorial Day, remembering her war dead.
With this post Jerusalem Hills Daily Photo seeks to honor the Americans who died in battle HERE, helping Israel in our War of Independence.
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The Burma Road in this picture was besieged Jerusalem's lifeline during the war.
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In the forest near both the old Burma Road and the modern Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Highway, near Sha'ar Hagai, you will find (if you look hard enough) the Machal memorial bearing this simple plaque:

The names of the four women and 117 men Machalniks who gave their life for Israel.
Machal stands for Mitnadvay Chutz LaAretz, meaning Volunteers from outside Israel.

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Between 1947 and 1949, when Israel came under attack from every surrounding Arab country, some 3,500 Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers came to help.
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Those who needed it were given some quick training and then sent to fight together with Israel's fledgling army and air force.
Some were already veterans of World War II and some had just come out of concentration camps.
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These are the estimated numbers of foreign volunteers who came:
U.S.A. 1,000 and some 250 from Canada. South Africa 700. The UK 600. North Africa 250. Latin America 250.
Smaller numbers came from France, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Turkey, Australia, the Belgian Congo, Rhodesia, and Russia.
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Machal volunteers also played a central role in facilitating Aliya Bet, the "illegal" immigration of 32,000 immigrants, many of them Holocaust survivors, who were not allowed to disembark on pre-state Israel's shores by the British when the British Mandate was still in force.
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After serving Israel in her hour of greatest need 3,000 Machal members returned to their home countries, but 500 stayed or returned soon after to make Israel their home.
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Dr. Jason Fenton, who wrote the book on Machal, came as a 16-year-old (see more here) and tells it like this:

"Our motives for going to Israel were diverse and not always clear to ourselves. Many had fought in Word War II and found it hard to settle down. Some were imbued by Zionist ideology, others suddenly discovered their commonality with the Jewish people. Some were genuine idealists, others came to escape personal problems. Almost all, I think, were drawn by the chance to take part in a truly epochal event, for which generations of Jews had yearned for close to 2,000 years. "
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Friday, September 11, 2009

Bird of the soul, thoughts on Sept. 11

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A glass bird on a headstone in Mt. Herzl military cemetery

The idea of a soul bird comes from the Talmud. In Hebrew it is tsippor hanefesh, an idiom representing that thing residing deep within you.

The Soul Bird is a best-selling children's book (which even our President Peres keeps on his night table) written by Israeli author Michal Snunit in 1985.
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Here are words explaining the soul bird, from a book review in Hadassah Magazine:

"It is, says Snunit, that part of us that trembles with joy when we are treated lovingly and reels in shock and pain when we suffer cruelty or hurt. It has two legs, but it stands only on one, not because it is a flamingo but because it needs the other foot to do its work. That work is to open and shut a series of drawers embedded within its own body. These drawers contain our deepest and truest feelings, and it is the soul bird's job to decide which of these should be opened in response to various stimuli. In an ideal world, of course, the soul bird would perform its task infallibly, calling upon us, for instance, to feel empathy when that emotion is called for or happiness when that is most appropriate.

This being an imperfect world, however, the bird often opens the wrong drawer. Or, alternately, it may open the right drawer, but we may respond inappropriately. The trick to leading a successful life rests in developing an ability to recognize, listen to and engage our inner soul bird."
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As we remember the victims of the terror of September 11, let us try to keep our soul bird strong enough that it will never be crushed by such dastardly acts. A permanently-handicapped tsippor hanefesh would be a posthumous victory to those terrorists.
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Stone, stone, everywhere

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Feeling the hardness of this date.
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RuneE at Visual Norway helps us collect benches for sharing on Fridays.
Come have a seat.
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Thursday, May 21, 2009

With Ethiopian-Israelis on Jerusalem Day

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Jerusalem Day today, a national holiday, marking what is called the liberation and reunification of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War.
There were many events in town, many different ways to celebrate and to remember.


My choice was to be at a moving ceremony with these kesim.
A kes is a religious leader of Ethiopian Jewry. Here they are singing the prayers in their holy language, Gez.


I sat among these Ethiopian-Israelis.


Their story is written on the wall of a new monument at Mount Herzl.
Please click to enlarge and read.
Part One is above,

and Part Two is here.


So many memorial candles were lit.
Today's relatively new yearly ceremony is called "The National Ceremony for Ethiopian Jews who perished on their way to Israel."


President Peres had praise for an isolated community that managed to survive 3,000 years of The Exile in the mountains of Ethiopia, unlike the Jews of Nineveh, China, and some parts of India who disappeared.
He lauded their unending dream to return to Israel, which they called "Eretz Jerusalem," the Land of Jerusalem.
There were several big operations to bring masses of Ethiopian Jews home.
One place you can learn about it, as told by the immigrants themselves, is here.
And if you have four minutes please watch a video about the 1991 Operation Solomon in which 14,000 were rescued in 36 hours of continuous airlifts. If your eyes stay dry, let me know.
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Peres talked mostly about Operation Moses, 1984-5.
One out of every three Ethiopian Jews who started the trek, on foot, over the mountains and then through the desert of Sudan to the temporary refugee camps, in other words 4,000 of those people, died before they could be air-lifted to Israel.

This kes came to the podium, opened his ceremonial umbrella, and spoke from the heart, without a written speech, in the spoken language Amharic. His whole family died on the long way to Israel.
The new Minister of Immigrant Absorption also spoke (Hebrew with a Russian accent).
 
I learned that Israel now has 120,000 Ethiopians and a third of them are Sabras (native-born).

These Scouts sang a happy song.
But earlier a man had sung a song in Amharic.
I could only understand the muffled sobs of the women next to me and a groan and a sigh from the men sitting behind me.

There was the religious part--a reading of Psalms, the recital of Kaddish, the cantor singing El Maleh Rachamim.
Then came the laying of wreaths by the VIPs, including the Ambassador of Ethiopia.
I wonder how he felt about all this.

At the end, we all stood to sing our national anthem, Hatikva, The Hope.
Israel has always been built on hope.

As we filed out through a narrow passage, I with the Ethiopian women, my imagination had a few seconds to pretend we were trudging through Sudan together.
Would I have been strong and brave and determined enough to do what they did?
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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

R is for Reality (ABC Wednesday Part 3)

R is also for Israeli reality.
Riding horses in the Palm Sunday procession from the Mt. of Olives to the Old City. Mounted police are part of the security forces in old Jerusalem.


Riot police (Yasam units) on the ready for any trouble.
  "Remember." One of the plaques at the numerous sites of suicide bombings and terrorist acts, all over the city, many from the second intifada, naming the victims so they will be remembered.

Razor wire.
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