Jerusalem Street Signs

Arutz Sheva reports (smugly) that three new streets will soon bear the names of religious Zionist leaders:

Jerusalem streets will be named after three late outstanding personalities in the Religious Zionist movement – Rabbi Yosef Kapach, head of Yemenite Jewry and a modern expert on Maimonides’ writings, Zevulun Hammer, former leader of the NRP and Education Minister, and Emanuel Medav, one of the architects of scouting for religious youth and a fighter who died in the War of Independence.

David Hadari, Deputy Jerusalem Mayor and head of the NRP-National Union faction in the city council, said, “This is a great day for religious Zionism, with three of its sons, who have all have achieved great accomplishments, being remembered in Jerusalem.”

It’s nice that these leaders are being memorialized but to view this as a great victory for religious Zionism seems a bit of an overstatement. Streets in Jerusalem are named for all sorts of figures, from ultra-Orthodox rabbis to secular Zionists and non-Jews. A few people sitting on a committee choosing street names are not really representative of Israeli society. So my only question is, where are these streets located? I would like to walk down Kapach Street.

Anti-Zionism in a Swedish City

The mayor of Malmo, in Sweden, has come under attack by the city’s Jewish community for declaring Zionism as unacceptable as anti-Semitism.

“Malmö does not accept anti-Semitism and does not accept Zionism. They are extremists who put themselves above other groups, seeing others as something lesser,” Ilmar Reepalu said on Thursday in an interview with Skanska Dagbladet newspaper.

The response of the Jewish community was to hold a pro-Israel demonstration and to blame the mayor for the choice of some young Jews to leave the city.

Malmo has a 15% Muslim population and tension between Muslims and Jews in the city seems to be the reason for Reepalu’s statement.

(Interestingly, this story has been reported by an Arab news service called Gulfnews.com.)

Will Israel Have a Smoke-Free Town?

It will if Rabbi Riskin of Efrat has anything to say about it. According to The Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Riskin is spending his free time trying to convince store owners and restaurants in Efrat to stop selling cigarettes on the grounds that it is against halakhah.

Sale of cigarettes is of course legal and definitely out of rabbinical jurisdiction. But Rabbi Riskin is convinced that he can affect change through persuasion. He claims to have already talked 5 store owners into removing cigarettes from their shelves.

The issue of smoking has been debated among rabbis for a good few years. But Rabbi Riskin’s campaign is different in two ways: First, he is not just issuing a rabbinic opinion but actually trying to enforce it. And secondly, he has declared that it is not only forbidden to smoke, it is also forbidden to “aid and abet” smokers by selling cigarettes.

Since Israel has the highest percentage of male smokers in the entire western world, it should be interesting to see whether Rabbi Riskin can rid one small town of cigarettes.

Israel in Haiti

The media has been full of praise for Israel’s rescue efforts in Haiti. The Israelis set up a field hospital in Haiti which has treated numerous patients around the clock. The Israeli team consists of doctors, paramedics, a rabbi and psychologists. The only internet connection in all of Haiti was set up by the Israelis and is used by all the journalists for sending in their reports.

NBC has a great report on Israeli efforts in Haiti. It’s nice to see some positive coverage of Israel in the international media.

UPDATE: The Muqata has posted a letter from an Israeli soldier in Haiti to his parents.  Here’s the best part:

In the IDF Medical Corps Delegation which came from Israel in the Middle East to Haiti, there are American volunteer doctors. They have no other useful installation in which to work in. A doctor and nurse from Germany came. They heard this is best hospital in Haiti. An emergency room team from Colombia arrived with all their equipment and asked if they could set up next to us to be part of our hospital. England is the enlightened country in Europe, the one which has an academic boycott of Israel; twenty British doctors and nurses asked to work with us.

All these people, without exception, stand together at the morning formation at 7 AM in the flag square. The flag of Israel. The flag of a country which was established after the USA was already superpower. After the British left a land under their control. After Colombia was already an established country. After the Holocaust against the Jewish people.

Ritual Bath Discovered Near the Western Wall

A ritual bath, or mikveh, has been uncovered only 20 meters from the Western Wall. This mikveh must have served the many pilgrims who came to Jerusalem and purified themselves before ascending to the Temple Mount.

According to the IAA:

In his book The War of the Jews, Josephus Flavius writes there was a government administrative center that was situated at the foot of the Temple. Among the buildings he points out in this region were the council house and the “Xistus”- the ashlar bureau. According to the Talmud it was in this bureau that the Sanhedrin – the Jewish high court at the time of the Second Temple – would convene. It may be that the superb structure the Israel Antiquities Authority is presently uncovering belonged to one of these two buildings.

This discovery is only the beginning of the excavation of this structure and chances are there are more surprises to come.

Shana Tova from the IAA

The Israel Antiquities Authority has posted an online presentation of holiday symbols from antiquity. Included are menorahs, lulavs, pomegranates and the Temple. The artifacts span the period from King David through the Byzantine period.

Click here to view the presentation.

Portrait of Alexander the Great

According to the University of Haifa:

A rare and surprising archaeological discovery at Tel Dor: A gemstone engraved with the portrait of Alexander the Great was uncovered during excavations by an archaeological team directed by Dr. Ayelet Gilboa of the University of Haifa and Dr. Ilan Sharon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Despite its miniature dimensions – the stone is less than a centimeter high and its width is less than half a centimeter – the engraver was able to depict the bust of Alexander on the gem without omitting any of the ruler’s characteristics” notes Dr. Gilboa, Chair of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Haifa. “The emperor is portrayed as young and forceful, with a strong chin, straight nose and long curly hair held in place by a diadem.”

Amazingly, archaeologists have been digging at Tel Dor for 30 years! Dor was a major port city until Caesarea replaced it during the Roman period. Alexander the Great passed through Dor on his way from Tyre to Egypt in 332 BCE.

Long-Lost Relatives Find Each Other Through Yad Vashem

An amazing story of a family’s reunification is being told on the Yad Vashem website. A woman doing research for her son’s bar mitzvah project found a picture of her great-grandfather on the Yad Vashem website. Since neither she nor anyone in her family had uploaded this picture she set out to find out who did and found a whole family of cousins living in Israel.

An excerpt from the article:

“Cynthia Wroclowaski, Outreach Manager of Yad Vashem’s Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project, arranged a special visit for the family to Yad Vashem. On August 31, 2009, the two families had an emotional reunion at Yad Vashem that included a moving memorial ceremony in the Synagogue. The family recited the names of relatives murdered in the Shoah, celebrated the new ones they had found, and marked the occasion of Matthew’s Bar Mitzvah in the city of Jerusalem.”

Why I Moved to Israel (7)

Guest post by Caralee Mahlab Harwood

As a little girl and a young woman, I dreamed of getting married in Jerusalem. Never thought how this would come about as I was growing up in Sharon, MA and San Jose, CA. My dad had moved to Israel in 1950 from Iraq/Iran, and my mom had come to Israel for the year in 1962 to help the young State. They met, married and moved to America. I grew up on stories of their wedding in the not yet finished synagogue at the Givat Ram Campus of the Hebrew University, the cantor showing up after sundown, so their Hebrew anniversary date didn’t correspond to their intended wedding date,  the food rationing and everyone bringing their eggs so the festive wedding meal could be prepared. I just thought that one is supposed to get married in Jerusalem.

I came to Israel for the year to learn Torah after teaching high school math for the year at YULA. I was in the process of becoming an observant Jew. (The hand of HaShem in my becoming observant and making aliyah is another story, only partly.) I didn’t know where the Israel year experience was going to lead me. But, before leaving for the year, I asked my parents if I wanted to make aliyah would they come, too. I was an only child, and I didn’t want to be 10,000 miles away for the rest of their lives. They gave me a great gift, and said yes.

While at Nishmat that first year, we had a class on Eretz Yisrael and lots of classes whose content included the mitzvah of living in Eretz Yisrael. Suffice it to say I ran as far away from these classes as possible. Somehow I found myself organizing the Tu B’Shvat Seder for the Shabbaton in Shalavim. As I was leading the Seder with my friends, I was spouting the ideology of the interconnection and dependency between the Land of Israel, the People of Israel and the Torah of Israel. It was a moment of revelation. I knew which path I wanted to take within the People of Israel.  I knew I wanted to make aliyah, though I had to make sure I was doing it for me because I had just started dating this American guy who wanted to make aliyah. Who knew if he would still be around a year later after I had already made aliyah? Fifteen amazing years later with four scrumptious daughters, we’re building our family in the heart of the Land of Israel amongst our people. By the way, I had that beautiful wedding under the Jerusalem sky.

Evidence of the Temples

Stephen Rosenberg, in an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post, speaks out against Arab propaganda which claims that there was never a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. He points to the Arch of Titus, which depicts the menorah being carried away from Jerusalem, as an important source for the existence of the Second Temple.

Further evidence of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in antiquity was recently discovered near the Old City Zion Gate. The inscribed stone vessel is proof of maintenance of temple purity. Because stone cannot become impure, stone vessels were popular during the Second Temple period.

And, as mentioned before on this blog, the Muslim Supreme Council used to advertise the Temple Mount as the place where Solomon’s temple once stood! In addition, the Arab name for Jerusalem, Al-Quds, is an abbreviation of Madinat Bayt al-Maqdis, the city of the temple.

Rosenberg is correct when he writes that “nothing could be clearer” than the existence of a Jewish temple in Jerusalem.