havka

On Monday I went to Akko to listen to Havka Folman. To the extent that there is a stereotype about the demeanor of Holocaust survivors, Havka defied them. Although her experiences were frightening and depressing, she was energetic, expressive and funny.

Havka acted to warn the Jewish communities in Poland in 1939 as a part of the Dror youth movement. The concept of "youth movement" is not familiar to most people in the United States. I went to a summer camp for many years run by the Habonim Dror youth movement (the result of a merger between Havka's Dror and Habonim), and now I'm working on an Israel program run by Habonim Dror, so listening to Havka was especially meaningful to me.

Havka wrote a book, and this article includes a lot of what she said in Akko.

and that problem is transport

I have been living in Tel Aviv and attending class in Netanya. As the crow flies it is 15 miles from the apartment in Florentin to the ulpan in Poleg. The commute has given me an opportunity to explore public transportation. I took trains and buses, transferring at numerous locations. The best option by a fair margin of both time and comfort is to take a sherut, which I think is translated as a shared cab, from the central bus station in Tel Aviv to the Udim bus station on Route 2 (with a 10-15 minute walk on either end).

A sherut is generally a 10-passenger van, and there is probably a sherut that goes where you're going for a reasonable price. I don't know if it is possible to make a more precise statement than that.

Sometimes a sherut follows a bus route, sometimes not. Sometimes a sherut has its own numbered route, sometimes not. Sometimes a sherut will come along in a minute or two, sometimes not. Sometimes the driver will allow you to board for a few stops, and sometimes he will refuse unless you are going all the way to his destination.

The sherut driver knows his route, but there are no route maps. The sherut driver knows the price of a journey from one stop on his route to another, but there are no fare schedules. (As far as I know.)

A sherut is more comfortable than a bus but less comfortable than a train.

One time a sherut driver kicked me out of his van before I had reached the destination I paid for. Another sherut picked me up and took me the rest of the way (at no additional charge).

And for all that, the sherut fleet seems to be a pretty decent system. Because the vehicles are smaller, they come more frequently than buses and add to the variety of routes it is possible to travel.

The only problem is finding the right sherut. I've gotten comfortable asking strangers if they know which bus goes where I'm going. About 40% of the people I ask offer a plausible answer, and about 50% of the answers are both helpful and correct.

street philosopher

I enjoy exploring Tel Aviv, but lately I've been getting distracted. The street names raise serious philosophical questions. When does Menachem Begin become Jabotinsky? In what ways is Pinsker parallel to Bar Kochba? How large is the intersection of Ahad Ha'am and Borochov, and how far is it from A.D. Gordon?

homo'im ba'aretz u'bakitah

Last week two teenagers were murdered at a gay center in Tel Aviv. (In some places the Hebrew word "moadon" has been translated as "club," but this is misleading. It was more like a community center than a place for dancing and listening to loud music.)

I attended a rally in Kikar Rabin last night with 70,000 others in solidarity with the gay community. (Kikar Rabin is a plaza named for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered there in 1995 following a peace rally.) President Shimon Peres spoke, as well as the mayor of Tel Aviv and several government ministers and members of Israeli parliament. An adult staffer at the gay center who was apparently injured in the attack spoke on the podium from a wheelchair. Even though I could not understand all his words, he was quite moving.

Or commented to me that none of the speakers made the "obvious" connection between hatred of homosexuals and hatred of Arabs. I asked whether that would have been a divisive connection to make, and he said that for the crowd in attendance it would not have been divisive.

The labels for queers in Hebrew are awkward cognates. Lesbians are lezbiot, homosexuals are homo'im, etc.

On Thursday I moved from kitah bet to kitah bet plus. Think grade 2 to grade 2.5 (out of 9), without the graduation ceremony. Today, one of my classmates from kitah bet joined me in kitah bet plus. Let's call him Robert. Today Robert and I were sitting on opposite sides of the classroom. During a break, he asked to switch seats with me. I agreed and asked why. Robert said that there was a French Christian family on his side of the classroom that was intolerant of his sexuality. I spent a week and a half in kitah bet with him and didn't realize he was gay, but he seemed pretty sure that this family was hostile to him because he was gay. I did not sense their hostility or question his perception. We switched seats.

news items

There's a story that has gotten a lot of press coverage in Israel about a woman in Jerusalem who starved her son. She was videotaped removing his feeding tube after he had already been hospitalized. Here's a Haaretz article about it: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1105049.html

To me, the strange thing about this story is that the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) community has interpreted this news story as a plot by the hospital to defame Haredim (because the woman is Haredi) and has therefore responded with rioting.

I have not been following the story too closely, but today I struggled through an article (from a few days ago) in Hebrew that announced that the district attorney in Jerusalem will indict the woman. The second headline said that people close to the mother are expected to make the following offer: in return for the state dropping the indictment, the family will leave Israel. Or confirmed that I translated the headline correctly.

How would that help anything? Why would that be an offer worth considering?

Reading Israeli newspapers is pretty challenging for me, so I'd like to request that in the future, articles I read make more sense. Thanks in advance.

News item number two was brought to my attention by my mom, and is also a bit surprising: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/world/middleeast/06kenan.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

Amos Kenan, an Israeli writer, died on Tuesday. He was, at various times, a member of Hashomer Hatzair (progressive Zionist), Lechi (revisionist Zionist), the anti-Zionist Canaanite movement, and Ariel Sharon's Shlomtzion Party. How does that work?

karmiel

Ulpan Akiva organized a trip to the dance festival in Karmiel yesterday. An impressive crowd was in attendance for the final performance, maybe upwards of 10,000 people. The Egyptian Ambassador spoke briefly in English before the performance began about how hard he was working towards peace. He may have been referring to the peace process in general, but I think he might be particularly involved with negotiations over Gilad Shalit.

Even though I did rikudei am (Israeli folk dancing) at Moshava for many years, I was surprised at how familiar the performance was. The performance I saw in Karmiel was the premier performance of the biggest rikudei am event. The costumes were more elaborate and the dancers were older, but it was basically the same as the performances put on by campers every week.

I went to a grocery store (Hetzi Hinam) today with Or. The busiest time of the week at the Giant in Columbia Heights is on Friday around 6 pm, and the most crowded area is in the front at the registers. The entire store today was as crowded as that, and Israelis drive grocery carts the same way they drive their cars.

running in tel aviv

I just returned from a run along the Tel Aviv beach boardwalk. This is the first time I have exercised per se in Israel, but it seems like being hot and sweating all day should count for something. It is humid here but I think DC is much more humid. The heat in DC is oppressive. The heat in Tel Aviv is scorching. On the whole I think scorching is not as unpleasant as oppressive, but in Tel Aviv I spend much more time outside (or in poorly air conditioned buildings).

Running through the Florentin neighborhood in Tel Aviv is different than running through Columbia Heights in DC. In Florentin, I jump over cats and piles of empty boxes. In Columbia Heights, I weave around garbage cans and parking meters. In Florentin, I dodge water dripping from air conditioners.

Speaking of which, I've heard that potable water is scarce in Israel, but I've never heard about a problem with electricity. Maybe air conditioners can be cranked up to harvest more of the humidity, and the resulting water can be collected and used (which would also eliminate one of my street obstacles).

Anyways, yesterday I visited Yonah on Moshav Nordiya near Netanya. Yonah is on the staff of MBI, Habonim Dror's five-week summer program for 16 year olds.

In ulpan today I learned the future tense. In English, there is no future tense. One just says "will" to indicate the future, as in "I will eat." In Hebrew just one word, conjugated appropriately, means "I will eat" (future - atid) or "I ate" (past - avar) or "I am eating" (present - hoveh). I will post again soon.

chaverim l'kitah - classmates

In my hebrew textbook at the University of Maryland, the dialogues had ridiculous names and personas--ridiculous but, it seems, realistic. I'd like to introduce my ulpan classmates.

I'm only introducing a select few today. Names have been changed to protect ... me (if any of them ever read the blog). Except one name, which is too good to be true. A girl named Armina joined our class today. She's from Armenia. Armina from Armenia! (In hebrew, Armina is an anagram for Armenia.)

Yael - 14 year old American girl. She speaks hebrew rapidly and confidently with an Israeli accent. Her Israeli parents spoke hebrew to her as a child. By comparison, all the others in the class sound like stuttering fools. And yet she complains during breaks that the class is too hard. What could explain this? She can't read hebrew.

Irina - 20-something Russian woman. She speaks at least as well as I do, but with a thick Russian accent, which grates on my ears. I think she and I have diametrically opposed senses of humor.

Andrew - 40-something American man. He seems like a nice guy, but I feel bad for him. He habitually transposes vowel sounds, struggles mightily with any sort of reading aloud or verb conjugation, and generally looks like he doesn't understand what the teacher is saying. I think he's taken an Ulpan Akiva course before, so he might have been socially promoted to our class, so to speak.

Ariella and Natan - 12 year old french girl and her father. The French accent in hebrew is, I think, the most pleasant of the foreign accents I have heard. Natan and I sat next to each other one day and I defined a bunch of words for him in Hebrew. I bring a dictionary to class.

Rachel - 24 year old American woman. Her vocabulary and grammar are pretty good but she speaks with an unapologetic American accent. Most of the time when she speaks, her inflection implies the question, "Am I saying this right?" I respect the humility but think it is a bad habit.