Israeli farmers to follow a full year of rest
Posted on July 24, 2007 • By Deena Levenstein
Category: Environment | Tags: | Leave a Comment
Every seven years many Israeli farmers stop farming their land in accordance with the Jewish law called shmita. Religious leaders meet with farmers in order to discuss with them the issues involved in this mitzva (commandment).
Since the 1950s and ’60s, the number of dunams that “rest” during the shmita year has increased from 1000 dunams to around 220,000 dunams. It is estimated that 400,000 dunams will lie fallow during the upcoming shmita year.
Serious financial loss can result to farmers who are willing to stop farming for a whole year. Some farmers are expected to gross $1.5 million for shutting down their operations. Diaspora Jews, particularly from the US, help offset these losses by raising money during the 6th year of the shmita cycle to support the farmers during this year of rest.
Michal Lando, “Mitzva makers”, The Jerusalem Post, July 24, 2007
Israeli researchers find solution for wasp that destroys Eucalyptus trees
Posted on July 24, 2007 • By Deena Levenstein
Category: Environment | Tags: | Leave a Comment
A tiny wasp is the chagrin of many countries. And now, those same countries are requesting assistance from Israel after Israeli scientists, funded by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), found the one millimeter Closterocerus to inhibit the wasp.
The wasps subject Eucalyptus trees to continued attack, causing massive damage. An Israeli research team traveled to Australia where they identified Closterocerus. After extended research on the bug, it was released into Israeli forests. A substantial improvement was noticed there and there are reports that the bug migrated to Jordan, Egypt and Turkey.
Israeli experts have already traveled to Thailand and are soon to make a trip to South Africa.
New Guinness world record in dance by Israeli Arabs
Posted on July 23, 2007 • By Deena Levenstein
Category: Art and Culture | Tags: | Leave a Comment
How amusing to picture thousands of people dancing in a line. And how much more intriguing when it is pictured in the setting of Acre’s old city, Israel.
2,743 Israeli Arabs did the Debke dance this Sunday for seven minutes. It was the longest and largest Debke dance recorded so that it is now the new world record (surpassing the last 1700-people record from Toronto).
The dancers traveled from villages all over Israel in order to participate in this event. This is the first time any Israeli Arab will be entering the Guinness Book of World Records.
Yoav Stern, “Israeli Arabs break Debke dancing world record”, Haaretz, July 25, 2007
Guerilla artist’s exhibit documents the despoliation of Jerusalem
Posted on July 22, 2007 • By Gil Zohar
Category: Art and Culture, Featured | Tags: | 2 Comments
Guerilla artist and photographer Yoram Amir has made a career documenting the changing face of Jerusalem. And as his current “Jeru$alem” photograph series exhibit shows, it’s not a change which he views for the better.
“Jeru$alem”, which was on display at The Jerusalem Cinematheque during the recent Jerusalem Film Festival, utilizes antique horseshoe-shaped wooden window frames to display his documentation of the destruction of the traditional city. Amir salvaged the windows from the Palace Hotel on Agron Street, the facade and lobby of which are being preserved in yet another real estate mega-project appealing to overseas Jews. Together the photos and frames make a disturbing anti-consumer message about Jerusalem being reduced to a caricature of herself.
Interviewed at his Shodedei Yam Gallery in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market – the name is a Hebrew pun meaning both sea pirates and brigands of Jerusalem – the 44-year-old artist decried that rapacious real estate developers are destroying the Holy City’s unique character through cheap, overly tall buildings that rip away at the city’s urban fabric.
He warned of “the conspiracy of stealing the landscape. No one is guarding the city for the next century,” he warned. “Nobody is building structures that will last 400 years. Jerusalem of Gold is becoming Jerusalem of concrete.” “For a time I was Chairman of the Market Committee. Did you know that in the whole Machane Yehuda market there aren’t normal and clean public bathrooms? That for me is the base that you have to fight for.”
The aesthetics of the artist’s beloved Jerusalem are being relentlessly destroyed by “monster buildings” being erected in a “culture of copying” that is part of an “architectural disdain” for the city’s heritage, he said. Amir criticized the process whereby Jerusalem has been turned into a commodity “that advances the interests of foreign real estate developers. The capitalist corporate system is pollution to [Jerusalem's] streets.”
Cinematheque founder Lia Van Leer chose Amir’s exhibit because of its connection to Jerusalem’s budding environmental movement, he explained. Amir was one of the first activists in the city to oppose the so-called Safdie Plan to build suburban housing on the Judean Hills west of the city.
Canadian-Israeli lawyer Mike Dacks elaborated on Amir’s work: “For a Western admirer of underground Israeli art, Yoram has some of the coolest and most unique installations I’ve come across. His photographs highlight the paradoxical nature of contemporary Jerusalem – the relations between the secular and religious in the city, the contrast between the old and the new, or the constant interaction and power dynamic between the Arab and Jewish sectors of the city, and the rich and the poor on all sides. He has a great knack for uncovering – often ironically – deeper truths about Israeli society that are only rarely accessible to Westerners.
“He is far from crazy – rather the opposite. He is the completely natural result of Israeli society. The guy was an officer in the paratroopers in the early 1980s and within the span of a year fought both in Beirut against the PLO and also in removing Jewish settlers from the Sinai. Born into a Moroccan family and not given all the opportunities that other sectors of Israeli society were afforded, he’s watched these skyscrapers go up in his hometown while the most beautiful historic buildings fall, lie abandoned or are demolished.
“This is all done with the complete complicity of the municipality officials who as we always hear in the press are engaged in hugely corrupt business and administrative practices. At the same time, Jerusalem – eternal capital of the Jewish people has become the single poorest city in Israel – in spite of all the donations from the Diaspora. How can that be?! Weren’t we here to build something beautiful – Earthly Jerusalem to match the beauty of its Heavenly counterpart? This is the perspective from which Yoram approaches his art, and indeed his life.”
The Shodedei Yam Gallery is located at Rehov ha-Horev 12 in Machane Yehuda. For more information call 052 240 0287.
Jeru$alem, by Yoram Amir
he building at the Holyland is the Temple
Calatrava Bridge is the Gate of Victory
A digital clock and synthetic grass
This is the main spine
Mountains disappearing forests shrinking
Historic buildings destroyed
Long live the tractor, long live the crane
There is none other but the dollar
Jerusalem is buying blue and white sponsored by Coca-Cola
Businesses are collapsing the shopping malls are enjoying
The architecture faculty in the Clal Building
The architect of the University up on Mount Scopus
He wins the Israel Prize
Tens of teachers of visual communications from Tel Aviv
Tens of scrapers of the heavens in West Jerusalem
Have to plan, to design, to advertise, to market
New York is here, Bezalel is there.
Collection of seconds.
Academics at The Hebrew University figure out how to water plants with salt water
Posted on July 21, 2007 • By Deena Levenstein
Category: Environment | Tags: | Leave a Comment
“Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink.” Or so we thought.
Prof. Alex Levine and doctoral student Yehoram Leshem of The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, have been studying how plants react under salty conditions and why.
The results of their work, published in the Proceedings of the (US) National Academy of Sciences, show that through understanding the mechanisms by which plants deal with salty conditions and through genetic manipulation, it is possible to raise plants’ tolerance to what normally would be too much salt for survival.
Improving the salt tolerance of crops can be a life-save to many countries and societies.
Understanding of Jewish priests’ geneology and roles continues to deepen at first ever conference
Posted on July 18, 2007 • By Gil Zohar
Category: Art and Culture, Featured | Tags: | Leave a Comment
Some 200 Kohens and Levites attended the opening session Monday of The Gathering of the Tribe here, the first-ever conference devoted to issues concerning Judaism’s priestly caste.
Symbolically, the symposium began on the Hebrew date of Rosh Hodesh Av, the first day of Av. This is the date of the death of Aharon, the first Jewish High Priest and brother of Moses, whose date of death is the only yahrzeit (date of death) mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.
The four-day conference hosted a mix of rabbis, geneticists and genealogists concerned with the history, duties and obligations of Kohens and Levis. Among them was Prof. Karl Skorecki of the Ramban/Technion Medical Center in Haifa who is renowned for his discovery in 1997 of the Kohen genetic signature.
Prof. Skorecki, a Canadian doctor who today is the director of Nephrology and Molecular Medicine at the Technion Faculty of Medicine, delivered the opening presentation about his research proving that the majority of kohanim alive today are descended from a single common male ancestor.
Skorecki began his lecture by providing a general overview to the subject of human genetics and DNA, noting that “out of the 3 billion DNA letter code, on average any two humans are 99.9 per cent identical. We are one large human family, regardless of geography.”
Focusing on the tiny differences in DNA sequencing, Skorecki explained the two types of mutations which cause human diversity – SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) which occur approximately once every 10,000 years, and STRs (Single Tandem Repeats), which occur once in a millennium. Fidelity through the male blood line can be traced through the last of the 23 pair of chromosomes in the nucleus of a human cell, he explained. Similarly the female ancestor can be determined through the mitochondrial DNA, he noted.
Using these SNP and STR genetic markers, Skorecki demonstrated what he called the “Cohen Modal Haplotype” (CMH), a polymorphism on the Y chromosome found in a higher frequency in the Kohen caste than the general Jewish population, suggesting that most if not all Kohens are direct descendants of Aharon through a patrilineal line extending back 3,300 years or more than 100 generations.
Complicating the issue, Skorecki reported that he and his research team have discovered not one but two Cohen Modal Haplotypes, which he called J1 and J2. Pinchas the zealot mentioned in the Bible may be the origin of J2, he suggested.
Why don’t all Kohens share the same genetic markers?
“Halacha provides the answer, not DNA,” Skorecki noted. After the rebirth of the dead in the messianic era, scientists will be able to take a DNA sample of Aharon, settling the issue, he joked.
Adding yet another layer to the Kohen DNA story, Skorecki spoke about the disproportionate presence of the CMH among the males of the Lemba tribe in Mozambique and South Africa, suggesting an ancestral link to the Jewish peple. One sub-clan within the Lemba, the Buba clan, is considered by the Lemba to be their priestly clan. Among a small sample of the Buba, fifty-two percent of males were found to carry the Cohen Modal Haplotype. The Lemba also have a large percentage of genes often found in non-Arab Semites.
More recently Skorecki and his team discovered that some 3.5 million, or 40 per cent, of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from four “founding mothers” who lived in Europe 1,000 years ago.
About Prof. Skorecki
The only child of Holocaust survivors, Skorecki was born and raised in Toronto. He received his medical degree from the University of Toronto in 1977 and conducted his post-graduate clinical and research training at the Brigham and Women’s and Massachusetts General Hospitals. In 1984, he established a research program in the areas of kidney disease, molecular biology and human genetics at the University of Toronto Division of Nephrology. He was subsequently appointed professor and director of the Division of Nephrology in the Departments of Medicine, Pediatrics, and Clinical Biochemistry at the University of Toronto, and research scientist and director of the Nephrology Division at the Hospital for Sick Children, also in Toronto.
After a sabbatical at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot in 1991, Prof. Skorecki and his family decided to make aliyah to Israel and he joined the Technion faculty in 1995. In addition to conducting research in molecular biology and human genetics at the Technion, Prof. Skorecki has served as a clinical nephrologist at Rambam Medical Center, and as director of the Nephrology Department and of the Rappaport Research Institute in Haifa.
Humus tutorial
Posted on July 16, 2007 • By Rebecca Markowitz
Category: Videos | Tags: | Leave a Comment
Israeli tennis player Andy Ram wins mixed doubles
Posted on July 6, 2007 • By Deena Levenstein
Category: Art and Culture | Tags: | Leave a Comment
Israeli tennis player Andy Ram teamed with French Nathalie Dechy to win the mixed doubles title at the French Open.
Reuters, “Andy Ram wins mixed doubles title at French Open”, ynetnews, July 6, 2007.
Funny clips about Israel
Posted on July 6, 2007 • By Rebecca Markowitz
Category: Videos | Tags: | 1 Comment
Israel is the size of New Jersey
Posted on July 1, 2007 • By Rebecca Markowitz
Category: Tidbits | Tags: | 1 Comment
Did you know that Israel is geographically the size of New Jersey, and has a population of 7 million?
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