Click here to view the embedded video.

Compared to US dollars, Israel’s shekel bills have always been a colorful sight, making spending money a pleasure since it doesn’t feel like real money. And now, those bills will look even more fake, thanks to a new protective plastic coating that will be applied to the 20 shekel bill. Now we’re talking, money that doubles as an umbrella for the upcoming winter months, and as Haaretz points out, a replacement for missing monopoly money.

October 4 – “Geeknic – The Israeli Bloggers Meetup – Summer 2007” 5pm, Banana Beach, Tel Aviv

October 11 – Digital Eve Speed Networking and Party, 7:30pm, Borochov 88, Ra’anana

October 11 – Jeff Pulver Facebook Party, become Facebook friends with Jeff Pulver for details

October 11 – OpenCoffeeClub: Meetup Group in Israel Meetup, 6pm in Aroma Cafe, Herzilya

October 18 – The Tel Aviv-Yafo Entrepreneur Meetup Group, 11am, Solo Cafe, Tel Aviv-Yafo

October 23 – iDrink 7:30pm, unconfirmed location in Tel Aviv

October 25 – WordCamp Israel, 9am, Michlelet Afeka, Tel Aviv

In other tennis-related achievements, Israel’s Special Olympics team will be going to Shanghai in early October to compete in a variety of sports, including table tennis with silver medalist Meir Abramov. Says the Jerusalem Post, “Table tennis player Meir Abramov, 21, who represented Israel in Ireland and came home with a silver medal, told Peres: ‘It was the most thrilling experience of my life. I never thought that I would ever be chosen to represent Israel.’”

For many, these prayer notes are an important way of communicating with God. But how is there always room for mine? Do these Kotel assistants ever read my notes?

Here’s what Ynet News has to say:

Rabinowitz and a dozen workers sweep the wall with wooden sticks in order to reach up high to snare the notes closest to the heavens.

They never read them and have never counted the number of scripted prayers, but in each collection there are enough to fill about 100 shopping bags, each with thousands of notes, Rabinowitz said.

The rabbi’s office, which manages the site, estimates that more than 5 million people visited the Western Wall in 2006. Israel’s Tourism Ministry said that about 1.5 million of them were foreign tourists.

Click here to see some real-time Kotel action.

The Mossad put Bulgaria in touch with people who were able to influence the situation for a positive outcome.

Libya finally sent the medical professionals home after Bulgaria forgave millions of dollars of debts owed to Bulgara by Libya.

“Bulgarian intel chief: Mossad helped free nurses from Libya”, The Jerusalem Post, July 31, 2007.

Thank goodness this made headline news in Lincoln County, Georgia or else we might never have found out about such a cool program. The program is called GILEE – Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange. According to their website, GILEE was founded in May 1992 (how did it take so long for us to find out about this?) with the following objectives:

1. To enhance inter-agency cooperation between State of Georgia law enforcement agencies and the police force of the State of Israel.

2. To offer an educational professional program to senior Israeli law enforcement officials in Georgia, primarily in the area of community policing.

3. To offer an educational professional program to senior Georgia law enforcement officials in Israel, primarily in the areas of counter-terrorism and drug interdiction.

Basically, Georgia trades its knowledge of community policing for Israel’s knowledge of counter-terrorism and drug crime prevention. The program is still very active – as we note the upcoming visit of a Lincoln County Sheriff soon to arrive in Israel.

There are so many ways to describe Liviu Librescu, the heroic professor at Virginia Tech who barricaded the classroom doorway to save his students’ lives during Monday’s shooting tragedy. Librescu was an Israeli/Romanian engineering and math lecturer who survived the Holocaust and later escaped communist Romania. After finding out more about this man, I started to see his name over and over again, and couldn’t ignore the words jumping out from his name – ‘Libre’ which means ‘free’ in Spanish and French, and ‘Rescu’ short for ‘rescue’. It’s not often that someone’s name describes their life story.

An inspiring man:

When Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, the young Librescu was interned in a labor camp, and then sent along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a central ghetto in the city of Focsani, his son said. Hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews were killed by the collaborationist regime during the war.

Librescu, who was 76 when he died, later found work at a government aerospace company. But his career was stymied in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to the Communist regime, his son said, and he was later fired when he requested permission to move to Israel.

In 1977, according to his son, Israel’s then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened to get the family an emigration permit, and they left for Israel in 1978.

Librescu left Israel for Virginia in 1985 for a sabbatical year, but eventually made the move permanent, said Joe Librescu: “His work was his life in a sense.”

… At the university, people placed flowers on a table holding his picture and a lit candle. “We remember him as a great specialist in aeronautics. He left behind hundreds of prestigious papers,” said professor Nicolae Serban Tomescu.Librescu, who specialized in composite structures and aeroelasticity, published extensively and received numerous awards for his work. He received a doctorate from the Bucharest-based Academy of Sciences in 1969, and an honorary degree from the Bucharest Polytechnic University in 2000.

He also received several NASA grants and taught courses at the University “La Sapienza” in Rome and at the Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Laurie Copans, “Holocaust survivor saved students’ lives” Yahoo News, April 17, 2007