On Nov. 30, Israel marks the Day of Departure & Expulsion of Jews from Arab Countries & Iran.
Almost a million Jews were expelled from their countries of birth after 1948, 850,000 from the Arab world & 100,000 from Iran. This fact of history and ethnic cleansing has been ignored for too long.
Kaf tet b’November was on Shabbat this year.
Why is it important to share the Jerusalem street sign again every year?
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, the Partition Resolution, to divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948, when the British mandate was scheduled to end. The Jews accepted. The Arabs declared war.
In 1977, the General Assembly called for the annual observance of 29 November as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The UN has become consistent in rewriting and inverting history.
Jerusalem doesn’t have fall colors like the US Northeast. However, these leaves were near the Knesset.
Oh, oh, the Jerusalem streets, with construction most everywhere, making it hard to drive or walk.
The new signs promote the use of the expanded bike lanes. I saw three bike riders at one time last week.
We had heavy rain and a couple of grey days. Again today, it was sunny, and then came heavy rain.
It was a good time to stay home and bake to fill the freezer on a rainy day,
However, when the sun comes out, so does the colour along the Jerusalem streets.
At the beginning of the week, I was back at the National Library of Israel, and the sun was shining.
Finally! The timing was right to get a photo of the shadows in the form of letters.
This display was back to the original before the Iron Swords War.
This was for a tour group, after almost two years without the faces of the murdered on October 7 on display.
The last three hostages are now down to two. One is a Thai worker, Sudthisak Rudalak.
Police officer Ran Gvili was murdered on October 7, and his body was taken hostage.
Will they ever be released to come home?
The main lobby was quiet; it is usually full of large tour groups.
From that lobby area, visitors usually take this image to post of the National Library of Israel.
However, this time I was escorted upstairs to a small conference room for a special presentation by three researchers. Avi Shmidman, Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra and Nachum Dershowitz are the principal investigators of the MiDRASH project.
For centuries, in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, the Cairo Genizah contained more than 300,000 handwritten pieces from the 9th to the 19th centuries.
They have used AI and Machine Learning to transcribe and share from the Cairo Genizah fragments.
Soon, the results will be available online through the National Library for researchers around the world.
For those wanting something less academic, NLI is hosting children’s events during Hanukkah.
Thursday night was Thanksgiving, a holiday mostly celebrated with Black Friday ads and not turkey.
But AMIT held a Thanksgiving dinner at the Jerusalem Inbal Hotel to celebrate 100 years of educating Israeli children. The attendees were mostly American, with a large percentage of them olim.
I went for the Thanksgiving-themed food for Friday night dinner.
It was interesting to see the photos of Thanksgiving and Shabbat posted on social media again. For two years, many refrained from posting their weekly gatherings as hostages were held starving in Gaza.
There are only two hostages presumed dead known to be left in Gaza, and for many, it’s back to normal.
However, the war is not over. Newly wounded have joined the long list of over 20,000 soldiers.
As we were reminded at the AMIT dinner, 66 fallen soldiers were students, as well as 3 AMIT educators.
Hadar Goldin, the longest held hostage, was kidnapped and killed during a humanitarian ceasefire 11 years ago, and finally returned for his long-suffering parents to have a proper burial.
There is what to be thankful for and hopeful for on the Jerusalem streets.
What will happen next? You never can predict.
Hope to see you soon, this year in Jerusalem.
