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Byline: Gil Zohar

Urban warfare training

Urban warfare training

An Israel Defence Forces patrol. The mural on the right was painted by Batsheva Schneider when she was doing her military service. (photo by Gil Zohar)

Fans of Fauda may recognize the Tze’elim Urban Warfare Training Centre (UWTC) in the western Negev Desert near Kibbutz Tze’elim. The base – where Israel Defence Forces infantry and commanders train in the type of house-to-house and subterranean combat expected in the Gaza Strip, but also in the West Bank, southern Lebanon and other Middle East locations – was used as a set for the hit TV series. But, while faudameans “chaos” in Arabic, the disarray in this sprawling 24-hectare base has been finely calibrated to accustom troops to real-life conditions of fighting in Arab cities and villages.

photo - Soldiers in the midst of operations training.
Soldiers in the midst of operations training. (photo by Gil Zohar)

Located inside the larger Tze’elim Training Base, the UWTC simulates the maze of a multi-storey Middle Eastern urban environment. Established in 2005, it was built at a cost of $45 million.

The warren of 600 structures includes garbage-strewn streets, storefronts, schools, houses, shacks, an eight-storey apartment block and mosques. The muezzin’s call blares from the minarets, which are illuminated with green Islamic lights. Garages advertise cars for sale. Jeeps patrol the dusty streets. Holes blown in walls allow soldiers to avoid entering a building via the doorway, which may have been booby-trapped.

Most striking are the murals and graffiti scattered across the site, some painted by Batsheva Schneider when she was doing her military service. The images include Islamic Jihad fighters firing RPGs, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, Qassam rockets from Gaza, and guerrillas with their faces covered by a keffiyah scarf marked “shahid” (martyr). One Arabic sign just says “death.”

photo - Murals and graffiti are scattered across Tze’elim
Murals and graffiti are scattered across Tze’elim. (photo by Gil Zohar)

Entering a mock-up of a claustrophobic Gaza terrorist tunnel, this writer felt the palpable panic among my fellow journalists behind me as they urged me forward in the pitch-black darkness.

photo - Images include Qassam rockets from Gaza
Images include Qassam rockets from Gaza. (photo by Gil Zohar)

Other buildings are decorated to replicate a salon in a private home. The verisimilitude extends down to framed family photographs, flowers in a vase, recent newspapers from Gaza and art with Quranic verses. Simulators showing mortar strikes and explosions suggest to soldiers what they might witness outside the living room window.

In addition to the IDF, Israel’s “Mini Gaza” has been used for urban warfare training by U.S. Army soldiers and United Nations peacekeepers. The project was developed to meet the need for better urban warfare training by the IDF, as a response to the challenges of the Second Intifada of 2000-2005. It is regularly updated as new terror strategies evolve.

Training exercises here are meant to help soldiers and their officers distinguish between combatants and civilians, and prepare them for situations where terrorists exploit civilians as human shields.

This writer was part of a delegation of international journalists on a tour organized by the Israel Government Press Office. The invitation came before the recent military operation in Jenin.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

Format ImagePosted on September 1, 2023August 29, 2023Author Gil ZoharCategories IsraelTags Israel, warfare
Beit HaRav Kook at 100 years

Beit HaRav Kook at 100 years

Rabbi Itzhak Marmorstein – a former spiritual leader of Vancouver’s Congregation Or Shalom – stands beside the ark in Beit HaRav Kook, where he is the gabbai (sexton). (photo by Gil Zohar)

Scores of congregants packed Beit HaRav in downtown Jerusalem June 2-3 to celebrate the centenary of the historic synagogue, yeshiva and home of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), a seminal Zionist religious leader during the British Mandate who founded the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

Born in Griva – then part of the Czarist Empire but today Daugavpils, Latvia – Kook arrived in Jaffa, Ottoman Palestine, on Iyar 28, 5665 (1904), where he became the city’s leading Jewish spiritual figure. The family’s private celebration became a national holiday during the 1967 Six Day War when Israel conquered the Old City of Jerusalem on the same date.

Exiled in Switzerland and then in Britain during the First World War, Kook – also known by the Hebrew acronym HaRaAYaH – played a key role in London in securing the 1917 Balfour Declaration by which Britain announced its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

Returning to the country then under British military occupation following the war, Kook served as the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Jerusalem. Both the city’s Jewish religious leaders and Whitehall were anxious to replace the Ottoman office of hakham bashi, chief rabbi of the former Turkish empire. Thus, in 1921, Kook was appointed to the newly created position of Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the Land of Israel.

But where was a scholar of such stature to live, especially since the representatives of other religions in the holy city all had an appropriate residence?

The issue was brought up in a July 24, 1921, meeting at Government House on the Mount of Olives – today the Augusta Victoria Hospital – between Britain’s newly arrived high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel (1870-1963), and New York businessman Harry Fischel (1865-1948). Asked by Samuel to raise money for the project among his American peers, the philanthropist and his wife Shayna volunteered to fund the building themselves.

They identified Beit David, a one-storey kollel almshouse erected in 1873 by philanthropist David Reis. Owned by the Ashkenazi community’s Central Committee of Knesset Israel, the site was eminently suitable. The courtyard – opposite Rothschild Hospital (today Hadassah College) and near the residence of pioneering ophthalmologist Dr. Alfred Ticho and his wife, artist Anna – was located on Hadassah Street, which was renamed after Rabbi Kook following his death.

photo - The yeshiva hall and beit midrash of Beit HaRav Kook
The yeshiva hall and beit midrash of Beit HaRav Kook. (photo by Gil Zohar)

A cornerstone for the second-floor addition was laid on Aug. 15 before the Fischels departed. Work began immediately. Fischel, an architect and real estate developer in Manhattan, ensured the structure included all the latest modern conveniences. The double-height ceilings were decorated with colourful stencil patterns. Built surrounding a central courtyard, one wing included a reception area, kitchen, bathroom and three bedrooms for the Kook family. The other side included the Central Universal Yeshiva, a synagogue and the scholar’s bureau – now restored to its appearance a century ago. At Kook’s insistence, the synagogue incorporated a moveable roof to permit a sizeable sukkah.

The Kooks moved in at Hanukkah 1922, though the synagogue and yeshiva were still under construction. That spring, the Fischels again crossed the Atlantic. Docking in Alexandria, they caught the train from Egypt across the Sinai Desert to Palestine. Arriving at Lydda (Lod) on May 9, they were greeted by a delegation of rabbis. The couple insisted on being immediately escorted to Beit HaRav.

The dedication began at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sivan 12, 5683 (May 27, 1923). The program – which included 33 events and speakers with a tea break – augured well for cooperation between the country’s growing Jewish community and the new imperial regime.

The many dignitaries in attendance included leading rabbis and Zionist figures. The event was a quasi-national holiday. Jerusalem was decorated with bunting in the Zionist, British and American colours. Flags flew everywhere across the city.

The orchestra of the nearby Institute for the Blind played the Star-Spangled Banner, God Save the King and Hatikvah, while the Etz Chaim Talmud Torah’s choir performed for the guests.

Among the dozens of speakers was Fischel, who addressed the assembly in Hebrew and then English: “Words fail me at this moment to express my gratitude to the Almighty for granting me this privilege of building this Beth HaRav and synagogue…. While my heart always beats for Palestine, yet my home is in America. I have, therefore, had to travel nearly 6,000 miles to participate in this holy celebration….

“The building committee has just presented me with the key of this house certifying thereby that the building is now completed. In view of the fact that this residence and synagogue are to be used for the benefit of the people of Palestine, and that Your Excellency [Samuel], is the chief executive of the land, I therefore deem it fitting and proper to present you with the key, and designate you as custodian of this combined edifice. May I ask you, please, to accept this golden key and keep it as a souvenir and memento of this occasion? I want to take this means also of publicly thanking you for the honour you have bestowed upon us. May God grant you, your administration and the people of Palestine continued security and peace.”

Turning to Kook, sitting next to him on the dais, resplendent in his Sabbath and festival fur spodek (tall, black hat), Samuel declared:

“I congratulate the Chief Rabbinate, Mr. and Mrs. Fischel and the Jewish community at large on this auspicious day. Among the many problems with which the civil administration had to deal on its establishment was the adoption of measures to place the Jewish community both on its secular and on its ecclesiastical side, upon a permanent and regular basis. The question of the organization of the secular side was not yet fully settled. But the government has been able to establish, on an electoral basis, the Chief Rabbinate and, for the first time after an interval of many centuries, a Jewish ecclesiastical authority has been founded on a permanent footing, based upon the decisions of the community itself.”

The ornately carved chair that Samuel presented to Kook on behalf of King George V remains in its place of honour on the synagogue’s eastern wall next to the aron kodesh (Torah ark).

photo - The Beit HaRav dedication ceremony a century ago. Rabbi Isaac Kook, fourth from the right in the photo, is wearing the fur spodek. To his left is Harry Fischel. Herbert Samuel and Sefardi Chief Rabbi Yaakov Meir
The Beit HaRav dedication ceremony a century ago. Rabbi Isaac Kook, fourth from the right in the photo, is wearing the fur spodek. To his left is Harry Fischel. Herbert Samuel and Sefardi Chief Rabbi Yaakov Meir. (photo from Rabbi Aaron I. Reichel, esq., administrator of the Harry and Jane Fischel Foundation)

Asked about the importance of Beit HaRav, the institution’s gabbai (sexton) Rabbi Itzhak Marmorstein – also known by his nom de plume rabbanique Evan-Shayish – cited Kook’s dedication address a century ago:

“We are engaged here in declaring an elevated ideal that must proceed higher and higher. This ideal must develop and grow its activity through the gathering together of our scattered powers so that together we can proceed in the rebuilding of the ruins of Jerusalem together. This involves strengthening the physical building of the land and the nation in the material realm as the basis for the higher, holy and spiritual building of the Torah and holiness. This will illuminate the living light for the entire national renewal in all its branches.”

Kook’s funeral in 1935 was attended by an estimated 20,000 mourners. Beit HaRav continued to function as the flagship for the dati leumi (national religious) community, but a larger yeshiva was erected in Kiryat Moshe in 1964, and the old building fell into disuse.

Since 2008, Marmorstein – a Canadian-Israeli who formerly served at Congregation Or Shalom in Vancouver – has been engaged in reviving the original building. The building today operates as a neighbourhood synagogue with Sabbath services, as well as a museum.

The centre offers a class every Thursday at 9 p.m. taught by noted kabbalist Rabbi Yohai Yemini on Kook’s commentary on Rabbi Isaac Luria’s teachings. Those insights, recorded and edited in Safed between 1570 and 1572 by his disciple Haim Vital, form the basis for Lurianic kabbalah (mysticism), a system of thought Kook helped spread under which the arrival the Messiah and the ingathering of the Jews to Israel is imminent.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

Format ImagePosted on June 23, 2023June 22, 2023Author Gil ZoharCategories IsraelTags Beit HaRav, history, Israel, Itzhak Marmorstein, milestones
Israel’s antiquities trade

Israel’s antiquities trade

A brochure about antique coins from Zak’s Antiquities.

Israel’s central role in the global antiquities business was the subject of a Zoom lecture on May 2 sponsored by the W.F. Albright Institute of Archeological Research in Jerusalem and the Palestine Exploration Fund, headquartered in London.

Entitled The Antiquities Trade in Israel and Palestine: Same as it Ever Was?, the joint presentation featured Michael Press, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway, specializing in the archeology of ancient Israel, and Morag Kersel, an associate professor of anthropology at DePaul University in Chicago, Ill., who studies the relationship between cultural heritage law, archeological sites and objects, and local interaction.

Press offered a scholarly overview of how the trade in antiquities burgeoned in the 19th century as tourism and Holy Land pilgrimage reached a mass scale, while Kersel spoke about how the quasi-licit trade functions today.

The Ottoman Empire enacted its first antiquities law in 1869, prohibiting the export of the empire’s heritage, Press noted. Yet, the first English-language Baedeker guide to Palestine and Syria, published seven years later, detailed the sum of baksheesh – a paltry few francs – needed to grease the palm of a customs officer to smuggle out a centuries-old souvenir.

The discovery in 1868 in Dhiban, Jordan, of a monumental Iron Age inscription mentioning King Mesha of Moab triggered an explosion of forgeries, continued Press. Notably, in 1873, Jerusalem antiquities dealer Moses Wilhelm Shapira (1830-1884) hoodwinked Germany into purchasing a trove of 1,800 fakes, he said.

Most pilgrims were interested in acquiring objets de piété, or items related to religion. A popular article was the widow’s mite, the least valuable coin circulating in Roman Judea, which Jesus mentioned in Mark 12:41-44 and Luke 21:1-4. The market in ancient coins included a brisk trade in forged gold and silver coins. Some pilgrims carried with them valuable numismatic items (rare coins, tokens, etc.) from Europe, which they sold in Palestine to fund their journey.

The evolving trade included Samaritan, Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, gems and seals, and ancient lachrymatories – perfume vials that widows would ostensibly fill with their tears and place in tombs as symbols of mourning for the deceased.

Press showed advertising from an American newspaper for the Phoenician (ie. Roman) glassware of Azeez Khayat (1875-1943). Born in Tyre, Lebanon, then part of Ottoman Syria, Khayat arrived at Ellis Island in 1893 and became a United States citizen five years later. Using the small collection of ancient glass he had brought with him, he became a dealer on Rector Street in Manhattan’s Little Syria. On repeated trips to his Middle East homeland, he was able to bring back thousands of artifacts – often excavated by his own workmen – and sell them in a gallery he opened first on West 11th Street and, later, at 366 5th Ave., opposite the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Many notable U.S. museums acquired important objects through him.

The market for Holy Land antiquities – both counterfeit and real – also included pottery vessels and oil lamps, said Press.

Bringing the story to the present, Kersel said the restrictions imposed by Israel’s Antiquities Law of 1978 forbid the sale of any human-made item from before 1700 CE. However, the act grandfathered the sale of items already in the inventory of the country’s 50 or so licensed antiquities dealers, she said. Since those catalogues are often nondescript and include unclear photographs, and since the lists are rarely updated when an item is sold, there is considerable opportunity to introduce newly and illegally acquired items, Kersel explained.

Underfunded and overstretched, the Israel Antiquities Authority’s anti-theft unit does its best to monitor dealers’ illegal activities, she said. Most shops are located along the Via Dolorosa in the Old City of Jerusalem and resemble Aladdin’s cave of treasures. Those in luxury hotels are decked out with elaborate displays resembling those in prestigious museums. All provide a certificate of authenticity cum export permit with each sale, she noted.

Typical is Zak’s Antiquities, run by Zak Mishriky, located in the Old City’s Christian Quarter Road, which advertises: “Invest in biblical antiquities. Ageless, timeless & priceless.” Fine print about the source of the merchandise notes: “The majority of our ancient artifacts come to us through private collections and auctions here in Israel.”

As an archeologist, Kersel has devoted two decades to tracking how the illicit trade in unprovenanced objects extends from the ground to the consumer. In a network that extends from the United Arab Emirates through Jordan, the West Bank and Israel to the United Kingdom and the United States, shady operators, she noted, are pillaging the Middle East’s cultural artifacts. Their criminal enterprise results in the destruction of archeological sites, the desecration of ancient graves and theft from museums. Moreover, it compromises the understanding of the past, she said. Some tie the business to funding terrorism.

Kersel categorized those buying these items into four groups. The first she called explorers, some of whom volunteer on archeological excavations, who generally purchase low-cost items from a cabinet of curiosities in the Old City and do so in search of an authentic exotic cultural experience. While not condoning their behaviour, she excoriated the second group – the elite. She was particularly critical of billionaire Steve Green of Oklahoma. The evangelical Christian, whose family owns the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, used his fortune to establish the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which opened in 2017.

“There were a lot of red flags,” she said of the museum’s acquisitions. All 16 Dead Sea Scroll fragments Green purchased proved to be forgeries, she noted, explaining how the antiquities enthusiast’s agents mislabeled the thousands of artifacts he purchased. Shipping them in small batches to various American addresses, they hoped to stay below the radar. The scam was finally stopped thanks to a tip-off from a FedEx agent, she said. Some 3,450 items were seized by U.S. authorities.

Kersel was similarly harsh in discussing disgraced Wall Street financier Michael Steinhardt, who, during a period of high inflation in the 1970s, conceived that antiquities were a commodity likely to appreciate quickly. Like Green, Steinhardt sought to gain validation for his purchases – including a group of Neolithic masks perhaps looted from caves by the Dead Sea – by donating them to museums. Steinhardt was a major benefactor of the Israel Museum.

Kersel identified the third group as religious tourists. Like their 19th-century forebearers, they, too, are interested in small-scale items like the widow’s mite, or lachrymatories.

The fourth group Kersel identified comprises members of a charter, such as alumni of a university or members of a sports or social club on an organized tour, who are driven by a group psychology. If one person buys an artifact, that leads their peers to do so, too, she said. And those items must be “cheap, portable and dustable.”

Citing Nelson H.H. Graburn, a professor emeritus in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, Kersel said such charter tourists will knowingly purchase a replica in order not to lose face with their fellow travelers.

“Afghanistan’s Law on the Protection of Historical and Cultural Properties (2004) strictly regulates the excavation and sale of antiquities: allowing private ownership of only registered antiquities, and prohibiting export except by the state,” said Press. The result has been to drive the business underground – would the result be any different were Israel to declare the antiquities trade illegal, revoke dealers’ licenses and nationalize their inventories?

Kersel cautioned such a radical solution would not end the trade. In an email, she wrote: “I don’t think that the demand for biblical antiquities will ever end, everyone wants something from the Holy Land, but I do think we can create better collectors, who only buy from licensed dealers and who ask about provenance, the origin stories, of the piece.”

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

Format ImagePosted on June 9, 2023June 8, 2023Author Gil ZoharCategories IsraelTags antiquities, archeology, Israel, law, looting
Düsseldorf returns painting

Düsseldorf returns painting

Wilhelm von Schadow’s “The Artist’s Children” (1830).

The German city of Düsseldorf reached an agreement recently with the heirs of Max Stern (1904-1987), a Jewish art dealer forced to flee the city in 1937, ending a long-standing battle over the ownership of a painting, according to The Art Newspaper, which first reported the deal.

The family portrait from 1830, “The Artist’s Children,” by 19th-century Romantic painter Wilhelm von Schadow, has been held by the city since 1959, when it acquired the canvas from a private collector. It was discovered when a researcher from the National Archives in Ottawa found it in a catalogue for a 1967 Düsseldorf Museum Kunstpalast exhibition, which listed the painting’s location as the Stadtmuseum. In recent years, the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, based at Montreal’s Concordia University, and the Dr. Max and Iris Stern Foundation sought to reclaim it, contending that Stern sold the painting under duress.

Founded in 2002, the Stern Project, headed by Dr. Clarence Epstein, is seeking to track down the 220 Old Masters and Northern European artworks that formed Lot 168 in the November 1937 sale at Cologne’s Mathias Lempertz auction house, known as Auktion 392. The paintings constituted the inventory of Düsseldorf’s Galerie Stern that Nazi officials forced him to liquidate at vastly discounted prices. As well as the 1937 auction canvases, the Stern Project is seeking to regain the paintings the art dealer left with Cologne shipping agent Josef Roggendorf, which the Gestapo confiscated in 1938, when Stern was already in Britain.

As part of the agreement, Düsseldorf handed over the portrait on condition that the municipality immediately buys it back. The terms of the settlement, including how much the city paid to re-acquire the artwork, were undisclosed.

In a press release, Düsseldorf mayor Stephan Keller said he was pleased with the “fair and just solution” between the parties and that von Schadow’s artwork “will remain in Düsseldorf.” He added that the painting will go on view at the city’s Museum Kunstpalast starting in August.

Stern took over Galerie Stern on Königsallee, which was founded by his father Julius, in 1934. By order of the Nazi government, the gallery was “aryanized” in 1937. Its inventory was sold at a forced auction for a fraction of its value.

Armed with a single suitcase stuffed with his remaining possessions, Stern fled to London that year. But, in May 1940, when Hitler’s invasion of Britain seemed imminent, Scotland Yard rounded up more than 2,000 German and Austrian citizens, mostly Jews, and incarcerated them as enemy aliens. Stern was sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man.

Hearing that some detainees were being sent to Canada to free up soldiers guarding British camps, Stern volunteered to join them. In North America, he believed, he would be well-positioned to help his mother and one sister in Britain, as well as his other sister and her family in France. But Canada, where he was greeted by bayonet-wielding soldiers, was even less hospitable than Britain. As Stern recalled years later, “We had to stage a hunger strike to convince the Canadian authorities that we were certainly not Nazis but, on the contrary, anti-Nazi.”

Held in a camp first near Fredericton, N.B., and later in Farnham, Que., he was put to work cutting down trees. Still, he remained optimistic, thankful for the food, shelter, clothing, exercise and 20 cents per day in pay. He also welcomed the opportunity to teach. Twelve years earlier, he had earned a doctorate in art history, which he put to use in classes for his fellow internees.

Stern’s talent and positive outlook caught the attention of William Birks, scion of the Montreal jewelry family, who headed the local branch of the National Committee on Refugees. Birks was openly critical of Canada’s restrictive and antisemitic immigration policy, which he called “narrow, bigoted and very short-sighted.” He believed the government should have sent trade missions to Europe to recruit men like Stern, “not wait for them to seek and beg us.” In 1941, he sponsored Stern’s release and move to Montreal.

Needing a job and hoping to assist in Canada’s war effort, Stern looked for work in an airplane factory. When he was not hired, he turned to the thing he understood best – art. “You’ll starve,” people told him, but he was certain he could be successful as a dealer in Montreal, because he had spotted a void he knew how to fill. Most of the city’s galleries were pushing stuffy 19th-century European genre and landscape paintings. No one was promoting or selling home-grown works because, as he later explained, “Canada didn’t have any confidence in its own artists.”

Stern pitched his vision to Rose Millman, who had just opened a space on rue Sainte-Catherine called the Dominion Gallery of Fine Art. Impressed by his assurance and expertise, she offered him a job for $12.50 a week. Stern said he wanted $17.50 and her promise to make him a full-fledged partner once he built up her business by conquering Canada, as he put it, “by selling Canadian artists.”

Within months, he was mounting exhibitions by contemporary Canadian painters. Over the years, they would include John Lyman, Goodridge Roberts, E. J. Hughes, Stanley Cosgrove, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and others whose names he would play a pivotal role in establishing. Stern secured their loyalty and best work by offering them monthly retainers for an agreed-upon number of works, already an established practice in France, Britain and the United States, but not yet in Canada.

Stern’s first major coup came in 1944, when he visited Emily Carr, then 72, at her home in Victoria. She showed him a room packed with 300 paintings. Struck speechless by her talent, he asked if he could mount an exhibition.

Laughing, she replied, “You will not sell a single painting.” The recipient of critical praise, Carr had yet to enjoy commercial success. “If you let me choose the paintings,” Stern replied, “I think I can make it a perfect success.”

In 1947, Stern and his wife Iris became the sole owners of the gallery.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Stern endeavoured to track down his confiscated paintings. His efforts were largely unsuccessful. He died childless in 1987, and left his estate to Concordia University and McGill University in Montreal, as well as Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The three schools later founded the Max Stern Art Restitution Project to reclaim the estimated 400 artworks lost during the 1930s. To date, the project has recovered 24 pieces, including paintings by Otto Erdmann, Nicolas Neufchatel and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

The case of von Schadow’s “The Artist’s Children” proved to be particularly complicated due to questions of provenance. When the city of Düsseldorf acquired the portrait in 1959, it was hung in the office of the city’s mayor. Decades later, when the Stern Foundation filed a claim for the artwork, it pointed out that, in 1937, Galerie Stern allowed for the piece to be reproduced in a book about paintings of children. But Düsseldorf city officials pushed back, arguing that the book did not prove the gallery owned the artwork at that point. There was no evidence of the painting being surrendered under Nazi persecution, the city contended.

In 2017, a scheduled exhibition in Düsseldorf about Stern and the Restitution Project was abruptly canceled due to local opposition, leading to intense controversy. The city’s stance apparently softened following the 2020 municipal elections.

“We couldn’t prove that it was not a restitution case, so we, as the city government, recommended to the assembly that it should be restituted,” Miriam Koch, the Düsseldorf city official in charge of culture, told The Art Newspaper. “The big parties in the city council supported restitution.”

According to Lynn H. Nicholas’ 1995 book The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, more than 140,000 pieces of artwork were looted under the Nazi regime. Most of them remain unclaimed.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

Format ImagePosted on May 26, 2023May 26, 2023Author Gil ZoharCategories Visual ArtsTags art, Düsseldorf, history, Holocaust, Max Stern Project, restitution, Wilhelm von Schadow
ABCs on visiting West Bank

ABCs on visiting West Bank

According to one tour guide, an hour spent walking around the Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem and talking to the residents there is the best way to gain an understanding of the complex conflict that has caused so much suffering. (photo from Gil Zohar)

The throngs of foreign journalists parachuted into Israel to cover the judicial reform debacle – and the many more correspondents based here on a semi-permanent basis – do a poor job explaining basic facts of life in the Jewish state. A case in point is the West Bank.

Most English-speaking tourists I encounter as a licensed tour guide/journalist are woefully ignorant about the legal status and history of the territory Israel captured from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the June 1967 Six Day War. The term West Bank is a neologism King Abdullah invented in 1948, when his Arab Legion crossed the Jordan River from the east bank to occupy the area known in Mandatory Palestine as Judea and Samaria.

Apart from those traveling with companies like Abraham Tours, which offers a dual narrative tour of Hebron, or Green Olive Tours, which also promotes travel to the Palestinian Authority provisional capital Ramallah and other key Palestinian cities, most tourists avoid the Area A cities of Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm, Qalqilya and Hebron. The latter city, divided into PA-ruled H1 and IDF-controlled H2, is the only city in the West Bank with both Jewish and Palestinian residents.

Car rental companies like Hertz or Shlomo Sixt don’t offer insurance to visit Area A. The exception is Middle East Car Rental, located in East Jerusalem’s Wadi Joz neighbourhood, which provides twin insurance policies for those PA-controlled Area A cities, Israel-ruled areas B and C, and the pre-1967 remainder of the country.

What, then, are areas A, B and C? And what should a tourist know about visiting them?

First, the West Bank is safe for tourists – mostly. On March 18, two German nationals were surrounded by angry youths in Nablus, who slashed the tires of the tourists’ Israeli rental car. Notwithstanding that the two knew their car insurance was void in Area A, the pair – who were mistaken for Jewish settlers – drove to the city to enjoy Turkish coffee and the local goat cheese and rosewater pastry delicacy called knafeh nablusiyya. They were rescued by an Arab-Israeli who himself was shopping in Nablus in violation of the Israeli law barring its citizens from visiting Area A.

Looming trilingual signs painted red warn Israelis that entering Area A is dangerous. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of Israelis from Nazareth and elsewhere in the Galilee routinely shop in Jenin, where prices for food and vegetables are strikingly lower than in Israel, and where the 17% value-added tax is not paid.

Similarly, some Jerusalem Israelis illegally buy granite and marble products and furniture from factories in nearby Bethlehem, thus saving the 17% VAT. Trucks with yellow Israel licence plates, rather than the green and white ones used in the PA, routinely pass through the Israel Defence Forces roadblocks that ring the West Bank. These soldiers are not customs officers, so they don’t inspect waybills from those trucks, whose bilingual drivers have tuned their radio to Hebrew stations to blend in should they be stopped.

Apart from the aforementioned signs, nothing prevents anyone from driving into Area A. Under the bilateral Oslo Accords signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in Washington, D.C., in 1993, Israel divided the West Bank into Areas A, B and C, and withdrew from the first. Area A is mostly composed of non-contiguous municipalities and villages, and Israel’s roads and bypass highways gerrymander around Area A cities.

photo - Despite trilingual signs painted red, warning Israeli citizens that entering Palestinian Authority-controlled Area A is dangerous, hundreds of thousands of Israelis routinely travel to Area A cities
Despite trilingual signs painted red, warning Israeli citizens that entering Palestinian Authority-controlled Area A is dangerous, hundreds of thousands of Israelis routinely travel to Area A cities. (photo from Gil Zohar)

Areas B and C are under the control of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), a unit in Israel’s Ministry of Defence that coordinates civilian issues between the Israeli government, the IDF, international aid and nongovernmental organizations, diplomats, and the PA. Following the Oslo Accords, COGAT replaced the defunct Civil Administration, which had governed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between 1981 and 1994. (Israel unilaterally quit Gaza in 2005.)

Returning from Area A to Israel can be trickier. The main difficulty is not the 800-kilometre-long incomplete wall and fence that partially encircles the West Bank. For example, while Palestinians with the correct documents and biometric ID card are required to pass through the Qalandiya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, five kilometres to the east is the Hizma checkpoint used by Israelis living in the West Bank. Under normal security procedures, cars with yellow licence plates simply drive past the IDF troops. Bored-looking soldiers wave drivers through. Mostly, cars just slow down for perfunctory profiling.

But how does a scofflaw who scarfed hummus at Bandali in Ramallah’s Lower City get back to Jerusalem? Ditto for Rukab’s Ice Cream in the city centre, which has been dishing up its unique, stretchy gelato since 1941? Or the Vanilla café, renowned for its divine cakes? Having had a culinary respite from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one hails a cab and asks to be taken to the Rami Levy supermarket in Geva Benyamin, east of Ramallah. The driver – wink, wink – will drop you off on Route 60 at a slight distance from the settlement’s gate, which is guarded by an armed security officer. Should the guard ask you where you are coming from, the response “From Route 60” will be sufficiently vague that he will allow you past the barrier. There, at the bus stop, one waits for the bulletproof bus that drives back to Jerusalem through Hizma. No ID documents are checked.

Similarly, no documents are required for the 25-minute ride on Bus 231 from Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate Bus Station to central Bethlehem via Beit Jala. Like traveling from Ramallah back to Jerusalem, the return from Bethlehem requires some fudging of the truth. Bus passengers disembark at the checkpoint on Route 60 between Beit Jala and Jerusalem. Some Israeli citizens holding a foreign passport pretend to be tourists. When asked for the visa they received at Ben-Gurion Airport (which is issued on a sheet of paper rather than stamped in one’s passport), they play the “stupid card,” claiming they don’t have it. The guards may scowl but routinely let the faux-tourists re-board the bus rather than create ill-will.

Israel’s porous approach to security similarly applies on the West Bank’s highways. Today, all the permanent army roadblocks that once cut up the West Bank have been removed, allowing freedom of movement. “Z,” an intrepid tour guide who routinely takes tourists to all three sectors in the West Bank, points out where the decommissioned IDF posts once stood.

Jeff L., a lawyer from Los Angeles who volunteered with the Israeli army’s Sar-El program, recently went with Z on a day-long tour across the northern West Bank, including Nabi Musa (a shrine Muslims revere as the mausoleum of Moses), the oasis of ‘Ain Mabu’a, the all-Christian village of Taybe (with its renowned brewery), the all-Muslim village of Turmus Ayya, and the model city of Rawabi. Rawabi and Taybe are in Area A.

Stuck outside Ramallah in an L.A.-style traffic jam in the late afternoon, the two abandoned their plan to pose for a selfie outside Yasser Arafat’s tomb in the Muqata government compound.

In an email, Jeff wrote, “It was an awesome day. I will do my best to become an ambassador for peace.

“My day in the West Bank began at Wadi Qelt / Nahal Prat. The beautiful nature reserve was full of blooming wildflowers. Muslim women and their families from Hebron were enjoying the rushing water and lush surroundings. We were greeted warmly by all with big smiles.

“Visiting Taybe, Tarmus Ayya and Rawabi, again, everywhere we went we were warmly greeted. Fortunately, Z speaks Arabic and was able to communicate with everyone we met. My impression of the day in the West Bank was one filled with hope for the future.

“There was a genuine interest in everyone we met to talk and to make us feel welcome.

“All the people we met who live in the West Bank want the same peace and prosperity for their families as we [Jews] do.”

Z – who has a permit from the Israel Ministry of Tourism to enter Bethlehem and Jericho – has never encountered a problem in Area A or elsewhere in the West Bank. During the pandemic, he was stopped by a PA policeman en route to the Mar Saba monastery east of Bethlehem. The officer, who was carrying an AK-47, didn’t have an issue with a car full of tourists in a vehicle with yellow licence plates driving in Area A, but instructed them to return to Jerusalem because of the threat of COVID.

Should tourists to Israel also visit the West Bank and Area A?

Z insists that an hour spent walking around the Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem and talking to the residents there is the best way to gain an understanding of the complex conflict that has caused so much suffering. Moreover, tourist sites like Hisham’s Palace in Jericho or Jacob’s Well in Nablus, where Jesus is said to have chatted with a Samaritan woman, are all exceedingly interesting and photogenic. But Z recommends going with a seasoned tour guide, lest you end up like the two German tourists who were attacked going to Nablus’s al-Aqsa pastry shop.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

Format ImagePosted on April 14, 2023April 12, 2023Author Gil ZoharCategories IsraelTags Israel, Palestine, tourism, West Bank
National library opens soon

National library opens soon

The National Library of Israel’s new building was designed by the Basel architect firm Herzog & de Meuron. (photo ©Herzog & de Meuron)

Come March, and in advance of Israel’s 75th Independence Day, the People of the Book will have an iconic shrine worthy of their literary legacy, promises Oren Weinberg, the chief executive officer of the National Library of Israel, making him the chief librarian of the Jewish people.

All of the NLI’s collection of more than 6,000,000 rare volumes, manuscripts, incunabula, books and miscellaneous printed material has been transferred from the current building on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Givat Ram campus. Their new home, 500 metres distant, is the 45,000-square-metre venue located at the northwest corner of Ruppin Road and Kaplan Boulevard in the Ben-Gurion government precinct, between the Knesset and the Israel Museum.

“Construction of the new National Library of Israel complex is nearing completion,” Weinberg told a recent press conference. “Over the past year, the new building has emerged as a stunning addition to the Jerusalem cityscape, already recognized as a major Jerusalem landmark.

“The building reflects the library’s transformative renewal from the secluded environment of a university campus to a stunning physical manifestation of our central value: opening access to the National Library of Israel’s treasures to broad and diverse audiences from Israel and around the world.”

Weinberg told a recent explanatory session for the NLI’s core group of readers and researchers that, while boxing, moving and unpacking 33,000 books daily is a daunting logistical challenge, he and his team are proud they were able to do so without disrupting service to the institution’s many thousands of daily readers. The transfer of the books was finished in December. Now, a high-tech array is protecting the invaluable collection from fire, water damage and theft. Apart from reference material, most of the books are housed in the four basement levels. The six floors above ground serve the public.

With palpable excitement, Weinberg displayed photos of the construction progress of his $200 million baby, now in its final phase, funded by the Rothschild family’s Yad Hanadiv and the Gottesman Fund of New York.

The NLI was designed by the Basel architect firm Herzog & de Meuron. If that name is familiar, it’s because the Swiss architects are renowned for their bird nest stadium that graced Beijing’s 2008 Olympics. Their Jerusalem library is certain to be an equally recognizable instant landmark. Located on an irregular plot, the architects designed a modern interpretation of a triangular flatiron building surrounded by a lush garden.

Like its predecessor, which opened in 1960 and is named after its patron, Lady Davis of Montreal, the new building will be primarily a close-stack facility. It, too, will have a spiral staircase. But the comparison ends there. With a glass oculus – calling it a skylight would be too modest – and a swooping roof that would be a skateboarder’s delight, the distinctive library will be incomparably more multi-purpose than the current facility. Besides the greatly expanded and dramatic three-level reading room, it will encompass an auditorium, display areas, lockers, commercial space, a restaurant, synagogue and underground parking. In the future, it will be served by a nearby light rail station.

The multi-purpose research centre and venue for cultural and educational activities will also be a place to drink coffee and socialize, Weinberg said.

photo - The National Library of Israel’s reading “room” has three levels
The National Library of Israel’s reading “room” has three levels. (photo ©Herzog & de Meuron)

Founded in 1892, the NLI today is the repository of the world’s largest collection of Judaica and Hebraica. It collects everything related to the state of Israel, and contextualizes that core with general books on the humanities, Islam, the Middle East, religion and antisemitica.

Among its rare treasures are the Damascus Crown, a 13th-century Hebrew Bible smuggled out of Syria 29 years ago in a Mossad operation so hush-hush that the manuscript’s existence in Israel was kept secret for decades. Another priceless volume is a commentary on the Mishnah handwritten by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides.

Sir Isaac Newton’s manuscripts about theology and the apocalypse, including his notations in cursive English and Hebrew, have a home at the NLI. Newton predicted the end of the world will come in 2060. That should leave readers at least 37 years to savour the new building.

More recent is Czech novelist Franz Kafka’s notebook, wherein he recorded Hebrew words and their German meaning in advance of his unfulfilled dream of settling in Jerusalem.

The NLI continues with its mission of collecting, preserving and providing access to the cultural treasures of the state of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. For example, in a complex deal in 2017, the library acquired 80% of the 10,000-volume Valmadonna Trust Library – the largest private collection of Hebrew books and manuscripts in the world. Included were a rare 1491 Chumash (Torah in book-bound form) from Lisbon and one of only two surviving copies of a 1556 Passover Haggadah from Prague, a siddur (prayer book) from Venice dated 1459 written on klaf (parchment) and a Hebrew Bible handwritten in England in 1189 – the only dated Hebrew text before the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 by King Edward I.

In keeping with NLI policy, the price paid for the Valmadonna Trust Library collection was not released. Selections from it will be on view to the public in March, when the new NLI opens.

Like books, space can also be a precious commodity. With desks for only 600 readers, the Givat Ram structure is today obsolete. The new building will have more than double that number. Each reader will enjoy a 1.25-metre-long desk and each space will be equipped with its own reading lamp.

While computers will be readily available both at desks and to borrow – during a recent visit to the Lady Davis building, I had to scavenge a mouse to access the catalogue – it is anticipated that most readers will be bringing their own notebooks, said Weinberg. That fact indicates the NLI’s forward-looking vision whereby ever more materials will be digitized as the preservation of knowledge evolves.

What of Mordecai Ardon’s triptych depicting the Prophet Isaiah’s vision of messianic peace, which was installed in 1984 opposite the old building’s main stairwell? The stained glass vitrine, like the old building, will be in limbo – an empty white elephant waiting to be repurposed.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

Problematic provenance

Gish Amit’s 2014 book Ex-Libris: Chronicles of Theft, Preservation and Appropriating at the Jewish National Library, published by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, tells the extraordinary story of how three collections came to the NLI.

Following the Second World War, the Diaspora Treasures project brought to Jerusalem hundreds of thousands of books once owned by now-murdered Jews whose belongings had been looted by the Nazis.

During Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence, 30,000 Arabic-language books that were owned by Palestinian refugees were collected. They are cataloged “A.P.” – abandoned property – and await a peace treaty so that they may be turned over to the future National Library of Palestine.

Lastly, there was the gathering of books and manuscripts from the 49,000 Yemenite Jews who were rescued and brought to the nascent state in 1949 and 1950 in Operation On Wings of Eagles. Their property was systematically looted as part of Israel’s claim to ownership of the country’s Jewish past, as well as its pre-Zionist past. Amit documents that only a small number of those books were ever returned to their rightful owners.

– GZ

Remembering Lady Davis

Noted Jewish Canadian philanthropist Henriette Marie Meyer (1872-1963) was born in San Francisco. She moved to Montreal in 1898 to marry businessman and philanthropist Mortimer Davis, and became known as Lady Davis after her husband was knighted by King George V in 1917.

The couple divorced in 1924 and Lady Davis moved to Paris, where she continued her philanthropic activities, including founding a resort for children with disabilities, called the Colonie de vacance. For her actions, she was made an officer of the Legion d’honneur.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Davis fled to Montreal, where she donated a Spitfire plane to the Royal Air Force and provided lodging for RAF pilots. For her contributions, she was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

In 1945, she founded the Lady Davis Fund, which helped bring Holocaust survivors to Canada. She is best known in Canada for the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital.

In addition to the National Library of Israel, she also donated funds to build the Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Centre at the Technion, and the Lady Davis Carmel Medical Centre, both in Haifa.

– GZ

Format ImagePosted on January 13, 2023January 11, 2023Author Gil ZoharCategories IsraelTags development, Herzog & de Meuron, libraries, National Library of Israel, Oren Weinberg
Mausoleum work to resume

Mausoleum work to resume

The construction site of the mausoleum for Bahá’í leader ‘Abdu’l Bahá, east of Haifa Bay, Israel. (photo by Gil Zohar)

Construction of Vancouver-based architect Hossein Amanat’s mausoleum for Bahá’í leader ‘Abdu’l Bahá (1844-1921) was set back when a fire on April 8 caused significant damage to the main building at the holy site just east of Haifa Bay, Israel.

The Iranian-Canadian architect’s design features a sloping geometric meditation garden rising in a sunburst pattern to form a dome covering the tomb. Amanat’s neoclassical Persian structure extends the Ridván Garden, which was a favourite oasis where ‘Abdu’l Bahá’s father, Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892) – the founder of the Bahá’í faith – retreated after he was released from Acre Prison in 1877. The modest house in which he stayed during his visits there has been restored. After his father’s death, the Iran-born ‘Abdu’l Bahá’ popularized the new religion outside the Middle East in a series of visits to Montreal, and cities in the United States and Europe.

Amanat, 80, fled his native Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and settled in Canada. He is best known for his Shahyad Freedom Tower in central Tehran, which was dedicated in 1972 to honour the Pahlavi dynasty. Following Iran’s revolution, the monumental 45-metre-high archway was renamed the Azadi Tower, after the square in which it stands.

Amanat also designed a series of Bahá’í administrative buildings on Mount Carmel, including the Seat of the Universal House of Justice, the Centre for the Study of the Sacred Texts, and the Centre for the International Counselors.

photo - Architect Hossein Amanat is best known for his Shahyad Freedom Tower in Tehran, Iran, which is now known as the Azadi Tower
Architect Hossein Amanat is best known for his Shahyad Freedom Tower in Tehran, Iran, which is now known as the Azadi Tower. (photo from flickr)

The April 8 blaze destroyed “several months of work” on the 2,900-square-metre circular platform and piazza, the Universal House of Justice (the governing council of the Bahá’í faith) said in an April 14 statement. Clouds of smoke billowed from the mausoleum, prompting firefighters to evacuate the nearby suburbs of Giv’at Hatmarim and Afgad.

The fire broke out when windblown sparks from welding on the dome ignited scaffolding and plastic forms being used to mold poured concrete, Ynet reported. The completed concrete walls and structures were undamaged, and the 250 million shekel ($77 million US) project – announced in 2019 – is insured, said the Universal House of Justice. The shrine and meditation garden are being paid for by donations from Bahá’í faith’s five million members around the world.

Bahá’í media representative Sama Sabet said construction “will resume soon.” She didn’t estimate the cost of the damage.

For the last century, ‘Abdu’l Bahá has been temporarily entombed in Haifa’s shrine of Siyyid ‘Alí-Muhammad Shírází (1819-1850), popularly known as the Báb (“Gate” in Arabic). Shírází was executed in Tabriz for apostasy after claiming to be the deputy of the promised Twelver Mahdi, or al-Qa’im. According to legend, the firing squad’s initial barrage of bullets failed to hit him, and a second team of shooters was brought in. As a Shiite heretic, his body was fed to dogs. It was rescued and hidden by believers.

In 1908, all Ottoman political and religious prisoners were freed by the Young Turk revolution. Newly released, ‘Abdu’l Bahá smuggled the Báb’s remains to Ottoman Palestine and built his iconic shrine midway up Mount Carmel, near where he himself was living. Its dome, visible from the Haifa harbour along the axis of the German Colony, was gilded in 1953.

screenshot - An aerial view of the Bahá’í shrine, designed by Vancouver-based architect Hossein Amanat, which caught fire on April 8
An aerial view of the Bahá’í shrine, designed by Vancouver-based architect Hossein Amanat, which caught fire on April 8. (screenshot from YouTube)

The mausoleum and garden south of the Tel Akko archeological mound will be one of seven Bahá’í holy sites, ornamental meditation gardens and administrative complexes in a western Galilee pilgrimage route stretching from Mazra’a near Nahariya south through Acre (Akko in Hebrew and Akka in Arabic) to Mount Carmel in Haifa. The serene mausoleums of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh – together with their adjoining gardens, characterized by their sacred geometry and immaculate landscaping – were registered on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2008.

The Bahá’í faith believes in progressive revelation – that God has revealed himself in a series of manifestations, including Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and, most recently, Bahá’u’lláh.

In 1863, Bahá’u’lláh fulfilled the Báb’s prophecies by proclaiming the Bahá’í faith. The new creed eventually evolved into a global religion. Exiled from Persia to Ottoman Baghdad and then the imperial capital Constantinople (today Istanbul) in 1868, Bahá’u’lláh was imprisoned in Acre’s Turkish citadel in remote Palestine. For Israelis, the notorious jail and its gallows are best known for the prison breakout on May 4, 1947, near the end of the British Mandate of Palestine, in which gunmen from the Irgun underground freed 27 incarcerated freedom fighters.

After being released from Acre Prison, Bahá’u’lláh moved six kilometres north to Mazra’a, also called Mazra’ih. Two years later, he settled in the Mansion of Bahjí (meaning “delight”) in Acre. That palatial home was built in 1821 by ‘Abdu’lláh Páshá, then the Ottoman governor of Acre. Bahá’u’lláh remained there until his death in 1892.

In addition to the mausoleums of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh, Bahá’í pilgrimage sites in Haifa and the western Galilee on UNESCO’s World Heritage List include the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh and adjoining Mansion of Bahjí and Bahjí Gardens in Acre; the Shrine of the Báb; the 19 terraces of the Bahá’í Gardens and Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa; and the House of ‘Abbud in the Old City of Acre, where the Bahá’u’lláh spent time after being released from prison.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

Format ImagePosted on May 6, 2022May 4, 2022Author Gil ZoharCategories IsraelTags architecture, Bahá’í, development, history, Hossein Amanat, Israel, religion, ‘Abdu’l Bahá
Tour guides struggle

Tour guides struggle

Unemployed tour guide Hannah Rosenberg is now serving up hot dogs for about $12.50 Cdn an hour. (photo by Gil Zohar)

For Anglo tour guides who have been unemployed since March 2020, the Israeli government’s recent decision to impose a seven-day quarantine requirement for visitors from the United States because of the coronavirus – that resulted in the cancellation at the beginning of August of 42 10-day Birthright trips – was another blow to a hard-hit industry.

Compounding the gloom caused by the week-long isolation order are two other decisions. The U.S. Centres for Disease Control recently warned against travel to Israel due to the rise in cases of the coronavirus as the Jewish state experiences another wave of COVID-19 infections and death. And, at the end of June, Bituach Leumi (Israel’s social service agency) ended payments to unemployed guides under the age of 60.

Hannah Rosenberg, 30, who completed a two-year certification course at the Hebrew University, leading to a series of Ministry of Tourism licensing exams in February 2020, is currently grilling hot dogs at Zalman’s in downtown Jerusalem for NIS 32 (about $12.50 Cdn) an hour. She remembers how the good times suddenly ended.

“March 18 (2020) was my last tour,” she recalled. She was two days into a seven-day tour with an American family visiting Jerusalem and the Galilee when a phone call from the U.S. State Department cautioned the family to leave immediately, lest they get stuck without a flight out. “It was a lie,” said Rosenberg, a native of Jupiter, Fla., the first of many she has heard from government officials.

“I applied to Bituach Leumi,” she said, “and was denied because I had not been working for the previous six months, during which I was studying for the tour guide exam.”

An ever-resourceful veteran of an Israel Defence Forces combat intelligence unit, Rosenberg kept applying and, after nearly a year, was given NIS 1,200 ($475 Cdn) monthly beginning in February. That payment ended in June.

“My parents are helping,” she said. “It’s the first time since I was a kid. It’s a hard thing to ask.”

Notwithstanding the hardship, Rosenberg has no plans to leave Israel. “I’m here for good,” she said, sharing that she still plans to pursue her dream to become an archeologist.

Mark Sugarman, 68, who made aliyah from Boston in 1971 and became a licensed guide in 1992, has had a relatively easier time. He’s simply become retired – but not by choice. His last tour was in March 2020, he said.

“We finished the tour, the typical 10-day Christian pilgrimage tour of the holy places. It was grueling. It was like being in the army and doing miluim (reserve duty). I was exhausted…. I went into a voluntary two-week quarantine. I didn’t know if I was infected and I didn’t want to infect anyone close to me…. By the time I came out of quarantine, we were in the first lockdown. I was stuck at home with my wife and dog in Talpiot. I was knackered,” he said, using a word he learned from his British clients.

“I applied for everything. A month later, I turned 67, so I officially reached the age of retirement and I got Bituach Leumi. I couldn’t get unemployment … because I took old-age pension, I wasn’t eligible. Whatever I get, I’m grateful.”

He added, “When I was working, I saved money. The last four years before COVID was a fat period. Now, it’s lean. I’ve been in the business for close to 30 years. I remember the Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2004, and that was a harder period than now. Everyone had to scramble at the time. I know how hard it is for my colleagues who have young families.”

Sugarman would like to go back to the United States for the unveiling of his mother’s headstone in November, but it’s problematic at this time.

“It’s been hard,” he said. “My mother’s funeral was on Zoom. Since the pandemic started, I [have] lost three family members and two friends. We were cut off from each other physically. People dying were isolated from their loved ones. Together with the loss of income, that’s been the hardest part.”

Daniel Gutman, 41, has worked as a tour guide since 2009. The Dallas, Tex., native remains philosophical about the situation. “I’ve had a little bit of work here and there, with some people visiting, family and seminaries and yeshivas, which needed two to four guides per capsule. That helped a little but, basically, I haven’t worked in the last 18 months.

Since Bituach Leumi stopped its payments at the end of June, Gutman said it has been challenging. “The government bailed us out for 18 months after they put me out of work. It was enough to survive. Now I’m back to March 2020, to square one, figuring out what I’m going to do. I’m dipping into my savings.”

On the positive said, he said, “Although I’ve taken a hit financially, I’ve had an 18-month sabbatical to be with my family.” But, he added, “I’m looking forward to getting back to showing people the country I love.”

Even during times of war and terrorism, tourists used to arrive, Gutman said. But not now. “Is there [national] value in tourism?” he asked. “If so, the government needs to support tour guides. Money has gone to bail out tour operators and hotels.”

Gutman loves his career and said he has no plans to retrain. “I am optimistic this will end.”

Chicago-born Ami Braun, 43, another veteran guide, also has scrambled to survive since benefits ended in June. He recently sent an email promoting online sales of the Four Species (etrog, palm, myrtle and willow) for the upcoming holiday of Sukkot. And he has conducted some virtual tours for the Beit Avi Chai community centre. “I have been a licensed guide for 14 years. This is my passion. I am doing whatever I can to stay afloat,” he said.

Braun has returned to guiding part-time at the Kotel Tunnels. “The pay is like a student job,” he noted. “It’s not something to live off of.”

In addition to being a writer, I’ve been a licensed guide for more than a decade. For the longest time after March 2020, I dreamed, every night, about guiding. It was a great adventure showing tourists my country, the West Bank, Jordan and Egypt, and I touched the hearts of a lot of people who fell in love with Israel. But those days are gone. I’ve been able to devote my time to editing a book about Hebron’s Jewish community, and to researching a study about Nazi collaborator Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who spent the years 1941 to 1945 living in Berlin and aiding the Third Reich. I’ve had clients send me to Portugal and to Germany, but now travel has all but ended. Every summer since 2005 my wife and I have visited family in Canada. This year was the first time we haven’t gone. We’ve cut back on all expenses, including hosting Shabbat guests.

Still, I consider myself fortunate. I have my good health, interesting research, food in the fridge, and a wonderful wife and friends. Everything else doesn’t matter.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

Format ImagePosted on August 27, 2021August 25, 2021Author Gil ZoharCategories TravelTags Ami Braun, Bituach Leumi, coronavirus, COVID-19, Daniel Gutman, economy, Hannah Rosenberg, Israel, Mark Sugarman, tour guides, tourism, unemployment
Seeking siddur’s return

Seeking siddur’s return

Afghanistan is seeking to repatriate a 1,200-year-old siddur, which is currently housed at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. (photo from Museum of the Bible)

The National Museum of Afghanistan, established in 1919 at the former Bagh-i-Bala royal palace overlooking Kabul, reflects both the multifaith heritage and tortured history of the Central Asian country that once dominated the Silk Road linking Europe and East Asia.

Following the outbreak of Afghanistan’s civil war in 1992, the museum was repeatedly shelled. It suffered heavy damage in a May 12, 1993, rocket strike. The combination of Taliban mortars and looters resulted in the loss of 70% of the 100,000 prehistoric, Hellenistic, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Islamic and Jewish objects once in its collection. Those pilfered artifacts flooded antiquities markets in London, Paris, New York and elsewhere. Now, the pro-Western regime of President Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai – formerly an anthropology professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. – wants its cultural legacy returned. Among the treasures it is seeking to repatriate is a 1,200-year-old siddur (prayer book) – the world’s oldest Hebrew manuscript after the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“It is our responsibility to get back our ancient treasures,” said Abdul Manan Shiway e-Sharq – the country’s deputy minister for information and publications in the Ministry of Information and Culture – in the first-ever on-the-record interview between an Afghani official and an Israeli journalist.

Shiway e-Sharq said photos of the ancient siddur in Kabul’s National Museum, dating from 1998, contradict the ownership documents provided by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The MotB says it bought the siddur in 2013 from antiquities dealers in the United Kingdom who provided provenance documents showing the manuscript had been in Britain since the 1950s. The MotB paid $2.5 million for the prayer book. Though Shiway e-Sharq appraised the unique volume at $30 million for insurance purposes, it truly is priceless.

The prayer book may have belonged to the Radhanites, a little-known group of medieval merchants, some Jewish, who traded along the Silk Road linking Christian Europe, the Islamic world, China and India during the early Middle Ages. The Radhanites’ entrepôts and Afghanistan’s early Jewish community were likely destroyed in the 12th and 13th centuries, as the Mongol Empire grew from the steppes of Mongolia to extend from Europe to China.

Responding to a query, MotB’s chief curator Jeff Kloha said the museum will share results of an investigation when completed.

“As noted on the museum’s provenance research web page, museum staff continues to work with external scholars and experts to research this item’s historical and religious significance, as well the item’s history in (apparently) Afghanistan and later Israel and the United States,” Kloha said. “That research is progressing and nearing completion.”

The allegation that the MotB’s rare Afghan Hebrew prayer book is another ancient Near Eastern treasure that was smuggled out of its country of origin is the latest in a series of scandals about looted and forged antiquities that has rocked the Museum of the Bible since its 2017 opening.

The MotB recently shipped 8,000 clay tablets back to Baghdad that may have been taken from the Iraq Museum in 2003, when looters overran it during the American invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. At the end of January 2021, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security returned 5,500 papyrus fragments from the MotB with “insufficient” provenance to Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, concluding Cairo’s efforts since 2016 to regain its antiquities. And, the museum has acknowledged that all of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments it acquired are forgeries.

MotB founder Steve Green, an evangelical Christian whose family owns the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, and chief curator Kloha have worked to tighten the museum’s acquisition policies after the U.S. government reached a settlement with Hobby Lobby in 2017 requiring the chain store to pay a $3 million fine for illegally importing ancient artifacts.

Leon Hill, the in-house counsel for Transparent Business Solutions, a Dutch company that specializes in corporate integrity management, is keen to see a resolution to the dispute over the ancient siddur. He is dismissive of Green’s explanation that he and Kloha are novices in the museum business and the acquisition of artifacts. “They can’t continue to say that. They’re no longer new. They have a duty to know better. They have a duty to the history and heritage of the artifacts they purport to protect.”

He accused the MotB of “cultural imperialism.” He said, “We hope that we won’t need to be hired by the Afghan government, and that the Museum of the Bible will do the right thing in the right way quickly.”

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

Format ImagePosted on April 23, 2021April 22, 2021Author Gil ZoharCategories WorldTags Abdul Manan Shiway e-Sharq, Afghanistan, history, Jeff Kloha, Kabul, law, Museum of the Bible, religion, siddur
Mufti house to be shul

Mufti house to be shul

Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s mansion turned into the Shepherd Hotel for a period of time. (photo from Daniel Luria)

Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and 1930s, who spent much of the Second World War in Berlin as a Nazi collaborator and war criminal, must be spinning in his grave in Beirut. The landmark mansion he built 88 years ago in affluent Sheikh Jarrah, between the Old City and Mount Scopus, is slated to become a synagogue in a future 56-apartment Jewish neighbourhood in east Jerusalem.

The 500-square-metre manor house, called Qasr al-Mufti (the Mufti’s Palace) in Arabic, today stands derelict at the centre of a largely completed 28-apartment complex which itself lacks an occupancy permit. The reason the new neighbourhood is not being finished – and indeed has not been marketed in the 10 years since demolition and construction began – is that the developers have applied to rezone the 5.2-dunam site to double the number of units to 56, according to Daniel Luria, a spokesman for Ateret Cohanim, which backs the housing project.

Luria was unclear when the rezoning application would be approved. The historic house at the core of the site will be preserved and repurposed for communal needs, including a synagogue and perhaps a daycare centre, he said.

“There is a beautiful poetic justice when you see the house of Hajj Amin al-Husseini crumbling down,” said Luria.

Though al-Husseini built the mansion, he never lived in it. Following the outbreak in 1936 of the Arab Revolt against the British Mandate government, the mufti became a fugitive, hiding in the Old City’s Haram ash-Sharif. When the British attempted to arrest him in 1937, he fled Palestine and the British made do with confiscating his property. The al-Husseini clan owned numerous properties in Jerusalem, among them the Palace Hotel (today the Waldorf Astoria), the Orient House and the villa subsequently turned into the Shepherd Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah on a plot of land known as Karam al-Mufti (the Mufti’s Vineyard), named for al-Husseini.

Among those who did occupy the mansion was his secretary George Antonius (1891-1942), who wrote The Arab Awakening while living there, in 1938. Antonius’s widow, Katy, continued living in the building, which functioned as a salon where wealthy Palestinian Arabs and British officials socialized. (The city’s British sports club had a “No Natives” policy.)

At one of her elegant soirées in 1946, she met Sir Evelyn Barker. The much-decorated general was commanding officer of the British forces in Palestine and Trans-Jordan from 1946 to 1947. The two carried on an affair and exchanged Judeophobic love letters. In April 1947, he wrote her about Jews: “Yes, I loathe the lot – whether they be Zionists or not. Why should we be afraid of saying we hate them. It’s time this damned race knew what we think of them – loathsome people.”

photo - Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s mansion in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood circa 1938
Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s mansion in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood circa 1938. (photo from Daniel Luria)

On April 13, 1948, both Scottish Highlanders garrisoned at the mansion and other British troops stationed at the nearby Police Academy failed to intervene for eight hours when a convoy of doctors and nurses headed to Hadassah Hospital came under fire from Arab guerillas. Seventy-eight Jews, many doctors and nurses, died in the massacre.

Following the War of Independence, the al-Husseini mansion became the Shepherd Hotel in the now-divided and impoverished city. It was eclipsed by the Hotel Jerusalem Intercontinental, today called the Seven Arches, which opened on the Mount of Olives in 1964. After the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel conquered and annexed east Jerusalem, the hotel was taken over by the custodian of absentee property.

In 1985, it was sold to C and M Properties Ltd., owned by Florida bingo hall billionaire Irving Moskowitz (1928-2016), the benefactor of right-wing Israeli settler groups intent on housing Jews in the eastern side of the now united city. Following the zoning of Plan 2591, a request was made on Nov. 6, 2008, to permit the company to build two new residential blocks, including 28 apartments on top of an underground parking lot. In January 2011, the four-storey Shepherd Hotel annex – added on to the mufti’s original mansion – was demolished to make way for the future housing.

Rather than attempt to rezone the site – which adjoins the British consulate – for a higher density at the beginning of the redevelopment process, it was decided to build what was legally permitted and later apply to amend the zoning, Luria explained.

“Ateret Cohanim is not involved in the building project but we have an interest in strengthening Jewish roots in and around the Old City,” he said.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

Format ImagePosted on March 5, 2021March 4, 2021Author Gil ZoharCategories IsraelTags antisemitism, development, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Holocaust, Israel, Jerusalem

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