Jerusalem – Jewish Independent

Good Abroad: Promoting pluralism in Israel

Then-mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat and Nomi Levin Yeshua at the Jerusalem Foundation of Canada gala in Toronto in 2014. (photo from Nomi Levin Yeshua)

This article is the first in an occasional series about people with British Columbian roots having positive impacts in Israel and elsewhere.

When Nomi Levin Yeshua went to Israel in 1990, she wasn’t committed to staying there. Almost three decades later, the Vancouver-born and -raised woman can look back on a career that has impacted the face of Jerusalem and Israel.

Thanks to a chance meeting over Shabbat lunch with her grandmother’s former neighbour’s sister – “You know Israel,” she said, laughing – Yeshua had barely arrived in Israel when she got a job as assistant to the assistant to Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s mayor – but the job was more than that.

Shula Eisner, Yeshua’s new boss, had been working for Kollek since 1965, just before he began his 28-year run as mayor. Kollek was chairman of the Israel Museum and, before that, had served 11 years as director general of the prime minister’s office under David Ben-Gurion. In that role, Kollek effectively created almost all of the government agencies in the new state.

“One of the things he believed was that there had to be a national museum,” Yeshua told the Independent recently while in Vancouver for a milestone birthday of her mother, Shanie Levin. “He went around raising money to start the Israel Museum. He had an office there and [Eisner] was originally hired there to work with him with all the foreign donors. Then he was elected mayor and he kept to the Israel Museum office.”

In 1966, Kollek founded the Jerusalem Foundation, where Yeshua now works.

“That was his way of creating a forum for supporters of Jerusalem around the world, to be part of creating a new vision for Jerusalem. Then, a year after that, with the Six Day War and the reunification of the city, suddenly everything was just multiplied,” she said.

Yeshua acknowledged that Kollek’s multiple roles as mayor, head of the national museum and leader of a major foundation would probably not be sustainable today, but that was a different time.

“For him, it was all fluid,” she said.

To accommodate his different hats in the era before email or even fax machines, there was a driver who shuffled between offices, taking papers back and forth.

When Eisner moved over to another foundation, she handed her baton to Yeshua, who worked with Kollek through his last years as mayor and continued until a few months before he passed away, in 2007. She continues to run all donor relations for the Jerusalem Foundation and she personally handles Canadian fundraising for the organization.

The Jerusalem Foundation was started by Kollek because he saw that Jerusalem was a very poor city.

“A lot of religious institutions that don’t pay taxes at all are in Jerusalem, so he knew that it was always going to be a challenge for the city to have a balanced budget, to expand the city, to develop the city, to provide for the citizens of the city, so he knew that he was going to need to raise money,” she said.

Kollek pioneered a fundraising model that is now almost universal across Israeli and Jewish philanthropy.

“He connected every donor to a specific project and they knew that their money went to that project and they could come – and now their grandchildren come – and see those projects. To this day, they can still track the money. The Jerusalem Foundation was really at the forefront of that movement of changing the way people were giving to Israel. Now, it’s taken for granted, but it wasn’t back in the late ’60s and early ’70s at all. That was Teddy,” she said. “He wanted people to feel personally connected to the city, to the project, to the place.”

The foundation emphasizes “shared living” and is now focused on a vision for 2030.

“This is a city that is completely about how to exist together in this space that we share. It’s not just Arabs and Jews. It’s also secular and religious, it’s poor and rich, it’s all kinds of divisions that exist in the city,” she said. “But how do we share and how do we understand each other better?”

One major project is Hand-in-Hand School for Bilingual Education.

“Bilingual education is something that Canadians completely understand but Israelis less so. This is a school that teaches in Arabic and in Hebrew, in mixed classrooms. The rest of the Israeli education system is – we don’t like to use this word but it’s the truth – segregated,” she said. “There are Jewish schools, there are Arab schools and then, even within the Jewish schools, there are religious and nonreligious. This school brings together all of the different population groups and at all times there is an Arabic-speaking and a Hebrew-speaking teacher in the classroom.” There are now six such schools around the country.

Another area of the foundation’s work is helping the most vulnerable populations in the city, through projects such as Springboard, which develops programs primarily through the education system to push gifted kids into opportunities their financial situation might not otherwise permit.

The Jerusalem Foundation is also the city’s second-largest funder to the arts, after the municipality.

“We really believe that a modern and thriving city should have a good cultural scene. Culture is not just for one population group. All members of the community should be cultural consumers. But you have to create culture that is appropriate for those people,” she said. “For example, there is a dance troupe for ultra-Orthodox women. They only perform for women, of course, because otherwise that wouldn’t work for them. But they’re really doing amazing stuff and giving these ultra-Orthodox women who want to dance an opportunity to have a really high-level, professional dance troupe within the system that works for them.”

The foundation is also building a new Hassadna Conservatory of Music.

“They help kids ages six all the way through high school with classical music education and they also provide a special program for children of Ethiopian descent who don’t necessarily have the financial means to get musical training and they have a special program for special needs kids that’s integrated,” she said.

Yeshua credits her Vancouver upbringing as foundational to her worldview and accomplishments. She grew up in the Habonim Dror Zionist youth movement and was a camper, counselor and camp director at Camp Miriam. At home, her Jewishness was nurtured in a pluralistic way.

“In terms of how my mother brought us up, Jewish identity wasn’t limited to our religious identity,” she recalled. “National identity was something that was acceptable, cultural identity was very much encouraged. I think growing up in the very open community of Vancouver – to me it always seems that way, at least – it allowed me to be Jewish in a way that I felt good with and it wasn’t only one way to be Jewish.”

Yeshua acknowledged that “many people feel somewhat alienated from Israel today.”

“I want people to understand that there is a way to engage with Israel, to support Israel, and not contradict your own value system or what you think is acceptable,” she said. “What we do with the Jerusalem Foundation is something that people can respond to, relate to, understand – to protect Jerusalem as a city that is for everyone.”

Spring cleaning

Crews from the office of the Rabbi of the Western Wall remove tens of thousands of written prayers from the Western Wall. (photo by Gil Zohar)

On April 10, equipped with long sticks, crews from the office of the Rabbi of the Western Wall removed tens of thousands of written prayers, which worshippers had wedged into crevices at the holy site over the previous half year. The painstaking work is done twice annually, in advance of Passover in April and Rosh Hashanah in September, to ensure space for new prayers. The notes that are removed are buried in Mount of Olives Cemetery.

The origin of the practice of placing small folded sheets of paper between the cracks of the 2,000-year-old ashlars is unclear. According to tradition, God’s female presence (Shechinah), has never left the holy site.

A retaining wall of the Temple Mount, built by King Solomon circa 960 BCE and destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, the Kotel Maaravi (Western Wall) stands today beneath a religious plaza known in Arabic to Muslims as al-Haram ash-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary). Jews believe the holy hill marks the navel of the world from where God began his creation 5779 years ago; the site also marks where Abraham brought his son Isaac to offer him up as a sacrifice. Muslims consider the Western Wall to be where Muhammad tethered his winged steed al-Burak when he ascended to the Seventh Heaven. And Christians believe Jesus was one of the millions of Jewish pilgrims in antiquity who came here during the festivals of Passover, Tabernacles and Pentecost.

From 1948 until 1967, when East Jerusalem was under the control of Jordan, Israelis were prohibited from visiting the site.

Gil Zohar is a journalist based in Jerusalem.

First Temple stamps discovered

The stamp of “Ikar, son of Matanyahu.” (IAA photos courtesy Ashernet)

The 2,600-year-old stamp of “Ikar, son of Matanyahu” was among the artifacts uncovered in archeological excavations at the Givati Parking Lot, in City of David National Park in Jerusalem. The dig was conducted by archeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and Tel Aviv University and, according to TAU’s Prof. Yuval Gadot and IAA’s Dr. Yiftah Shalev, the artifacts were found inside a large public building that was destroyed in the sixth century BCE, probably during the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Large stone debris, burnt wooden beams and numerous charred pottery shards were discovered, all indications that they had survived a fire.

The stamp and bulla (seal impressions), which are about one centimetre in size, were deciphered by Dr. Anat Mendel-Geberovich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Jerusalem. “The name Matanyahu appears both in the Bible and on additional stamps and bullae already unearthed. However, this is the first reference to the name Ikar, which was unknown until today,” said Mendel-Geberovich.

According to Gadot and Shalev, “These artifacts corroborate the highly developed system of administration in the Kingdom of Judah and add considerable information to our understanding of the economic status of Jerusalem and its administrative system during the First Temple period, as well as personal information about the king’s closest officials and administrators who lived and worked in the city.”

Marathon draws 40,000 runners

Jerusalem Marathon (photos from Ashernet)

Running has become one of the most popular sports in Israel, with both the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem marathons attracting thousands of competitors. The Jerusalem Marathon on March 15 attracted some 40,000 runners, including 4,600 athletes from more than 80 different countries. Six different runs were offered, one of which was designed for competitors with special needs. The main event was won by Kenyan runner Ronald Kimeli, 33, who ran the 42.2 kilometres in two hours, 18 minutes and 47 seconds.

Tiferet Yisrael to be rebuilt

The landmark synagogue before being dynamited by Jordan’s Arab Legion in 1948. (photo from Wikipedia)

A cornerstone laying ceremony was held May 29, 2014, for the rebuilding of the Old City of Jerusalem’s Tiferet Yisrael Synagogue, which was dedicated in 1872 and dynamited by Jordan’s Arab Legion in 1948.

Speaking nearly five years ago, then-Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat declared, “Today we lay the cornerstone of one of the important symbols of the Jewish community in Jerusalem. The municipality attaches great importance to the preservation and restoration of heritage sites in Jerusalem, and we will continue to maintain the heritage of Israel in this city.”

Citing Lamentations 5:21, Uri Ariel, housing minister at the time, added, “We have triumphed in the laying of yet another building block in the development of Jerusalem, a symbolic point in the vision that continues to come true before our eyes: ‘Renew our days as of old.’”

The two politicians symbolically placed a stone salvaged from the ruined building, and construction was supposed to take three years, according to the Company for the Reconstruction and Development of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem Ltd. (JQDC), a public company under the auspices of the Ministry of Construction and Housing.

Fast forward to Dec. 31, 2018, and the exercise was repeated, this time with the participation of Jerusalem minister Zeev Elkin, construction minister Yoav Galant, deputy health minister Yaakov Litzman and Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon. But, this time, according to the JQDC, much of the project’s NIS 50 million (approximately $18 million Cdn) budget has been secured, in part thanks to anonymous overseas donors. With the Israel Antiquities Authority’s salvage dig of the Second Temple period site headed by Oren Gutfeld completed, work can now begin in earnest.

Fundraising to purchase the land for the Tiferet Yisrael, also known as the Nisan Bak shul, was initiated in 1839 by Rabbi Israel Friedman of Ruzhyn, Ukraine, (1797-1850) and his disciple Rabbi Nisan Bak, also spelled Beck (1815-1889). While der Heiliger Ruzhiner (Holy Ruzhyner), as his Chassidim called him, purchased the hilltop in 1843, the mystic didn’t live to see construction begin.

photo - A model of Tiferet Yisrael — A model of Tiferet Yisrael. *(photo from Jerusalem Municipality)*

His ambitious plans in Jerusalem reflected his grandiose lifestyle in Sadhora, Bukovina, in Galicia’s Carpathian Mountains, pronounced Sadagóra in Yiddish. There, he lived in a palace with splendid furnishings, rode in a silver-handled carriage drawn by four white horses and, with an entourage, dressed like a nobleman, wore a golden skullcap and clothing with solid gold buttons, and was attended by servants in livery. This unusual manner was accepted and even praised by many of his contemporaries, who believed the Ruzhiner was elevating God’s glory through himself, the tzadik (righteous one), and that the splendour was intended to express the derekh hamalkhut (way of kingship) in the worship of God.

In one incident, described in David Assaf’s The Regal Way: The Life and Times of Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin (Stanford University Press, 2002), the Ruzhiner’s Chassidim noticed that, notwithstanding that their rebbe was wearing golden boots, he was leaving bloody footprints in the snow. Only then did they realize that the gold was only a show and his shoes had no soles. Indeed, he was walking barefoot in the snow.

Rabbis Friedman and Bak were motivated by a desire to foil Czar Nicholas I’s ambitions to build a Russian Orthodox monastery on the strategic site overlooking Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Bak consulted with architect Martin Ivanovich Eppinger. (Eppinger also planned the Russian Compound, the 68,000-square-metre fortress-like complex erected by the Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society west of the Jaffa Gate and outside the Old City, after the czar was outmanoeuvred by the Chassidim.)

Bak, who both designed the massive synagogue and served as its contractor, spent more than a decade fundraising and six years building it. Inaugurated on Aug. 19, 1872, he named the three-storey landmark in honour of his deceased rebbe.

According to a perhaps apocryphal story, the quick-witted Bak was able to complete the ornate synagogue thanks to a donation from Kaiser Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary. In 1869, while visiting Jerusalem en route to dedicate the Suez Canal, the emperor asked his subjects who came from Sadhora in the remote Austrian province of Bukovina why their synagogue had no roof. (In 1842, having spent two years in Russian prisons on charges of complicity in the murder of two Jewish informers, Rabbi Friedman fled to Sadhora and reestablished his resplendent court.)

Seizing the moment, Bak replied, “Your majesty, the synagogue has doffed its hat in your honour.” The kaiser, understanding the royal fundraising pitch, responded, “How much will it cost me to have the synagogue replace its hat?” and donated 1,000 francs to complete Tiferet Yisrael’s dome, which was thereafter referred to by locals as “Franz Joseph’s cap.”

Tamar Hayardeni, in “The Kaiser’s Cap” (published in Segula magazine last year), wrote that, while the kaiser made a donation, the dome was in fact completed with funds provided by Rabbi Israel of Ruzhyn’s son, Rabbi Avrohom Yaakov of Sadhora (1820-1883).

In the winter and spring of 1948, the dome served as a key Haganah military position and lookout point for the Jewish Quarter’s outgunned defenders.

Children were recruited for the battle for Tiferet Yisrael. Some as young as 9 built defence positions. The “older” ones – 12 or so – carried messages, food, weapons and ammunition. Some were killed, including Grazia (Yaffa) Haroush, 16, and Nissim Gini, 9, who was the youngest fallen fighter in the War of Independence. Like the others who fell in the defence of the Jewish Quarter and were buried there, his remains were exhumed after 1967 and reinterred on the Mount of Olives.

Badly damaged by heavy shelling, the synagogue was blown up by Jordanian sappers on May 21, 1948. A few days later, following the neighbourhood’s surrender on May 25, the nearby Hurva Synagogue – the main sanctuary of Jerusalem’s mitnagdim (anti-Chassidic Ashkenazi followers of the Vilna Gaon) – met the same fate.

With the rebuilding of the Hurva completed by the JQDC in 2010, Tiferet Yisrael became the last major Old City synagogue destroyed in 1948 not rebuilt.

Hurva is a stone-clad, concrete and steel facsimile of its original structure, updated to today’s building code and equipped with an elevator. The same is planned for Tiferet Yisrael.

The reconstruction of faux historic synagogues has not been without critics. Writing in the Forward in 2007 as the Hurva was rising, historian Gavriel Rosenfeld, co-editor of Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (University of Michigan Press, 2008), noted the manifold links between architecture, politics and memory.

“The reconstruction of the Hurva seems to reflect an emotional longing to undo the past. It has long been recognized that efforts to restore ruins reflect a desire to forget the painful memories that they elicit. Calls to rebuild the World Trade Centre towers as they were before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks represent a clear (if unrealized) instance of this yearning. And the recently completed reconstruction of Dresden’s famous Frauenkirche – long a heap of rubble after being flattened by Allied bombers in February 1945 – represents a notable example of translating this impulse into reality.

“And yet, the reconstruction project is problematic, for in seeking to undo the verdict of the past, the project will end up denying it. Denial is inherent in the restoration of ruins, as is frequently shown by the arguments used to justify such projects. In Dresden, for example, many supporters of the Frauenkirche’s restoration portrayed themselves as the innocent inhabitants of a city that was unjustly bombed in 1945, thereby obscuring the city’s longtime support for the Nazi regime and its war of aggression during the years of the Third Reich. Similarly, the physical appearance of the restored Frauenkirche – despite its incorporation of some of the original church’s visibly scorched stones – has effectively eliminated the signs of the war that its ruin once vividly evoked.

“In the case of the Hurva,” writes Rosenfeld, “the situation is somewhat different. If many Germans in Dresden emphasized their status as victims to justify rebuilding their ruined church, the Israeli campaign to reconstruct the Hurva will do precisely the opposite – namely, obscure traces of their victimization. As long as the Hurva stood as a hulking ruin, after all, it served as a reminder of Israeli suffering at the hands of the Jordanians. [Mayor Teddy] Kollek said as much in 1991, when he noted: ‘It is difficult to impress upon the world the degree of destruction the Jordanian authorities visited upon synagogues in the Old City…. The Hurva remnants are the clearest evidence we have today of that.’ Indeed, as a ruin, the Hurva served the same kind of function as sites such as Masada and Yad Vashem – which, by highlighting the tragedies of the Jewish past, helped to confirm the Israeli state as the chief guarantor of the Jewish people’s future.

“At the same time, however, it seems the Hurva’s existence as a ruin conflicted with the state of Israel’s Zionist master narrative: the idea that, ultimately, heroic achievement triumphs over helplessness. In fact, in the end, it may be the project’s ability to confirm the national desire to control its own destiny that best explains its appeal. Israel faces many intractable problems that make present-day life uncertain. But, in the realm of architecture, Israelis can indulge in the illusion that they can at least control and manipulate the past. In this sense, the Hurva’s reconstruction may express deeper escapist fantasies in an unpredictable present.”

Rosenfeld’s theorizing about architectural authenticity made little impression on the JQDC chair, Moti Rinkov. Indeed the JQDC, together with the Ben-Zvi Institute, recently published High Upon High, in which 12 historians trace Tiferet Yisrael’s history. Rinkov noted at the second cornerstone ceremony: “The renovation and restoration of the Tiferet Yisrael Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter is one of the most important and exciting projects I’ve taken part in. Rebuilding the synagogue is, in fact, raising the Israeli flag in the Jewish Quarter. It’s truly a work where they’re restoring the crown to its former glory and restoring glory to the Jewish people.”

The rebuilt Tiferet Yisrael, together with the Hurva, will engage Jerusalem’s skyline not as authentic landmarks but, as Rosenfeld noted, “postmodern simulacrum.”

The other Tiferes Yisroel

In 1953, Rabbi Mordechai Shlomo Friedman, the Boyaner Rebbe of New York, laid foundations for a new Ruzhiner Torah centre in west Jerusalem to replace the destroyed Tiferet Yisrael. Located on the western end of Malkhei Yisrael Street between the current Central Bus Station and Geula, the downtown of the Charedi city, the Ruzhiner yeshivah, Mesivta Tiferes Yisroel, was inaugurated in 1957 with the support of all of the Chassidic rebbes descended from Friedman, who was the first and only Ruzhiner Rebbe. However, his six sons and grandsons founded their own dynasties, collectively known as the “House of Ruzhin.” These dynasties, which follow many of the traditions of the Ruzhiner Rebbe, are Bohush, Boyan, Chortkov, Husiatyn, Sadigura and Shtefanest. The founders of the Vizhnitz, Skver and Vasloi Chassidic dynasties were related to the Ruzhiner Rebbe through his daughters.

A grand synagogue built adjacent to the new Ruzhiner yeshivah also bears the name Tiferes Yisroel. The current Boyaner Rebbe, Nachum Dov Brayer, leads his disciples from there. The design of the synagogue includes a large white dome, reminiscent of the original Tiferet Yisrael destroyed in 1948 and now being rebuilt.

Gil Zohar is a journalist based in Jerusalem.

The final note

photo - The new bell being lifted to the top of the YMCA tower in Jerusalem — The new bell being lifted to the top of the YMCA tower in Jerusalem. *(photo by Ashernet)*

YMCA’s new bell. (photo by Ashernet)

Ever since the YMCA opened on King David Street in Jerusalem in 1933, the building, designed by Arthur Lewis Harman (of New York’s Empire State Building fame), has been a famous landmark; in particular, its iconic tower has been part of the city’s landscape. The tower contained a carillon of 35 bells made by the British bell foundry Gillett & Johnston in the early 1930s. It is the only carillon in the Middle East, but there was one note – in other words, a bell – missing from it. A recent anonymous donation made it possible for the YMCA to order the missing bell from the Royal Eijsbouts foundry in the Netherlands and, in a precisely managed operation earlier this week, a large crane raised and placed the new, 36th, bell into its place in the tower.

Holy colour of blue

A tallit’s tzitzit with threads dyed in tekhelet blue produced from Murex trunculus snails. (photo from Ptil Tekhelet/Eugene Weisberg)

There’s only one thing missing from the comprehensive temporary exhibit Out of the Blue, which opened June 1 at the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem (BLMJ) – the reek of the workshops along the Mediterranean coast of Phoenicia and Israel that produced the prized dyes known in antiquity as tekhelet and argaman.

Researchers at the Jerusalem-based foundation Ptil Tekhelet (Blue Thread) maintain that some 8,000 Murex trunculus mollusks were needed to produce a single gram of the luxury pigment. A demonstration of the malodorous dyeing process was carried out – in the garden of the museum – with one of the marine gastropods. A person can only imagine the stink of many thousands of the rotting sea creatures.

The Out of the Blue exhibit documents the significance of tekhelet, together with the Tyrian purple called argaman in the Torah, from antiquity to the present. Not coincidently, the exhibit opened in honour of Israel’s 70th anniversary. It traces the heavenly blue from the time it was a colour revered by the ancient Israelites and other early peoples of the Near East to its use for Israel’s national flag.

“This special exhibition looks at the magnificence as well as the significance of the colour blue in the ancient world, and ties the blue dyed threads mentioned in the Bible and extra-biblical texts to the very design of the flag of the state of Israel today. BLMJ is proud to be the one museum in the world that highlights the relevance and continuity of the roots of civilization in this region and their impact on our world today in a universal and non-sectarian way,” said museum director Amanda Weiss.

Out of the Blue spotlights ancient Near East cultures’ fascination with the colour as a symbol of divinity. In the Egypt of the pharaohs, Mesopotamia and Canaan, lapis lazuli imported at great cost from Afghanistan was used for cultic purposes.

The BLMJ exhibit continues with the lucrative imperial purple dye industry of the ancient Phoenicians, whose name means the “Purple People.”

But, for this reviewer, the core of the exhibit deals with the dyeing of sky blue tzitziyot (ritual fringes affixed to Jews’ tallitot, prayer shawls). In the eighth century, following the Arab takeover of the Levant, that technology was lost. As a result, Jews were compelled to wear white rather than blue ritual fringes on their prayer garments. Research to rediscover the lost dyeing process of the biblical commandment became synonymous with Zionism, the Jewish people’s return to their biblical homeland.

For more than 25 years, Ptil Tekhelet has dyed hundreds of thousands of sky blue tzitziyot coloured with murex snails’ distinctive tint. The azure tzitziyot remind worshippers of the sea, the sky and God’s sapphire-hewn throne, according to Tannaite sage Rabbi Meir, who was a disciple of Rabbi Akiba.

The exhibit includes a collection of the snail (hilazon) shells excavated at Tel Shikmona near Haifa, and dating back to the 10th through seventh centuries BCE, according to Yehuda Kaplan, one of exhibit’s three curators.

“You can see that, for some of them, there is a breach in the shell,” he said during a press tour of the exhibit. It was from those holes that a gland from the snail was extracted, with each yielding only a “minuscule” amount of the rare and highly coveted dye’s raw material.

“These snails, the Murex trunculus, probably about 4,000 years ago it was discovered that they could produce magnificent dyes with the most beautiful colours, dyes that were fast on wool, never faded. And that was something in the ancient world that was simply unheard of, it was priceless,” said Dr. Baruch Sterman of Ptil Tekhelet, co-author of the book The Rarest Blue: The Remarkable Story of an Ancient Colour Lost to History and Rediscovered.

photo - Baruch Sterman of the Ptil Tekhelet foundation, and co-author of the book The Rarest Blue — Baruch Sterman of the Ptil Tekhelet foundation, and co-author of the book The Rarest Blue. *(photo by Gil Zohar)*

At some point, added Sterman, those dyed fabrics were “worth up to 20 times their weight in gold.”

Other artifacts on display include garment fragments discovered at Masada during archeological excavations in the early 1960s. More than 30 years later, tests using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) proved the cloth had been dyed with a murex solution.

Out of the Blue concludes with the flag flown outside the United Nations in New York in May 1949, when Israel was accepted as a member state of the international body. A second Israeli flag on display was carried into orbit aboard the American Apollo spacecraft, which docked with the Soviet Soyuz rocket on July 17, 1975, in the first international manned space flight.

Sterman’s nonprofit amuta (foundation) is based on the research, in the 1980s, of Otto Elsner, a chemist at Ramat Gan’s Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, who discovered that, if a solution of the purple dye made from the hypobranchial gland of the Murex trunculus was exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet rays, it would turn a deep shade of blue.

Popularizing that knowledge has been a slow process. According to the Talmud, tekhelet is a specific azure dye produced from a sea creature known as a hilazon. Rabbinic sages ruled that vegetable indigo dyes were unacceptable.

Over the past 150 years, several marine creatures were proposed for reviving the biblical process of dyeing the tassels, among them one favoured by Israel’s first chief rabbi, Isaac Herzog, father of Israel’s sixth president, Chaim Herzog. Rabbi Herzog, who completed his PhD at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1914, believed that the violet pelagic snail, Janthina janthina, was the source of the ritual tekhelet.

Another theory was proposed half a century earlier by Rabbi Gershon Hanokh Leiner, known as the Radzyner Rebbe, who produced blue dye from the black ink of the Sepia officinalis (the common cuttlefish). But chemical analysis identified his dye as Prussian blue, an inorganic synthetic colour derived from iron filings and not from the squid itself.

That dispute continues to reverberate: most of the blue-coloured tzitziyot worn in Israel today are dyed from the inexpensive cuttlefish, acknowledged Ptil Tekhelet. (The tekhelet factory in Radzyn near Lublin in Poland was destroyed during the Holocaust, and the technology was lost but was revived in Israel after 1948 thanks to the prewar research of Chaim Herzog.)

The rediscovery of tekhelet has almost messianic implications – one rabbinic source notes, “The revelation of the hilazon is a sign that the redemption is shining near.”

According to the museum, “The tekhelet blue, which reminded every Jew of their connection to God, remained in the memory of the [Jewish] people and became an integral part of the national symbol of the state of Israel.”

Gil Zohar is a journalist based in Jerusalem.

Welcome, Paraguay!

(photo from Ashernet)

A section of Jerusalem’s Old City, near the Jaffa Gate, is illuminated with a greeting to welcome the establishment of the new Paraguayan embassy. On May 22, the municipality welcomed the establishment of the third embassy in the capital – the United States and Guatemala moved their embassies to Jerusalem earlier in the month. The next country to make the move to the capital is thought to be Honduras.

American embassy arrives

(photos from Ashernet)

In Jerusalem on Sunday, May 13, which was Jerusalem Day, there was a strong feeling of anticipation, as Israelis waited for Monday’s opening in the city of the new American embassy. Other countries are expected to follow the United States’ lead, starting with Guatemala, which opened its embassy in Jerusalem two days later, and Paraguay.

Reflecting on Jerusalem Day

The Kotel in Jerusalem. (photo by Marek69)

Jerusalem has been reunited now for 50 years. For five decades, we have had the privilege of praying at the Kotel, the Western Wall. On Jerusalem Day, 28 Iyar, which falls this year on May 13, thousands of worshippers will flock to the city, many before sunrise.

Nothing has ever come easily to the Jewish people. For 19 years, from 1948 to 1967, Jerusalem was cut in half and, at the Mandelbaum Gate, outside the Old City, there were signs: “Danger. Frontier ahead. Snipers nearby … stay out of the middle of the street!” Neighbourhoods and streets were split down the middle. Jews were evicted from their homes and synagogues in the Old City, and the Western Wall was out of bounds. Across the dividing line, Jordanian troops stood with rifles at the ready.

Jerusalem’s story covers thousands of years, but this segment began in 1948. Before the ceasefire was signed on Nov. 30 that year, Moshe Dayan, the commander of Israel’s forces in Jerusalem, met with his Jordanian counterpart, Abdullah El-Tel. In a deserted house in Musrara, they marked out their respective positions. These rough, indistinct marks expanded from the heat and blurred over time, yet they were accepted as the borders between Jordan and Israel in Jerusalem. The map was locked up at Government House and referred to in all disputes.

On June 5, 1967, while Israel was still warning King Hussein of Jordan to stay out of the impending war, a foreign radio station announced the conquest of Mount Scopus by Jordanian troops. It was a mistake, but it confirmed Israel’s suspicions of Jordan’s intentions, and that Mount Scopus, with its Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital, was in danger. The Jordanians believed that Israeli troops would come from east to west, but instead the Jerusalem Brigade attacked from the opposite direction, taking Armon HaNetziv, three Jordanian positions, the Arab village of Sur Baher and Mutzav HaPaamon, before several Arab troops came out of hiding and killed six Israeli soldiers.

Below, on the road to Bethlehem, stands Kibbutz Ramat Rachel. Jordanians and Egyptians fought Israelis on the southernmost part of the dividing line and the kibbutz changed hands three times. However, the Israelis eventually held it, which helped stop the Arab invasion of southern Jerusalem.

Soldiers of the Jordanian legion conquered the British High Commissioner’s residence, but were driven back by the Israeli Defence Forces, who moved towards the City of David. At dawn on Tuesday, 27 Iyar, a unit of paratroopers advanced, taking the police school, the district of Sheikh Jarrah, the American Colony and the area of the Rockefeller Museum. After a bloody battle at Ammunition Hill, the paratroopers reached Mount Scopus.

Jerusalem’s great day was 28 Iyar. With a daring thrust, Israeli soldiers scaled Mount of Olives, advancing beyond the village of Al-Azariya. Armoured vehicles burst through the Lions’ Gate towards the Temple Mount. At 10 a.m. came the announcement: “The Temple Mount is ours. It is in our hands!” Soldiers, even secular ones, ran towards the Western Wall, caressing its stones, their eyes full of tears and with a prayer on their lips, even if they didn’t know the words. A few minutes later, Rabbi Shlomo Goren, then IDF chaplain, blew the shofar at the holy site. David Rubinger, a military photographer, took the now-famous photo that has been reproduced around the world, of a soldier named Yitzhak Yifat (who is now a gynecologist living in Rishon lesion), removing his helmet and looking up at the wall in awe.

One of the first to reach the Kotel was a former Australian, Mordecai (Mark) Rechtschafner, from my hometown of Melbourne. He told me that, although he was overwhelmed by the sense of history at that moment, he was far from euphoric. Heavy losses had been sustained and he had lost many comrades. “I was exhausted, filled with sadness at the unbearable death of so many of my friends,” he said. “The Six Day War ended swiftly, but we paid a heavy price.” Every year, on Jerusalem Day, he comes to the city from Kibbutz Ein Zurim, where he lives, for the memorial service, to pay tribute to the many friends he lost in the battle.

Until the First Intifada and its ongoing aftermath, the hope of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs seemed a possibility and some believe it still is. Thousands of Arabs used to pour into Western Jerusalem each morning to work. On weekends, the narrow lanes of the Old City’s Arab shuk (market) would be packed with Israeli shoppers, but, today, it is mostly tourists who fill the market. The future is a question mark, as ongoing violence brings renewed tears to families throughout the land.

But the city of Jerusalem remains unforgettable and heartbreakingly beautiful. To me, it is a poem. One night, as darkness descended, I was moved to write these lines:

Black velvet spangled with stars
Is night in Jerusalem.
Splashes of silver,
The sob of the wind,
An ancient perfume,
A taste of nectar.
Skyline of turrets and domes
Is night in Jerusalem.
Pine trees are sighing.
Through a tracery of leaves
Golden lights dot
A midnight canvas.
Landscape of enchantment
Is night in Jerusalem.

Dvora Waysman is a Jerusalem-based author. She has written 14 books, including The Pomegranate Pendant, which was made into a movie, and her latest novella, Searching for Sarah. She can be contacted at [email protected] or through her blog dvorawaysman.com.