Daniella Ashkenazy – Chelm on the Med – Sept. 2015

Once again Daniella Ashkenazy treats us to “daily life ” in Israel according to the Hebrew Press.

SPECIAL HOMECOMING

We all know about the tradition of going back to visit one’s alma mater, but Dr. Asaf Merom (31) made room in his schedule to pay a visit to his gan (kindergarten, in Hebrew).

At the request of Merom’s old kindergarten teacher Nurit at Gan Nitzan in Herzliya, the budding researcher at the Tel Aviv University School of Medicine introduced her present brood of protégés to the fascinating world of science. Armed with a purple cabbage, the alumnus delivered an introductory lesson in chemistry – experimenting with the kindergarteners in turning blue cabbage juice red by adding an acid, and turning it green or yellow by adding a base. (Yediot)

SIDETRACKED

The 6:16 pm late commuter train from Jerusalem to Tel-Aviv also serves as a ‘secret passage’ to no-hassle parking right outside the gridlocked center of the capital. It turns out the train is popular not only due to the lions and the zebras waiting at the first stop out of the capital – the Biblical Zoo station, but also due to the zoo’s three free visitor parking lots.

Unfortunately, an absent-minded engineer in the cab turned the two minute train ride from the point of departure – the Malha Mall station, into a fleeting nightmare when he plum forgot to stop at the Biblical Zoo station and continued to lumber along all the way to the next stop…41 minutes down track: the Beit Shemesh station at the foot of the Jerusalem Hills.

Panicked commuters initially thought their train had been hijacked by terrorists or the locomotive engineer had dropped dead in his own tracks and there was no one at the controls. A security guard on board went through the coaches explaining the ‘oversight.’ Apparently the train could not simply back up…although there are precedents.*

Embarrassed Israel Railway officials arrange taxies to pick up riled commuters railroaded by the distracked engineer and ferry them back to the Zoo parking lot to pick up their vehicles, while other taxies picked up passengers stranded at the Zoo, to take them to Tel-Aviv. (Yediot)

* In the not so distant past, there were reports explaining why Israeli trains don’t run on time, citing how an elderly passenger missed her destination, and the engineer stopped, reversed the train and backed into the station. In another case, the engineer stopped outside the station to allow a bushed but limber girl soldier to jump off the train outside Rechovot after she dozed through her stop.

HEAD START

Like everywhere in the northern hemisphere, Israeli kids went back to school On September 1st. Following passage of a law mandates establishment of publically-run nursery schools for three- and four-year-olds in every locality, Israel was thrust into an acute shortage of 4,000 nursery school teaching assistants. With the competition between local and regional councils to bag promising candidates accelerating, the Kfar Saba Municipality launched a campaign in late summer that turned everyone in the bedroom suburb – city employees, parents, and run-of-the-mill residents – into headhunters. Besides billboards to the effect, as an incentive to pitch-in, anyone who succeeded in luring a qualified teacher’s assistant into working for Kfar Saba (instead of say Petach Tikva or Raanana) would be awarded a voucher for an evening at a posh restaurant by grateful city elders – a night ‘on the town’ in every sense of the word. (Yediot)

CLEAN SWEEP

Agricultural theft of livestock and agricultural equipment in Israel’s south is all too common, but the caper pulled off by an unknown gang of thieves was paramount to pure chutzpah said farmers from kibbutz Sde Yoav in the northern Negev: Overnight, someone harvested by combine (!) 30 dunam (7.5 acres) of sunflowers in a far field – taking off with 50,000 NIS ($13,160) worth of sunflower seeds with no one the wiser – despite the racket, leaving a bare field of stubble which the stunned kibbutzniks discovered to their dismay the next morning when they went out to inspect their crops. (Yediot)

* for a glimpse of what such an operation entails see this video clip harvesting sunflowers in the Negev…by the rightful owners.

THANKLESS JOB??

One doesn’t have to be a stevedore to make a good salary!*

Positions as garbage collectors in Tel-Aviv are attracting college grads as candidates – even a few with Master’s degrees, claim municipal authorities. With starting salaries for a four to five-hour shift ranging 6,000-8,000 NIS ($1,558-2,078) a month and promise of fast advancement to managerial positions, no wonder garbage collectors are now called ‘sanitation engineers’ in many quarters.

Among the city’s 950 crew members are two women, who told Yediot that they put on makeup like any other gal going to work and dressed for success. One added that she often gets ‘good mornings’ and ‘thank yous’ from passing neighbors, adding to satisfaction on the job. (Yediot)

* See “Dream Job” in July 2015 Column 2 in the archives.

SHOW YOUR COLORS!

Israeli illustrators are banding together to fight fire-with-fire, or ink-with-ink as the case may be: Publishing hard-hitting cartoons that unmask the lies and hypocrisy of Israel bashers. One of the initiators behind the Israel Cartoon Project is Yaakov Kirshen whose Dry Bones political cartoons already include such priceless items as Obama’s Problematic Two-State Solution. Among the first to join the initiative is Vlodik Sandler’s whose ’take’ on UN Human Rights Reports only requires a glance to get the message.

Illustrators* worldwide are invited to join the initiative by writing ticartoonproject@gmail.com.

Indeed, it is about time Jewish humorists answered the call to join the Laughter Brigade© as well – to use satire and Chelm-like-but-true material as raw material for their own acts. The Chelm Project can even imagine a ‘news in revue’ called “Never Mind the Times”© that would use Chelm-on-the-Meds best gems. Any takers out there? (Yediot)

* Kirshen wants to mentor and train an army of politically-savvy illustrators to defend Israel by establishment of what he dubs the Dry Bones Academy of Cartoon Advocacy and Activism now seeking crowd-funding.

WEIRD COLLATERAL WAR DAMAGE

Israel’s are used to sandstorms from North Africa as a spring and fall ritual, but a freak dust storm that cut visibility to a minimum and ‘painted’ the White City* yellow five days before Rosh Hashanah, came from…Syria

Even before the dust settled (the day before Rosh Hashanah) climatologist Professor Danny Rosenfeld was explaining that the strange phenomenon – a first since meteorological records began to be taken 75 years ago – wasn’t due only to which way the wind blew. It was probably tied to the war in Syria, surmised the TAU academic: Untilled fields abandoned by farmers fleeing from ISIS, left fields exposed to the winds, while the wheels of thousands and thousands of ISIS pickup trucks were pulverizing the crust of the fragile desert floor. If that wasn’t enough, ‘neighborly’ Turks are exacerbated dustbowl conditions by blocking irrigation water from the Euphrates earmarked for Syria and hogging the water for themselves, he charged. (Israel HaYom, Channel 10 – London and Kirshenbaum 8 Sept)

* Ha’ir HaLevanah or Tel Aviv

WHO GETS THE LAST LAUGH?

Ruti Chai is a yoga laughter therapist whose clientele are mostly cancer patients. In thirteen years at Shiba Medical Center she has gotten some very strange and unforgettable requests for her very special form of comic relief.

In one case, a former patient who had attended one of her laughter yoga clinic requested that on the first anniversary of her death (yortzite) her close friends hold a yoga laughter session with Chai in her memory, basically to celebrate her life. In another case, a dying patient requested that her laughter yoga teacher sing at her funeral. Another asked that Chai lead one rousing round of laughter during the family’s shiva (seven days of mourning). (Yediot)

DRIVER’S LICENSES AND SEX DRIVES

What are the requirements for approval of a driver’s license for a truck weighing more than 12 tons?

In light of the disproportional number of heavy trucks involved in road accidents (such trucks constitute 10 percent of the vehicles on the road but are involved in 30 percent of all accidents with fatalities) authorities sought to establish some kind of screening process to weed out questionable individuals who might constitute a jeopardy to road safety.

The Road Safety Council put the screening process in the hands of health authorities… All hell broke loose when the latter began administering candidates a battery of tests that health officials said were “conventional psychological profiles for risk evaluation” which included questions such as ‘Did you every wish you were a woman?” and told applicants to answer ‘Yes or No’ to statements such as “I never allowed myself to enjoy kinky sexual behavior”…with nary a question about how the subject would respond if the boss pressured them to work 14 to 18-hour shifts behind the wheel due to a shortage of drivers. (Yediot)

UNOCCUPIED TERRITORY

The Ecoland Group – the baby of a patent developer and two budding building contractor – has plunked down 16 M NIS (about $4 M) to buy an empty 164 dunam (41 acre) Finish island called Petajasaari in the middle of nowhere (Parallel 61 N. if you must know).

The Group plans to build forty 40-to-60 square-meter ecologically-sound off-the-grid housing units that will be sold exclusively (!) to Israelis…perhaps the reason the project promises not only to boast a club house, a small grocery/eatery and a playground…but also “a place where all the community can gather.”* when they’re not communing with nature or taking in the Northern Lights.

The entrepreneurs behind the project claim to have already sold 12 $100,000 units. Probably not emphasized in the promotional brochures, most of the year the area is only accessible by snowmobile. BTW: The regional bird is the cuckoo bird. (Yediot)

* I think elsewhere in the Diaspora they call such a place a synagogue, but apparently that’s not the intention…

NOOKS AND LADDERS

Tal and Uriyah bought an old house in picturesque Ein Karem, on the edge of Jerusalem. The property came with a unique ‘unfinished basement’ not listed when the property came up for sale: When a worker began renovating their new abode, floor tiles in the living room dropped from sight into what seemed to be a bottomless pit. The new owners inserted a wooden trap door in the middle of their newly stone-tiled living room – disguised under a decorate rug and a chair and remained mum.

But uncertainty of what actually lay below caused Tal sleepless nights until the couple decided to call the Antiquities Authority although they were “worried about the consequences.”*

Archeologists who excavated the site uncovered a 2,000 year-old 1.8 meter-deep Jewish ritual bath or mikvah carved into the rock below the Israeli couple’s new digs – the first evidence that Ein Karem was not just the birthplace of John the Baptist; apparently the village also housed a thriving Jewish community dating back to Second Temple times.

The excavation left the family with a living room sporting its very own vintage ‘jacuzzi’ (see the video) since it turns out that in the winter the mikvah fills with ground water that needs to be pumped out. The one downside to their unique living room ‘conversation piece’: It’s only accessible via a long aluminum ladder that must be lowered into the hole, to reach the staircase leading down into the 3.4 x 2.5 meter immersion pool. (Ynet)

* In Israel, according to the letter of the law, property owners are supposed to foot the bill for ‘emergency excavation’ of archeological findings discovered on private property leading to some truly nightmarish situation in the past. (photo courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Asaf Peretz)

ARTISTIC LICENSE

Speak of a narrow agenda! In a unique case of discriminating tastes, a Norwegian documentary film festival entitled ‘Human Rights – Human Wrongs’ sent a rejection letter to an Israeli filmmaker who submitted for consideration his short award-winning doco The Other Dreamers about the challenges facing exceptional children in Israel and their dreams, including Jewish and Arab kids, explaining to producer Roy Zafrani without so much as blushing: “Dear Roy. I’m sorry but we can’t show this film. We support the academic and cultural boycott of Israel so unless the [documentary] films are about…discrimination of Palestinians, we can’t show them.” (Yediot, the American Jewish Congress)



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