Sure, supermodel Bar Refaeli captures her share of headlines here. But you know who's a real celebrity in this country?
I'll tell you.
I was sitting down this afternoon in a little cafe in the mall, revving up my voice recorder, buffing up my pen & notepad, or whatever I do before an interview… when I noticed a woman standing outside the cafe, staring intently.
After a second, she started waving - at the guy I had come to interview. She waved timidly at first, shyly, and then a little more crazily when she saw that he'd spotted her there. "Todah," she mouthed at him. "Todah." Thanks.
"He's like a rock star here," said the translator.
I nodded, numb, amazed.
Who was this instantly-recognizable mega-star that I had come to interview?
It was this guy:
What’s that you say?
Exactly! Yeah, this guy. (The one in the vest. No idea who the guy in the white kippah could be.)
I’m not blogging this week, as we are away, flying to chu”l (what the heck is chu”l???).
But I was fascinated a while back to stumble across this old public-domain article from 1897, first published in a Christian periodical called The Biblical World. The article is called Children in Palestine, written by Anna H. Jessup. (It’s available in the public domain here.)
Interestingly, this was the same year as the First Zionist Congress. The author doesn’t seem to know yet that big changes are in the wind for Israel, then known as Palestine.
Certainly, the author doesn’t seem to like any of “Palestine’s” children – except perhaps the Christian ones.
I sort of love how this article reflects all the weird racisms and prejudices of that time period. Of course, I’m also horrified by it as well. (Don’t read it if you’re easily offended, maybe?)
But I think it’s helpful to think about how the situation has changed and evolved over the last 120 or so years, so far beyond what any of the players, either at that Zionist Congress, or reading that Christian magazine, could have envisioned.
I’ll be back to blogging in no time. In the meantime… I’d love to hear what you think about this crazy, racist report on the State of Affairs in Israel (aka Palestine, back when the Jews were Palestinian) circa 1897.
Children in Palestine
In writing of the children in Palestine at the present day, it must first of all be clearly understood that the people who live in Palestine are not all of the same race; that the inhabitants of different sections, or sometimes even of two villages near together, are of different religions, with sharply drawn lines of separation in customs and beliefs.
Thus we find Druses on Mount Carmel ; Metawileh in northern Galilee ; Bedouin in Jericho to the south and throughout Moab ; Circassians in their colonies east of the Jordan ; both Catholic and Greek Christians in Haifa, Nazareth, Bethlehem, and nearly all the cities; Jews in Safed, Tiberias, Jerusalem,
If there’s anywhere the Grinch LOVES at this time of year, it’s got to be the Jewish state… right?
Wrong!
More than 2% of Israelis are Christian, about 161,000 people. That’s about the same as the proportion of Jews in the United States, although it depends on how you’re counting.
But it’s not just Israelis. Beyond that 2%, there are about 300,000 “foreign workers” in Israel, which includes many, many Catholics from the Philippines. (I also believe that many olim from the former Soviet Union are “secretly” Christian, which would bump the numbers way up beyond the official government tally.)
Anyway, considering this country is the birthplace of Christmas, it’s usually given pretty short shrift. (A Christian word, by the way, meaning “confession.”)
Would I be a bad Israeli, a bad Jew, if I admit that it feels like there’s something missing here in December? Don’t worry, I’m not pining for the malls and Santas of years past. But it’s definitely different.
Which was why I was unexpectedly thrilled when I stumbled upon this colourful display outside a supermarket in the heart of Haifa.
No snow in sight, but at least Frosty is putting in an appearance.
Tomorrow, we’re going to visit our friends who live in… Tzfat? Tsfat? Maybe its ultra-weird English name, Safed?
No problem, though, we’ll just catch a bus from where we live in Kiryat… no, make that, Qiryat… hmm, or Qeeriyat… Shemuel. Shmuel?
Argh.
English place names here can make you crazy.
If you’re lucky, the English version bears some resemblance to the actual place name, ie what the people who live there call it. Sometimes, it doesn’t.
A minor example: Haifa. Before I lived here, I had no idea, really, if it was a “H” or a “Ch” at the front. Is it “Hi” as in, “Hi, howya doin’?” Or “Chhhhhai” as in “Le’chhhhhayim!” (turns out it’s a Ch)
Some places are impossible to guess. For various historical linguistic reasons, even one of the most currently newsworthy areas, the Gaza Strip (let’s think of it as part of Israel for a moment) is actually called Aza in Hebrew.
Blame it on the Crusaders
But the city spelled “Acre”? Let’s pronounce it Akko. I think that one is the Crusaders’ fault.
Safed? Hmm… better pronounce that one Tzefat. If you’re Ashkenazi and not going anywhere other than shuls and graves of holy people, you may be able to get away with calling it Tzefas, but don’t try it in the rest of the country.
Some of this is the fault of Christianity, which has popularized these ridiculous names. It’s hard to unlearn 2000 years worth of Bible study. Here are some of the good place names Christians have ruined permanently.
Joppa? Say it Yaffo.
Tiberias? Teveria.
One of my favourites, for the way it fails to trip of the tongue, is the now no-longer-a-town, Capernaum… or, in Hebrew, kfar Nachum.
Halfway through her school year, our older daughter started referring to the city where she lived, most pretentiously, as Jer-oo-zalem. Another Crusader / Christian legacy, I’m sure. The rest of us stuck with Yerushalayim.
Sometimes, Israelis are so confident in the rightness of their pronunciation that they act like they don’t care a bit how it’s written in English. After all, it’s right there in Hebrew character, and Hebrew (unlike English) is a totally phonetic language.
So who needs English?
English speakers, that’s who.
Somebody has already (in Hebrew) beaten me to the punch with this article (here’s the Google English version) to complain about street signs here in the Krayot, with a pretty funny collection of signs spotted in Kiryat Bialik, considered one of the “nicer” Krayot… but not, I guess, in terms of its English literacy.
Yes, they have spelled the name of one of the world’s best-known Israeli military leaders and statesmen “Mina Aham Begin.”
Remember, these signs were all collected from the SAME very small city. Somebody in City Hall could probably just keep a list of all the street names and consult it when they need to order a new sign.
The secret – revealed!
But they probably do more like what they were doing in the passport office where we happened to be waiting for another reason a few weeks ago.
Here is the secret of English place names in Israel and how they come to be so very, very wonky.
When the clerk had to transcribe a person’s name into English for his passport, she called out to the office in general, “How do you spell ‘Danny’ in English?”
When one of her clerk friends started guessing (wrong; she left off the extra “n”) I called out the answer from where I was sitting in the waiting area.
The guy was doing about thirty passports, I think, for every living member of his family, and eventually – literally after 40 minutes - we left in disgust. But not before helping out with the spelling of 5 names in English that would have been transcribed disastrously wrong had we not been sitting right there at the time.
THAT, my friends, is how street signs are made in Israel.
I have solved the mystery, and here is how it happens: the clerks call out to their friends, “How do you spell ‘Menachem’ in English?” … and whoever answers first calls it.
More signs of madness
One that really drove me crazy when I saw it in person was a street in the Old Port of Jaffa (Yaffo?) named after famous French guy Louis Pasteur.
(“How do you spell PASTER?” the clerk called to her friend.)
(I took this picture myself while my sister was begging me to come see the sites; I knew it would come in handy someday!)
It’s not like this is hard. He himself personally wrote his name every day in English (well, French) characters. So on the sign, you spell it… like he spelled it. Apparently, that type of standardization and reliance on others goes against the Israeli spirit.
One of the wonkiest signs I turned up is nearby in Haifa, though I haven’t seen it in person: Captain Steve Street / Rechov Keptin Steve.
You can see the main illuminated sign above, but what I love is that sometimes in and around Israel, we’ve seen these smaller signs that don’t light up but do tell you a little bit about the person for whom they’re named. Usually they’re a general or politician, but occasionally, you come across something interesting. Perhaps someday soon I’ll go there in person to figure out what this sign is telling me.
In the meantime, I have the Internet, which tells me – in this article from December, 1966, that he was a Spanish captain who brought “illegal immigrants” during the British mandate (those are the article’s quotes quotes, not mine; to me, they were actually illegal at the time; it was just a bad law):
The street… was named “Captain Steve Gate” for Captain Esteban Hernandorene, who was known to the “illegal immigration workers” as “Steve.” Born in Spain in 1905, he died in Haifa last year after serving the Zim lines where his son is now an officer.
Attending the ceremony were Jewish seamen, veterans of the second wave of prestate immigrants, naval officers and Catholic clergymen. The latter took part because Captain Hernandorene had been a Catholic. Poet Nathan Alterman said of the Spanish hero that “we shall yet read songs and poems of this fleet small and grey, and of you, too, Captain.”
Now there’s a story (to read more, here’s Captain Steve’s story in his own words). I guess there is one, behind every one of those wonky street signs and place names.
Want to know something else weird? Did you catch the name of that poet?
Here’s where I got off the bus this morning to walk in to work.
Natan Alterman Street.
Until I sat down to write this, I had no idea who he was either.
Not only is there a story behind every place name… but it seems they’re all connected in this tiny, besieged land of ours. Pray for the peace (piece? peece?) of Jerusalem and the country that surrounds her.
To the stories, to the connections, to the wonky street signs… to life.
Some controversy in the online world today, in which religious Jews in charge of a well-known interfaith organization have appealed to Christians to build churches here, made me think again about these signs. I photographed them a while ago, when we were new here, but now barely notice them every day as I walk past…
These both reflect what was probably a minor campaign for this huge organization, the John Hagee Ministries, but still, some very substantial donations raised to help the Jewish Agency build this Merkaz Klitah in 2005, presumably – at the time – to house incoming Ethiopian families.
Hagee himself – a controversial figure in some circles – is known for being very pro-Israel. Now, when evangelical Christian organizations come out as “pro-Israel”, usually what that means is that they need us all to be here so that the messiah can return, which will preface untold years of suffering and varying degrees of torment (depending on the denomination) for the perfidy of not believing in him all these years.
However, unlike some of these organizations, Hagee’s organization (based in Texas) does not try to negate the significance of our eternal covenant and seems to take a softer-sell approach. On their website, they list 7 points outlining why Christians must support a Jewish Israel, including the fact that gentiles only deserve blessing if they have done something practical to bless the Jewish people. For attitudes like this, Hagee has been lauded by organizations like Bnei Brith
Still, I don’t fully trust it, especially when I find writing like this on the same website, about the same Jewish people: “Today, the Jewish people are still Christ’s family and they are still the apple of God’s eye. No, they don’t see Jesus for who Christians believe He is, but they will in the future when He comes to deliver them. Until then, we, like Esther, have a duty to speak out and defend them.” Friends, sure, but perhaps an uneasy kind of friendship, given that they believe we will ultimately be persuaded.
However, this is a complicated issue and I haven’t even scratched the surface. It’s my understanding that some of the money Nefesh b’Nefesh uses comes from Christian organizations. Not only that, there are other organizations which exist independently to assist Jews with the aliyah process, and our family personally may or may not have received aid from one or more of them.
It’s hard to shake off the creepy feeling of being nothing more than a pawn in someone else’s eschatology (end-times theology). And it feels slimy to take their money and run, taking advantage of people we ultimately believe are misguided in their heartfelt donations.
Let’s be honest: we think they’re WRONG. They think we’re WRONG. Not everything is black and white like that, but in this case, that’s how it comes out: flip of a coin.
So I guess we just have to go on believing we’re right… at the same time as they believe just as resolutely (putting their considerable financial resources where their mouth is) that they are. Fortunately, it’s not up to me: I plan to sit back and let Hashem flip the coin…. but that doesn’t mean we don’t know how it’ll turn out in the end. :-)
