Recharge Your Neighbor

Posted on: November 2nd, 2012

I visited my friend Ed Litvak’s news website thelodownny.com, for news from the old neighborhood following Sandy. Among the reports I ran into this image, of Seward Park Co-op residents helping each other recharge their laptops and phones. Meanwhile, those co-op residents (which are about one-third Jewish and half of that frum) have put aside [...]

Majestic Destroyer

Posted on: November 2nd, 2012

Reader Jonathan Kahanovitch sent us this amazing image of Ms. Liberty under a canopy of ominous clouds. Destruction can be so pretty. Hope you’re dry and safe and that you have electricity and Internet. Otherwise, we probably won’t be having this conversation. Shabbat Shalom.

Cow Beauty Pageant

Posted on: November 1st, 2012

I figured we’ve all had plenty of flooded landscape images to look at these past few days, so, for a much needed change, how about a beautiful bovine? Meet Miriam, the winning cow, on display at the conclusion of a Cow Beauty Pageant, conducted back in early summer, 2001, in Moshav Be’er Tuvia, in southern [...]

Rally Gadget Maintenance

Posted on: October 31st, 2012

This picture was taken November 21, 2011, outside the Knesset, during a demonstration against the high cost of living. It started to rain and the protest signs got soaked. So they were hung up to dry on an improvised clothesline. The visible parts of each sign say “Bibi” and “R Finance” (the R is at [...]

Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 29

Posted on: October 30th, 2012

NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite captured this visible image of Hurricane Sandy battering the U.S. East coast on Monday, Oct. 29 at 9:10 a.m. EDT. At 8 a.m. EDT the National Hurricane Center noted that the center of Hurricane Sandy was located near latitude 36.8 north and longitude 71.1 west. This was about 310 miles (505 km) [...]

Boro Park Getting Ready for Hurricane Sandy

Posted on: October 29th, 2012

Voting Overseas

Posted on: October 29th, 2012

This year, American citizens living in Israel can vote in the upcoming U.S. elections, at the AACI (Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel) centers across Israel. The voting station in the picture is in Jerusalem. Nancy and I voted at the Netanya AACI which has the narrowest parking lot you ever saw, plus you [...]

Rains of Blessing

Posted on: October 26th, 2012

It’s not an easy translation, the Mishna’s notion of “gishmei bracha.” Midrash Rabah (Vayikra 35:10) suggests that the blessing of “I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees of the field their fruit” (Lev. 26:4) is fully realized when those rains come down at night. [...]

Nobody Here But Us Patriots

Posted on: October 25th, 2012

Here are U.S. soldiers during a joint exercise with the Patriot anti-missile system in Tel Aviv, yesterday, October 24. This is part of the large joint missile defense exercise of the IDF and the U.S. Army. The Patriot missile system is designed to detect, target and then hit incoming missiles. Thise missiles are often not [...]

Contemplating the Divine Together

Posted on: October 24th, 2012

We live on the first floor of a Netanya apartment building, which means that our living room panorama window overlooking the street below is about 15 feet high. Our girl cat, Lightening, sits in the window much of the day, basking in our Mediterranean sun. She wasn’t for the move to Israel initially, but by [...]

Upside-Down Coffee

Posted on: October 22nd, 2012

This is a normal cup of Israeli coffee, the kind you can order practically anywhere. This particular shop, in fact, is usually associated with gas stations. It’s called Kafe Hafuch or Upside-down coffee, the local equivalent of the French café au lait. It goes for between 8 and 14 shekel, or $2 to $3.5. Here’s [...]

Authentic Israeli Doggies

Posted on: October 21st, 2012

Here are Canaan puppies playing with their human at a dog kennel at Sha’ar Hagai, on the road to Jerusalem, where they are housed and bred The Canaan Dog is a native of the deserts of Israel. The original breeding stock at the Sha’ar Hagai kennel was collected from the wild and from the Bedouins, [...]

Hillary Giving Away Toys

Posted on: October 19th, 2012

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton watches a demonstration of drone capabilities by U.S. and Ugandan military representatives at Kasenyi Military Base in in Kampala, Uganda, last August. The U.S. supplies drones and training to the Ugandan military, which they use in their hunt for Joseph Kony and members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a [...]

Fall Is in the Air Somewhat

Posted on: October 18th, 2012

Believe it or not, this picture of a woman rowing her boat in the river against the background of yellow and red tree foliage was taken in Israel. The river is the Yarkon, which years ago used to be the dumping ground for industrial waste and now it’s relatively clean and doesn’t smell at all. [...]

Wall to Wall Hadassah

Posted on: October 17th, 2012

Some 2000 women are in Jerusalem this week to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization. See them marching in the street of Jerusalem like a lovely, mobile poppy field. Henrietta Szold founded the organization in 1912, to empower Jewish women, and, indeed, over the century of its existence, Hadassah has empowered [...]

Must Have More Babies

Posted on: October 16th, 2012

This is the babies room at the Bikur Holim hospital in Jerusalem. It’s a picture of the future. It’s a picture of a well functioning society aware of the fact that even after every single of its living members is dead and buried, it will continue to live and even thrive – because of the [...]

Checkpoints American Style

Posted on: October 15th, 2012

Here are U.S. soldiers and Afghan policemen conducting Operation Clean Sweep in Kandahar City in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, Oct. 3, 2012. It’s the only surefire method against a relentless army of terrorists who come in looking a whole lot like innocent civilians and end up blowing up people and things. You have to stop every [...]

Hell’s Playground

Posted on: October 14th, 2012

These are seven rocket launchers, one loaded with a rocket, discovered after the IAF thwarted a terror attack in Gaza. Last week, in response to a morning rocket barrage at southern Israeli communities, the IDF targeted Hamas terror activity sites and terrorist squads responsible for the rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. During 2012, more [...]

Hallucinatory Realism

Posted on: October 12th, 2012

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 was awarded yesterday to Chinese writer Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” I liked that description very much. I went looking for texts by the fresh winner. Among several offerings online, not all of which would befit a frum website, I found [...]

Reign of the Rain

Posted on: October 11th, 2012

A couple of days ago, we substituted, in the opening blessings of the silent Aminda prayer, the phrase describing God as maker of dew to the phrase describing Him as maker of rain. And on the night of the first day when we made the switch, we received the first serious rain of the season, [...]