A visit at the Academy of Hebrew Language

For the last few weeks I attend a series of lectures about Hebrew language intended for text editors. For a rather modest participation fee we are allowed to enter the holy temple of Hebrew language, whose priests and priestesses introduce us into its very secrets.

The Academy of Hebrew Language (Hebrew Academy) resides on the university campus of Givat-Ram in Jerusalem - the campus which was built after 1967. The building was built in an architectural style typical of that time, with a flat roof; it stands on a hill, surrounded by a grove of tall maritime pines.

The revival of Piyyut - the Jewish liturgical "soul" music

Several years ago, a friend of mine invited me one day to come with her and attend an evening class at a Jewish Studies center in Tel-Aviv about Jewish traditional songs. At first this didn't sound especially attractive to me, I even suspected it to be terribly dull and boring.

Then she told me that this wasn't one of those workshops where religious people lure non-religious people into making a "khazara be-tshuva", a "return to faith". Quite on the contrary, this workshop had been kicked off by a student from Jerusalem: as a student in musicology, he had chosen to study the various traditions of Jewish "Piyyut" - liturgical songs - among the various and numerous Jewish communities; while doing so, he came to realize that while Piyyut is indeed a very complex music, fully mastered  by only relatively few people - all religious people going to temple - and that this tradition was in danger to fade away and disappear.

During his field research, he had had this idea that Piyyut has an enchanting power of its own, even for those who are not religious.

How the media storm looks from inside Israel

Everybody has heard about last week's events, that is, one of its various versions. Obviously, seen from Israel, the situation is a totally different one  than seen from the outside, even though it is quite obvious even from inside Israel that there are very different and diverging points of view.

The most striking thing, at first, was the astounding discrepancy between what so many people here knew right away -  because so many people here in the country have a relative or an acquaintance who knows someone who is a friend of one of the soldiers or of someone well informed: young Israeli soldiers who had been instructed to gently, but forcefully stop western leftist activists on their route to Gaza, after numerous warnings, had been brutally and viciously attacked and lynched by professional Muslim mercenaries, while the whole world seemed to go crazy while adamantly accusing Israel of having massacred peaceful activists...

Brussels and Tel Aviv - two different dimensions of time

I have just returned from a five-days visit in Brussels at my father's. Since my family is scattered over several countries in central Europe, we usually gather at one particular point, to save time; it so happened that I hadn't been in Brussels (Bruxelles, in French and in "Wallon", the Belgian French dialect) in almost 10 years. I found the city very much changed; i remembered from my last visit that the center of the city was filled with quite annoying construction sites. now the city has been revamped and looks like a modern metropolis, with a character of its own. My father has been living for the last ten years in the rather central neighborhood of Ixelles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixelles), which has a very mixed population of rather low income citizens and immigrants, as well as wealthy bourgeois living in splendid 19th century villas and majestic neoclassical pavilions - no need to mention that Israel has none of these, certainly not in Tel Aviv - although Tel Aviv has beautiful houses and residential areas of its own.

On the last day of my visit, after the big family gathering had come to its end, we had a small and quiet walk through the streets of Ixelles and walked into the "parc de l'abbaye de la Cambre", along some of the numerous Ixelles ponds (in French: "les étangs d'Ixelles": see Abbey of La Cambre).

Day trip to Jerusalem

On a Friday morning, my partner and I traveled from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem - an approximately 1-hour drive. I love Jerusalem; I used to live there for 18 years, until I decided to move to Tel Aviv, as so many other people I had known did before me. For years I missed Jerusalem very much, even though I was happy with our moving to Tel Aviv.

The difference between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv is enormous: while Tel-Aviv is a relatively new city (the city celebrated its centenary in 2009) on the seashore of the Mediterranean Sea, a supposedly "Jewish" city (if one excludes Jaffa, which is part of Tel-Aviv municipality), with western flair, Jerusalem, in contrast, is a historical site, which has been existing for more than 2000 years, 800 m. above sea level, in the middle of the Judean Hills. Tel-Aviv is a relatively rich city, a cultural metropolis, with dozens of splendid, genuine Bauhaus-buildings:

 

While in Tel-Aviv, the atmosphere in the heart of the city is vibrant, full of life and interesting, Jerusalem looks somewhat austere, with its sand stone houses: