Strudel

• In Hebrew the @ sign (in an email address) is called "shtroodel."
• Look at the pastry before you enjoy it.

Jerusalem, Israel Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Even Licensed Guides

• From one guide I heard that Judith Montefiori was born to the House of Rothschild (and elsewhere that her connection to the Rothschilds was through her sister, who married one http://www.jewishmag.com/81mag/montefiore/montefiore.htm), from a second that the Turks only paved over a section of a dry moat to allow Kaiser Wilhelm II to enter the City in style (others said the Ottomans tore down a section of the City wall), from a third that Montefiori’s windmill (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/montefiores-windmill.html) never ground grain (while another said it did for some years ).
• One mistake per guide is not bad.
• What exactly was torn down for Kaiser Bill I do not know, but it would be strange if the engineers of Suleiman the Magnificent (http://www.answers.com/topic/suleiman-the-magnificent) left a huge gap in their wall right next to the careful defenses of the Jaffa Gate.

Jerusalem, Israel Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Jerusalem Trees

• When teachers who had moved to the new neighborhood of Zichron Moshe (http://www.blogger.com/(http://www.jerusalemshots.com/cat_en42.html ) wanted to plant trees (so the story goes), neighbors protested that trees needed watering and water would bring mosquitoes. The trees flourished. The municipality keeps after the mosquitoes.
• Like many places with "Moshe" in their name, the area is not named for the Moses of the Bible but for the philanthropist Moses Montefiore (http://www.sirmoses.org.uk/history.htm), who cotributed to housing and industry in the Land of Israel. They say that friends had collected money to build a memorial to him. At aged 90, Sir Moses asked why they weren’t putting the money to use. They started building while he was alive. He lived to age 101.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Numbered Jerusalem Stones

• Someone has painted a number on each Jerusalem stone of the outer walls of the corner building. Construction workers will deconstruct the walls, build a modern house on the lot, and replace the stones, each according to its number. Last they will clean the stones, so neither numbers nor signs of age remain.
• Passing by I will think, "They have put up a new building" where they have tried to preserve the facade of the old.
• Another way that Israel is a "New Old Land."
• http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/one-block-from-agripas.html

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Lychees Figs Peaches

• Jerusalem Israel (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/shesek.html )
• Lychees abound. Peel and eat. (http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/lychee.html )
• Purple- and green-striped figs have arrived in the market. Wash and share. They don’t keep.
• Peaches are in season. Choose the smallest. They are sweet even before they are ripe.
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/unexpected-february-entertainment.html

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Alfasi in Rehavia

• Alfasi Street is quiet and full of scholars, like Alfasi himself (http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/article-9354967/Isaac-ben-Jacob-Alfasi ).
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/lanes.html

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Jerusalem Israel

Dunash ben Labrat

• Rehavia street names honor the Jewish writers of Medieval Spain. Dunash ben Labrat’s (http://www.blogger.com/(http://www.poetry-portal.com/poets20.html) name is otherwise forgotten except by scholars who know about his refutation of ibn Saruk (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Saruk.html), a grammarian whose street is a few minutes’ walk away.
• Tens of thousands sing another work by ben Labrat every week, for he composed Dror Yikra (Let Freedom be Proclaimed), a Sabbath-table song. It works well to the tune of "We Sailed on the Ship John B" ("I Want to Go Home").
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/my-jerusalem-neighborhood.html

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Jerusalem, Israel

Lights Out

• At 8 pm, after a walking tour about visitors to Jerusalem from Epiphanius (http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/epiphanius.php) through Twain (http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/innocent/iahompag.html) and Melville (http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/6725.html), I walk through the souk towards the Jaffa Gate.
• Clang, a shopkeeper closes the steel doors of his shop. Less light on the straight and narrow street. The stone paving is uneven. Clang, another shop closes. Less light. Three steps up split by two narrow ramps for the passage of a cart. Clang, another door shuts out light. Fifteen paces along the irregular stones. More steps, the narrow ramps a trap for sandals. Clang. Clang. Fifteen paces. Clang. Clang. More steps.
• A shopkeeper invites me to look at the purses and bags in the lone shop still open in this segment. More steps. Here a silversmith is open there a vendor presents ornate copper and ceramic coffee sets. Clang.
• Ahead of me the last twilight and the streetlights of the plaza between the souk and the City gate (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/on-walls.html ) .
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/love-and-darkness.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/beit-hakerem.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/jerusalem-street-poetry.html

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Jerusalem, Isael

Love and Darkness

• Mekor Baruch and Kerem Avraham have changed from middle-class neighborhoods to poverty. Trash litters sidewalks and streets. (Fortunately http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/cats.html ) A friend says that the municipality stints on garbage collection because property owners don’t pay their taxes. A sound truck drives slowly through the narrow streets announcing free distribution of used clothes "on hangers."
  The children, however, look healthy and clean.
• A walking tour takes me through the streets where Amos Oz (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/oz.html ) lived from birth to the beginnings of adolescence. "There is the building where his mother lived as a student. Here was the apartment of the poet Zelda ( http://www.jhom.com/topics//trees/zelda.htm and http://israel.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=3156&PHPSESSID=fbd63995fae3eefd90251b1feb9a7662 ), his first-grade teacher and first love."
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/beit-hakerem.html

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Jerusalem, Israel

Bus Station

• Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station is full of shops and restaurants, inside and out.
• Although it lacks the oriental-bazaar feeling of the much larger Tel Aviv bus station, it offers great felafal along with more varied menus; raw, plain-roasted, or salted seeds and nuts; dried fruit; fresh fuit drinks (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/juice.html); junk food; books; magazines and newspapers; toys; clothing ( http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/daughter-of-salwar-kameez.html ) for all ages and all parts of the body; CD stores with large inventories and more up the escalator and down.
• But no bus-route maps.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Mint

• Agronomists say that, grown in the Mediterranean climate, plants in the mint family are more pungent than the same varieties in the US midwest.
• In almost any restaurant or café, you can order "tay eem nana," tea with fresh mint.
  At a sidewalk café I drink "limonana gahrooss." Delicious!
• Peel a lemon, being careful to remove all the white pith. Remove the seeds. Put it in the blender with lots of fresh mint. Separately dissolve sugar in water. Add the syrup and blend. Adjust proportions to your taste. Freeze until just barely solid. Blend again and pour. Almost as good.
• for a sensuous dessert, boil mint int heavy cream. lower the heat, stir in dark chocolate, pour in tiny cups, chill. Eat slowly.
• See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/juice.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/cheesecake.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/unexpected-february-entertainment.html

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Not Jaywalking

• Aside from the physical danger and the psychological (the guilt of imposing undeserved guilt on the law-abiding driver who'd knock me over), I'm kept witing for the walk light by the sight of the traffic cops writing a ticket for a pedistrian across the street.
• At crosswalks where there is no light, pedestrians have the right of way. I step off the curb and look both ways. The approaching car stops. The driver looks angry that I haven't just crossed briskly.
• At the end of Ramban, at the five-street intersection where it changes its name to Agron at King George V, and King George changes to Keren HaYesod, with ben Maimon (HaRambam) slipping in at the top of Derekh Azza ( http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/two-horses.html ) above Gahn Ahtsmaoot -- Independence Park ( http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/fantastic-animals.html ), cars block the crosswalk when I have the walk light. I weave around taxis and buses with due caution. Otherwise I'd keep waiting, while the lights cycled, until rush hour’s end.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Juice

• Juice vendors throughout the city squeeze fruit and vegetable juice to order. Fresh fruit temptation (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html ) makes choosing difficult at the tiny bars, open to the sidewalk.
• Melon is very sweet. It’s good with orange. Persimmon (each fruit in its season) is also extra sweet. I look on it as dessert.
• Pointing always works, and English often. Orange=top-ooz- eem. Melon=mee-lone. Persimmon=ah-far-see-moan.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Trains

• From Jerusalem to Beit Shemesh, the train winds down Nahal Soreq through gorgeous, and mostly undeveloped, hills. Don’t bring reading material or games. Just keep looking out the window.
• The train station, near the giant Malha mall, is large, immaculate, and empty.
• Trains run once an hour. It’s 40 minutes to Beit Shemesh where the train station is tiny and immaculate. Go out the other side, up the steps, and across the street to the shopping center if you don’t want to wait in the station for the next train up to Jerusalem.
• On the way back, feast your eyes again. Two trains a day stop at the Biblical Zoo before continuing on.
• The round trip ticket costs about two dollars and a quarter. Choose the English option on the ticket dispensing machine. Pay with cash or credit card. You need the ticket to get onto the platform and again at the other end. Occasionally a conductor on the train asks to see the ticket.
• The 4, 6, 18 (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/katamonim.html ), and 24 buses go directly to the train station. There are always taxis waiting.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Yoel Moshe Salomon

• Yoel Moshe Salomon is the subject of a catchy ballad and the name of a pedestrian street running from Kikar Tsiohn southward. (Cars do drive on that first block.) If you are walking away from the square, a left turn, anywhere, takes you into the kind of paths and byways tourists brag about finding (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/lanes.html ).
• Built at the end of the 1800s, this neighborhood's streets are too narrow for carriages, let alone cars. Even donkeys would have trouble with the stairs leading from one alley to another. Stroll through another age, even the sounds of modernity blocked by stone walls, until a twist and turn put you on Yafo street, which has existed and adapted for as many thousands of years as there have been Jerusalem in the hills and Yafo on the coast.
• http://www.hebrewsongs.com/?song=habaladahalyoelmoshesalomon has a song about Yoel Moshe Salomon.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Trompe L’Oeil

• Walk northwest down Agrippas from shouk Mahaneh Yehuda (away from the Ben Yehuda Midrahov and towards Binyanei HaUma) just past the point where the street changes its name to Shmuel Baruch. Turn around and look back towards the market.
• Ahead of you, on the left, a trompe l’oeil mural covers the wall of a five- story building. (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/mural.html describes another tompe l'oeil mural.) Along the bottom the painter has made a blue-flowered weed grow. To the right you see a portal in the stone wall, the lion of Judah on its lintel. A vendor displays fish. Another piles fruit on his table. The shouk stretches to imagined Judean Hills.
• On the ground floor of the building is a bakery. I blink. It is part of the mural.
• Far up on the wall, a woman leans, unmoving, over a railing to beat a rug. The pictured rail continues to reality. Around the building’s corner, a woman stands on her balcony. She is as real as the TV antenna on the roof, and she probably has a vacuum cleaner.
• The mural is the work of http://www.cite-creation.fr/ Lyon, France.
• If you come up the street from Sderot Ben Zvi before you see the shouk, you may think the picture more beautiful than the market itself. Though idealized, it is not more lovely.
• Trompe l'oeil fools the eyes but not the nose and ears. Mint, green onions, peaches, and the aroms of Iraqi cooking perfume the real market. People talk in tens of languages, while vendors shout instructions to porters, prices to potential customers, and greetings to old friends. (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/shesek.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/unexpected-february-entertainment.html )

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Mural

• Walking down Rehov Yafo from Shouk Mahaneh Yehudah (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/unexpected-february-entertainment.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/shesek.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html ), past the bus stop and before Davidka Square, ahead of you to your right, you will see a five-story high mural, drawn to look like photographs on a bulletin board.
• On the left, are girls and women from the Alliance Israelite Universelle school, founded toward the end the nineteenth century to provide an education that combined Torah study with vocational training. For the girls, work with textiles was important to the curriculum. The school promised they would produce cloth as good as that from Damascus.
• On the right are the men and boys, who learned metalworking and other trades. One picture shows a workshop for painting and sculpture, but I have not yet discovered anything about those classes.
• French was the language of instruction.
• The same organization (Kol Yisrael Hkhaverim or Kiahkh) opened schools elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire and in Morocco.
• At the time, Jewish religious leaders warned that a secular education would draw children away from religion. Parents liked the school, it had an excellent principal, and its students learned well, so it succeeded. In one picture the girls, smiling for a class photograph, are bare-kneed in what look like 1940s school uniforms.
• One of the school’s two buildings was torn down. Its gate sits in the middle of a wide part of the sidewalk, about a half a block farther down Yafo, across Kiahkh Street. Set Paralell to Yafo, the gate is easy to miss. The other building is now a vocational school for haredi men.
• The mural is the work of http://www.cite-creation.fr/ Lyon, France. (See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/trompe-loeil.html ).

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Emek Refaim

• Emek Refaim Street, with the neighborhoods around it, is a Jerusalem gem. Plans are to ruin it.
• The area includes HaMoshava HaGermani, also known as the German Colony or HaMoshava ( http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/bus-4-names.html ), which German Protestant pilgrims built in the late 1800s. The cafes and restaurants are so lively that foot traffic keeps the local bookstore open far into the evening. (See also http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/performing-arts-in-jerusalem.html )
• The city plans to allow a giant hotel to go up around a Templar building protected as historic. If you book a room, don’t expect to walk out of the lobby onto the colorful street of today. Progress will have faded it.

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox

Fantastic Animals

• Fantastic animals have emerged from rock in Jerusalem parks, the art of one sculptor or more, paid or not – a mystery. One is in Independence Park, very close to Agron St. Another is in the park on Elazar HaModai, next to Beit Elisheva. (http://www.e-map.co.il/eng_index.asp will help you find these.)
• http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/frogs.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/two-horses.html and http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/gazelles.html have more about Jerusalem animals live and fantastic.
• (As I write, an expert on the radio is talking about the danger of a large earthquake. Generally, he says, there is a major earthwuake in the area abiout every 90 years. See http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/water.html about the advice I am following.)

Copyright 2006 Jane S. Fox