from UN News Centre

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=35473&Cr=&Cr1=

29 July 2010 –More than 6,200 children attending a summer camp in the Gaza Strip run by the United Nations agency assisting Palestinian refugees have broken their own world record for the number of kites flown at the same time.

The feat comes exactly one week after more than 7,200 children bounced basketballs simultaneously for five minutes, doubling a 2007 record set in the United States.

“We still have to await final confirmation from the Guinness Book of World Records, but according to our figures the kids have done it. What an amazing achievement – two world records in a week,” said John Ging, Director of Operations in Gaza for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

Both record-breaking events were part of the Summer Games programme organized by UNRWA in nearly 150 locations across Gaza over a period of six weeks, beginning on 12 June.   

Around a quarter of a million children participate in the Games, which include sports as well as recreational and cultural activities. This is the fourth year that UNRWA has organized the programme in Gaza, whose 1.5 million Palestinian residents have been languishing under a three-year-old Israeli blockade.

“Like children anywhere in the world, children here must have a sense of normality,” said Mr. Ging. “Despite the abnormality they face in their daily lives, today’s achievement has lifted the spirits of the entire population here in Gaza.”

Playing politics: summer camp for Gaza’s children

UN vies with Islamic Jihad and Hamas to keep hundreds of thousands entertained in summer

By Harriet Sherwood, Guardian UK, July 29, 2010

Palestinian girls at an UN Relief and Works Agency day camp on the beach in Gaza City. Boys have more options and many attend summer camps run by militant groups. Photograph: Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP The boys sitting in the shade of an awning erected on a Gaza beach are only half listening to the man addressing them through a megaphone.

After all, school’s out for the summer and there is football to be played and the sea to be swum in. Some of the 100 or so boys whisper among themselves, others are busy burying their own or a friend’s legs in the hot sand.

But when the man asks, “What is our slogan?” they snap to attention, responding in unison: “Resistance!”

This is summer in Gaza, Islamic Jihad-style. These boys are among 10,000 or so children that the militant organisation estimates attends its 50 camps. Hamas, the Islamic party which runs Gaza, claims another 100,000 children are attending 500 camps it organises; both are dwarfed by the 250,000 taking part in the United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s Summer Games across the Gaza Strip.    

Gaza’s summer camps are seen by militant organisations as an opportunity to influence a generation of children; to inculcate a duty to resist the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. UNRWA says it just wants the kids to have fun.

This year, the rivalry has taken an ugly turn with middle-of-the-night arson attacks on two UNRWA camps, one involving a death threat to the organisation’s head, John Ging. UNRWA says it doesn’t know who was responsible and has asked Hamas to investigate.

Down on the beach, Hasan Abdu, the Islamic Jihad official in charge of the summer camps programme, is telling the boys: “Anyone who makes concessions on Palestine is making concessions on the Qur’an. Palestine is our right. You are the men of the future – one of you might make history.”

When he asks who will join the resistance in the future, hands shoot up, showing the words are getting through despite the boys’ apparent inattentiveness.

The camp is named in honour of “the martyrs of the freedom flotilla”, in reference to the nine Turkish activists killed by Israeli forces while trying to break the blockade of Gaza. Many of the boys are wearing T-shirts adorned with a picture of the Mavi Marmara, the flotilla’s lead boat.

Zidan Obied, who is running this camp, explains the programme and philosophy. “We are expressing our principles as Islamic Jihad. We believe in the right of resistance and we are against peace negotiations.”

He runs through some of the daily activities: sessions on the history and geography of Palestine; readings from the Qur’an; arts and literature; drawing – “we teach them to draw maps of Palestine from the river to the sea”; lessons on the significance of Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa mosque; sports; volunteering activities such as tree-planting and clearing cemeteries; military-style marching and exercises.

This, of course, is for the boys. There are separate camps for girls, with “very limited” sporting activities. Instead they are taught crafts, such as embroidery.

“We are a conservative community, we try to avoid bad behaviour between boys and girls,” says Obied. “Dealing with girls is different.”

Many families are reluctant to allow their daughters to attend even segregated camps, whoever is running them, and across the board there is a disproportionate number of boys taking part in organised summer activities.

A few miles to the north of the Islamic Jihad beach awning, separate Hamas-run boys’ and girls’ camps are sharing the same seaside facility. The girls here are studying the Qur’an for five hours a day; the boys have a wide range of activities on offer, including football, computer skills, marching and a “sniper’s corner” where they are taught shooting as a sport.

The children are also taught about the history of the Palestinian struggle. In a society where politics and conflict is part of daily life, the notion that children should be allowed to enjoy childhood free from such burdens is incomprehensible.

“Of course we have a political agenda,” says Ahmed Nabil, a Hamas official helping to run the camp. “We believe the older generation has a duty to tell the younger generation about these issues. We are letting them play but also giving them a message. We must not let them forget that we are an occupied people.”

Israel claims the Hamas and Islamic Jihad summer camps are breeding a new generation of extremists. UNRWA declines to comment on other camps, but emphasises its own, contrasting, philosophy.

“In the highly charged, pressurised environment of Gaza, it’s important to have a space where children can just be children,” says UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness. “We want to give the children a sense of fun and normality.”

UNRWA’s camps are better organised and equipped, not surprisingly given the organisation’s resources. Under brightly coloured streamers at camp number nine, there is a high-sided portable swimming pool, bouncy castle, trampoline and volleyball net.

The girls come in the morning, the boys in the afternoon – but both follow the same programme of activities, which sometimes involve a theme of teamwork and mutual respect.

Mohammed Zyara, running the boys’ activities at the camp, says: “Our main goal is to give them a good time, keep them away from troubles and politics.”

However, he says, UNRWA does not discourage children from attending rival camps. “I’m sure some of the boys go to one kind of camp in the morning, and another in the afternoon,” he says philosophically.

Back at the Islamic Jihad camp, the political lesson is over and the boys are playing in the waves despite the 80m litres of raw or partially treated sewage discharged into the sea off Gaza every day. Under the watchful eye of camp organisers, they chorus their support for Islamic Jihad, although many have also attended UNRWA camps this summer.

Hasan Sidan, a 13-year-old whose hair and clothes are caked in sand, reassuringly reflects the priorities of most boys his age. He likes the high jump best, and “the worst thing is when they are lecturing us”. Most of all, he says, he just wants to play on the beach and have a good time.

• Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Systematically and methodically exposes the myths and lies about the Arab right to the land of Israel.

This is a phenomenal book.The research is impeccable and the narrative one of the most compelling I have ever read.This book dispels the untruths and reveals the real truth behind the creation of the State of Israel.This should be required reading for every college student studying the Middle East and for that matter for anyone who wants to be enlightened with the truth surrounding the State of Israel. I consider this one of the most important books ever written on the Middle East.

An exhaustively researched, refreshingly honest, and extraordinarily well-argued elaboration of the case for Israel. Dr. Grobman correctly observes that ‘one cannot reason with people who do not wish to be swayed by facts,’ but for those who are still open to rational discourse, this book proves from a variety of angles not only that Israel has a right to exist, but that all free people should stand with her.

Grobman’s well documented study traces the uninterrupted Jewish connection with the Holy Land from the biblical era to the present. It will undoubtedly become an important reference for scholars and laymen wishing to acquaint themselves with the truth about the Arab Israeli conflict. It is also provides readily accessible information to expose the lies and distortions promoted by those seeking to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state.

An excellent historical source for nearly 100 years of the Middle East Arab-Israeli conflict.

Available At Balfour Store

Shepherd on a Mission

By David Suissa

If ever there were an Israeli who could lead Israel to peace with its Arab neighbors, it might be the Israeli diplomat I met the other day in the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel. This is your classic Zionist. He stands tall and proud of his country, doesn’t ignore its faults, has a deep understanding of the issues from all sides and craves peace.

Of course, it helps that he’s a Muslim. Not just a Muslim, but a Bedouin Muslim.

Ishmael Khaldi’s official position is policy advisor to the Israeli foreign minister, but he’s a lot more than that. He has become a one-man hasbara machine for the Jewish state, traveling around the world to make the case for the country he loves. When he encounters anti-Israel hecklers who spout slanderous words like “apartheid state,” he has an easy answer:

“If Israel was a racist state, a Muslim like me would never have made it this far.”

This notion of going far came early for Khaldi. Until he was 8, he walked four miles to school from his tiny Bedouin village of Khawalid in the western Galilee, then the same distance to get home again. He has fond memories of the family tent, where he lived with his parents and 10 siblings. He calls the tent an “extraordinary thing,” because it was made of goat hair, which he says keeps you “warm and dry in the winters, and cool in the hot summers.”   

It wasn’t just the memories of the goat-hair tents that marked him. It was also the ancient Bedouin lifestyle and the stories he heard from his grandmother, Jidda, who passed away in 2005 at the age of 96.

Khaldi recalls an early life that revolved around caring for animals, usually goats, sheep and cows. Because the condition of the land changed with the seasons, Bedouins were always on the move, looking for somewhere to nourish their flock. Their nomadic lifestyle lasted for thousands of years. Today, Khaldi says, many Bedouins have settled in more permanent dwellings in villages.

The turning point in Khaldi’s life came when he decided, at 17, to visit America. He spent three months in New York City getting by on “one miracle after another,” including one episode when he jumped onto subway tracks to get to the other side. “Bedouins always look for the shortest route,” he says.

He met religious Jews in Brooklyn and Queens who gave him room and board. He learned what it was to be a “Shabbos goy,” but he also remembers the joys of Shabbat and listening to the Torah portion of the week.

When he returned to Israel, higher education beckoned. Bedouins today do everything in their power to send their children to university, “even if I need to sell my clothes,” his father once told him. So he enrolled at the University of Haifa, where he got a degree in political science and arranged cultural tours for overseas students, mostly Americans, to his Bedouin village.

After completing his college degree, he followed his brothers’ footsteps in the national service and rose to second sergeant in the Israeli police force. He recalls his emotion when, after completing basic training, he was handed a Quran on which to swear his oath to his country, Israel.

He says that throughout history, Bedouins lived a life of tension with governing regimes, whether Ottoman, British or Arab. His own tribe developed a good relationship with the early Jewish pioneers in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. Bedouins and kibbutzniks always had a deep affinity for one another. His grandmother even learned a little Yiddish. So it was natural, he says, to want to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces and develop a loyalty to the Jewish state.

What I found fascinating about Khaldi is that at 38, with a graduate degree from Tel Aviv University and an important position in the Foreign Ministry, he’s still a nomad at heart. He’s always on the move, going from one country and city to another, telling Israel’s side of the story. He’s even found time to write a book about his story (“A Shepherd’s Journey”).

Israel’s story is his own, he says. No one stopped him from moving up. It was his choice to wake up at 3:30 in the morning to work to make enough money to buy a plane ticket to America. It was his choice to get an education and apply to work in public service. Israel is far from perfect, he says, but it gave him the freedom and opportunity to get where he is today.

Maybe his nomadic background has been a blessing. Nomads get attached to values, not to land or ideologies. They don’t build permanent structures; they don’t get bogged down if the land doesn’t produce. They’re used to being fluid, to moving on and looking for more fertile areas. And they never abandon their flock, or each other.

What better values for a diplomat? Loyal, practical, resourceful and travels light. Oh, and one more – respectful of his elders. This one, though, has landed him in hot water.

“My father keeps asking me when I will settle down, get married and start a family,” he says.

The only good excuse I can think of is that he’ll first need to take care of another matter – making peace between Muslims and Jews.
David Suissa is the founder of OLAM magazine, OLAM.org and a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. He can be reached at Suissa@olam.org

Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 21 Jul 2010

The cooperation agreement between the ITF and the ODIHR gives an enormous boost to Holocaust remembrance and the fight against antisemitism.

DFM Ayalon and ODIHR Director Lenarcic sign agreement (Photo: MFA)

(Communicated by the Deputy Foreign Minister’s Bureau)

This morning (21 July 2010), a cooperation agreement between the ITF (Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research) and the ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights) was signed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem, in the presence of Deputy FM Daniel Ayalon. The ODIHR is an operative branch of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe)

This year, Israel was chosen for the first time to head the ITF. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an agreement was signed today that boosts the strength of the forces in the global arena fighting against antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The agreement will bring about cooperation among 87 countries.

ITF Chairman Dan Tichon and ODIHR Director Janez Lenarcic signed the memorandum of understanding. DFM Ayalon welcomed the signing of the agreement and said that it gives an enormous boost to the fight against the delegitimization of Israel and antisemitism in the world, bringing 87 states for the first time into cooperation. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has acted, and will continue to act, against these manifestations of hate and will promote any initiative whose purpose is to eliminate them. Ayalon added that there are elements that deny the Holocaust and are preparing the next one. We must preserve the memory of the Holocaust so that similar horrors and hatred will never be repeated and the world will become a safer place.

The ITF was founded about ten years ago at the initiative of the Swedish government. Israel is heading the task force this year, with Mr. Dan Tichon, past Speaker of the Knesset, serving as the chairman and Ambassador Yakov Rozen as the political coordinator. The ITF, which has as its purpose the preservation of Holocaust remembrance through education, research and memorial sites, currently has 27 members, mostly European, and sees the cooperation agreement as very important.

The ODIHR, which has 57 members, deals with educational programs and follows up on instances of xenophobic, primarily antisemitic, hatred. For this reason, the cooperation agreement is likely to help promote Holocaust remembrance, including the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and the fight against antisemitism.

Ambassador Janez Lenarcic is a senior diplomat who in the past was advisor to the prime minister of Slovenia. The ODIHR joins six other organizations belonging to the Task Force whose representatives serve as observers: the UN, DPI, UNESCO, the EU, FRA, and the European Council.

Israel Museum gets major renovation

By ETHAN BRONNER, NY Times, July 20, 2010

JERUSALEM — The director of the Israel Museum was leading a visitor to see a provocative contemporary sculpture of a naked African youth when, stepping over protective cloths and around an exhibit of late Canaanite sarcophagi, he nearly ran into four workmen carrying the million-year-old horns of a wild bull.

The horns are the oldest items in the museum’s collection, and something about the juxtaposition of contemporary social consciousness, ancient ceremony and prehistoric beast summed up the museum’s refocused mission as it completes a three-year, $100 million renewal. As described by the director, James S. Snyder, the museum offers a series of unexpected aesthetic links across cultures and their histories, like the way 2,000-year-old carved ritual cups that are on view in the museum near the Dead Sea Scrolls are somehow evocative of Brancusi.

For the last 45 years, the Israel Museum has been both the crown jewel of this country’s cultural heritage and a bit of a mess. It has the most extensive holdings of land-of-Israel archaeology anywhere (including a heel bone pierced by an iron nail with wood fragments, the world’s only physical evidence of crucifixion), an encyclopedic collection of Judaica and an exceptional group of Modernist artworks. It sits on a 20-acre campus atop a hill at Jerusalem’s western entrance, holding pride of place along with the architectural and national landmarks that surround it, including the Knesset, or parliament, and the Supreme Court.

But as any past visitor can attest, finding one’s way around the museum’s art and archaeology has not been easy. Visits have begun with an uphill trek from a parking lot exposed to the hot sun and, inside the galleries, a feeling of being overwhelmed by quantity and mildly perplexed about substance.  

That is about to change. On Monday the museum opens new galleries and public spaces. There will be far fewer objects on display, with twice the space to view them, as well as richer links and explanations. In some of the new spaces soft light enters through filtered glass walls, the Jerusalem landscape a dreamy background presence. And a climate-controlled path leads to a central concourse from which the works can be reached.

The idea is not simply to make the museum easier to navigate but also to suggest interesting connections among objects and between the particular and the universal. That is never an easy task in this city of stones, where each culture has long sought dominance and where the interplay between preservation and transformation causes endless heartache.

And today, here in the capital of the Jewish state, there is a tendency to see the world purely through Jewish history and culture. That is precisely what Mr. Snyder, an American Jew who spent 22 years at the Museum of Modern Art, has sought to avoid. Rather, he has emphasized the commonalities of cultures and tried to place Jewish history and practices in a broader and clearer context.

One example is a new display that focuses on the Byzantine era. On one side is a restored synagogue; next to it are a church and the prayer niche of a mosque. Roughly contemporary structures, they are placed in a way that highlights both their distinctiveness and their commonality.

Meanwhile, the sections that used to be devoted to Judaica and Jewish ethnography are now merged into “Jewish Art and Life,” connecting the secular with the religious. The Judaica gallery used to feed inexplicably into French Impressionism. Now it sits near costumes and jewelry of the Jewish world and the early sources for modern art in Israel. A narrative arc takes shape.

“A lot of Israelis consider Tel Aviv to be the center of the country’s culture, but Jerusalem is the center of the world,” Mr. Snyder said. “It’s a bridge that connects Africa, Asia and Europe, a multicultural city, and I feel the power of that every day.”

As part of the renovation, the museum commissioned a sculpture by the Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor that stands at the top of the campus. A 16-foot-tall polished-steel hourglass called “Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem,” it reflects and reverses the Jerusalem sky and the museum’s landscape, a likely reference to the city’s duality of celestial and earthly, holy and profane.

When Mr. Snyder arrived in 1996 to consider becoming the museum’s director, he had never been here before. He was stunned at the power of the museum’s site, built like a modular Mediterranean village in an intensely Modernist style. But he felt it was an unrealized vision and set himself the task of finishing it during his tenure. In his 13 years on the job, he has added a huge and hugely popular outdoor model of how Jerusalem is thought to have looked 2,000 years ago and has groomed and expanded the campus and its celebrated Billy Rose Art Garden, a Middle Eastern hillside with Western works by Rodin, Picasso, Henry Moore and Claes Oldenberg. The Shrine of the Book, containing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known surviving copies of biblical documents, sits next to it.

The renewal has been led by James Carpenter Design Associates of New York and Efrat-Kowalsky Architects of Tel Aviv, and their goal has been to respect the architecture originally designed by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad in the late 1950s.

Mr. Snyder raised the money around the world and has added important pieces and collections. And now he has completed, on time and on budget, the biggest cultural development project in the country’s history.

To some here, that makes him a local hero. But Mr. Snyder, 58, is also an anomaly, and many people do not know what to make of him. He has never acquired Israeli citizenship or learned more than basic Hebrew. In a country where dressing up often means donning a clean T-shirt, he has kept the look of an Ivy League professor of a generation ago: tortoiseshell glasses, perfectly knotted knit tie, herringbone jacket and a crown of coiffed silver hair.

In a society built on the idea that Jews here have come home, Mr. Snyder has caused some consternation. He says his contribution to Israel is to help build a world-class institution and to urge the society to look toward the universal rather than the provincial.

He has also reached out to Israeli Arabs, recruiting the first Arab member to the executive committee of the museum’s Israeli Friends group and extending educational projects to Arab school groups beyond Jerusalem, including sponsoring a Jewish-Arab sculpture project among the youth of Umm al Fahm, one of Israel’s largest Arab cities. He plans to do similar work in Nazareth next year.

In the newly expanded museum, there is much more room for temporary exhibits. For the rest of the year, three of those galleries have been given over to Zvi Goldstein, Yinka Shonibare and Susan Hiller — an Israeli, a British-Nigerian and a London-based American — with each asked to do an installation using anything in the museum’s collection of some 500,000 pieces.

The other day, as Mr. Snyder was avoiding the ancient bull horns, Mr. Goldstein was hard at work in his room. He had been filling it for 18 months, he said, and the objects he was mounting included drills and spears, furniture, paintings and a urinal. He selected 600 pieces for his installation.

“The goal is to show how pieces of material culture shift in meaning over time,” he said, “how they can make surprising connections.”

Mr. Snyder could not have said it better himself.

Western coverage of the situation there seldom mentions the aid convoys and never mentions the new air-conditioned mall, resort hotels, spas, restaurants and busy markets.

A shopping mall opened in Gaza City last weekend. It is called, appropriately enough, Gaza Mall and even has a website complete with a catchy logo, and ads for “Israeli men’s trousers at an attractive price” and shirts from the United States.

There’s nothing remarkable about this, you say. New malls open all the time all around the world.

But think about it: One of the main complaints international organizations have against the Israeli blockade of Gaza is that construction materials, supposedly, are not getting through. Gazans are allegedly forced to live in dilapidated apartments and houses because big, bad Israel will not let cement mix and rebar pass its lines.

So just where did the materials come from to build Gaza Mall?

Admittedly, online descriptions of the mall as a “luxury” shopping centre are a bit over the top, although I suppose such descriptions are relative. (The first suburban shopping centres in Canada in the 1950s, while dwarfed by today’s mega-malls, must have seemed like palaces of commerce compared with the downtown department stores of the day.)

You can see photos of the Gaza Mall grand opening at the Palestinian Authority’s Safa website (safa. ps) or the website of photojournalist Tom Gross — tomgrossmedia. com. Note the tinsel streamers, balloons and mascots. If you look closely at the photos, you see a simple, two-storey collection of brightly lit but plain shops, apparently run by local merchants rather than the large chain stores that populate North American and European (and Israeli) malls.    

There is a single staircase in the centre–no escalator. However, according to the mall’s promotional material, there is “air conditioning, a parking lot, security guards, a full-service supermarket and a food court.”

Wait a minute, did the mall website say air conditioning!? It did. Somehow, despite the death grip Israel is supposed to have around the throats of poor, vulnerable Palestinians, the grip that we are told leaves Palestinians wanting for food and medicine, the stranglehold that has led to “concentration camp” conditions inside Gaza could not prevent the developers of Gaza Mall from finding commercial air conditioners to cool their building.

And what about the Israeli pants that are specially priced during the grand opening sale? Or the American shirts?

Israel and the United States are supposed to be the enemies of the Palestinians. Every week in their Friday sermons to the faithful, Palestinian imams spew out the most hateful claims against the “Zionists” and their sympathizers in Washington. Prayers are offered for the destruction of Israel and martyrdom is assured for all those who attack the Great Satan. (By the way, none of this has been tempered as a result of Barack Obama’s obsequious outreach to Muslim leaders and nations.)

Yet on the first days the doors opened at Gaza Mall, two of the big come-ons were pants made by the running, pig-dog Zionists and shirts from the decadent, imperialistic West. It all puts me in mind of the Cold War tales of ordinary Soviets trading away goods they’d had to work months to afford, just for a pair of black-market Levi jeans.

There is undoubtedly a lot of very real suffering and deprivation in Gaza, but as the Israeli Foreign Ministry pointed out recently, nearly 11,000 Gazans received free treatment for their diseases or injuries in Israeli hospitals last year and tons of food and medical supplies. Potable water and aid make their way to Gaza every day through Israel. Indeed, much of the food and aid originates in Israel.

The reason Israel was keen to interdict the Turkish flotilla in May was not so it could pile on the misery of Gazans; Israel lets scores of aid shipments in every day. It merely wanted a chance to offload the flotilla’s cargo and check it for weapons that could be used against it by Gaza’s terrorist rulers, Hamas.

When you are on Tom Gross’s page about Gaza Mall, scroll down to near the bottom where he has pictures of bustling Palestinian markets bursting with fresh fruit and vegetables.

I won’t try to argue that everything is happy and easy in Gaza. But Western coverage of the situation there seldom mentions the aid convoys and never mentions the new air-conditioned mall, resort hotels, spas, restaurants and busy markets.

National Post

lgunter@shaw.ca

Project aiming to preserve remnants of Jewish life around globe under threat due to budget cuts

By Tzofia Hirschfeld, YNet News, July 21, 2010

The Jewish people’s personal belongings are scattered all over the world: It has synagogues, prayer books, tombstones and cemeteries in various countries. Jews no longer reside in some of these places, and all they left behind is slowly disintegrating.

The “Journey to Jewish Heritage” project, initiated by Beit Avi Chai and the Zalman Shazar Center, aims to locate and document the remnants of Jewish life. Budgetary constraints now threaten the project’s existence, and if it is shut down, an entire world will be lost with it.

“We may be losing out last chance to document important evidence of Jewish existence in the Diaspora,” said Hannah Holland, the project’s director. “We are talking about disappearing communities – some of them diminished because of the Holocaust, some of them because of emigration. When we visit these places, we are met with remains of a splendid past and try to salvage last pieces of evidence of what once was, but now is gone.  

Wall painting uncovered in Chernivtsi synagogue (Photo: Avital Vibran)

“Beyond that, the program also gives students from Israel the opportunity to take part in a very moving encounter with people and places that are part of their people’s history. Students of all different backgrounds take part in this project – religious, secular, new immigrants, old immigrants, Israel-born. They come from a variety of academic fields: Architecture, painting, photography, history, and more.

Uncovering ancient tombstone in Greece (Photo: Tomer Appelbaum)

“After the training they receive with us, they go to document the disappearing communities and this gives them the rare opportunity to create a very strong connection to their people. They are given the chance to feel rare books with their own hands, to touch tombstones, to enter ancient synagogues – and this chance will be lost.”

Time is an important factor in the journey that Holland takes with the students. Time is not kind to the memories, and it eats away at them and breaks them to pieces. Each year, less is left.

“What we find today is not what could be found 10 years ago,” Holland said. “Last summer we uncovered a beautiful wall painting in a synagogue in Chernivtsi, which is now in the hands of the Evangelical Church. This painting is no longer there. Our documentation is the only documentation of it.

“The same applies to tombstones. In one of the places we found a tombstone from the 15th century, and in another place a student uncovered his grandmother’s tombstone by chance. In Georgia, we documented an ancient synagogue that may not still be standing. This project, in many cases, is the last chance.”

Indian States Worse Than Africa, A New Poverty Index Finds

The Link, July 17, 2010

http://www.thelinkpaper.ca/?p=1612

Amidst acute poverty across South Asia, the five states of Delhi, Kerala, Goa, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh have the least number of poor people in India, according to a new measure of global poverty developed at the University of Oxford for the UNDP.

The new measure, called the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), has been developed and applied by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI).

It will be featured in the 20th anniversary edition of the UNDP Human Development Report.

An analysis using MPI reveals South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have comparable intensities of poverty, according to an OPHI paper, Acute Multidimensional Poverty: A New Index for Developing Countries.

In terms of human lives, South Asia has the world’s highest levels of poverty.

Fifty-one percent of Pakistan’s population is MPI poor, 58 percent in Bangladesh, 55 percent in India, and 65 percent in Nepal.

The analysis states: “Delhi has an MPI equivalent to Iraq (which ranks 45), whereas Bihar’s MPI is similar to Guinea’s (the 8th poorest country in the ranking). 

“In terms of headcount, in Delhi and Kerala 14 percent and 16 percent of the population are MPI poor, in Jharkhand 77 percent of population are MPI poor and in Bihar, 81 percent.”

Other states with the least number of poor are Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Haryana and Gujarat.

The analysis by MPI creators reveals that there are more ‘MPI poor’ people in eight Indian states (421 million in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal) than in the 26 poorest African countries combined (410 million).

“…The population of the poorest state Bihar, with 95 million people, exceeds the sum of nine of the 10 poorest African countries,” authors Sabina Alkire and Maria Emma Santos say.