Time to take a break with some beautiful panoramic images of places we love.

Tel Aviv Coast. Photo by Dana Friedlander.

Wailing Wall and Temple Mount. Photo by Noam Chen.

Sea of Galilee. Photo by Itamar Grinberg.

Ramon Crater at Sunrise. Photo by ​Dafna Tal.

Acre (Akko); St. John church. Uncredited.

Night view from Mt. Carmel, Haifa. Uncredited.

All photographs courtesy of the Israel Ministry of Tourism.

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In honor of Israel’s 65th Independence Day celebrations, Gross has decided to spread the word about his YouTube channel. Several of the videos document visits to the early settlement by dignitaries, royalty and other celebrated personages.

In this first video from 1918, Chaim Weizmann, later to be named the first President of the State of Israel, marches down the main streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem together with other heads of the Zionist Commission — Montague David Eder, Baron Israel Sieff, Sir Leon Simon, Sylvain Levi, Joseph Cowen, Aaron Aharonson, Edwin Samuel, Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, Bezalel Jaffe, David Levontin and others — most of whom today are known more as street names than as actual people.

Gross notes that, “This is probably one of the few surviving fragments of the first Hebrew film, “Judea Liberated”, by Yaacov Ben-Dov, a film whose loss was recorded by the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court in 1927. Yet, I still have hope that I will find it someday.”

The clip entitled Trumpeldor at Migdal is part of the larger 1913 film, Lives of the Jews in Eretz Yisrael, directed by Noah Sokolowski and produced by Mirograf (Odessa) et Mizrah (I. Diesengof, Odessa). The film went missing and was rediscovered in 1997 in the French national film archive, the CNC. It was then reconstructed by Gross on behalf of the Jerusalem Cinematheque and the CNC’s Eric Le Roy into a new, 60-minute long version depicting 20 Jewish communities in the pre-State Land of Israel.

The clip, Allenby in Jerusalem 1917, is part of a movie by Yaacov Ben-Dov and cameraman Harold Jeapes about the entry of General Allenby to Jerusalem following the conquest of the city by the British two days earlier. It was hoped that the British administration would put the Balfour Declaration of 1917 — viewing “with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” — into effect.

The visit by Lord Balfour on April 7, 1925 was one of the most exciting in the history of the Jewish settlement. Balfour arrived on the occasion of the opening of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. These clips show him visiting the city of Tiberias and Haifa’s Technion.

Following the 1937 death of King George V, the coronation of his son was celebrated in Haifa. Gross notes that George VI was the king who witnessed the birth of the State of Israel in 1948. The original film was directed by Nathan Axelrod Collection for Carmel Newsreels, and is presented courtesy of the Jerusalem Cinematheque.

For more historic clips, visit Yaakov Gross’ YouTube channel and the Yaakov Gross website.

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Start with a good chuckle with comedian Benji Lovitt, who presents a list of 65 things he loves about Israel.

ISRAEL21c has created a beautiful photo collage video highlighting the people and places that make this country so special.
We turned to Israeli singer-songwriter Rosi Golan for her uplifting music and called on readers to send in Israel photos that make them smile. The result: Three minutes of feel-good birthday cheer.

Here’s a round-up of some of the other Yom Ha’atzmaut 2013 videos on the Web:

• Gorgeous photos of Israel set to Matisyahu’s ‘Sunshine’ makes you want to get up and hike around the country.

• The Fountainheads — a group of young Israeli singers, dancers and musicians from the Ein Prat Academy for Leadership — released an original birthday song that has hit a positive note with YouTube viewers around the world.

• The international educational organization StandWithUs took a quirky angle and shows off 65 things the Israel advocacy group likes about Israel in just 65 seconds!

• AACI (the Association of Americans & Canadians in Israel) asked its members why they make Israel their home. For some it was about being Jewish, for others it was all about the food.

• The Ministry of Foreign Affairs celebrates 65 years of achievement.

• The UJA Federation in Canada and the US Center for Jewish Education organized video competitions for the 65th anniversary, with the winner receiving a trip to Israel. Here are two of the submissions:

• And if you’re looking for a real party to attend – in Israel or abroad – YouTube is brimming with promos for Yom Ha’atzmaut parties. The Tel Aviv Student Union presents the most original advertisement with its updated version of first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion calling on everyone in the state to celebrate.

Happy birthday, Israel!

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From the Herod exhibit at the Israel Museum

What do Shai Agnon, Lea Gottlieb and Herod all have in common? They could all be considered “greats” in their respective fields. Shai Agnon is arguably the greatest Hebrew writer (well, he certainly was at one point), Lea Gottlieb, the co-founder of Gottex, was queen of Israeli bathing suit design, and Herod…well, who built bigger and badder than the Second Temple’s main dude?

Now you can catch a “greatest hits” retrospective of all three in Israel. Maybe not in a single day, but for themed tourism, it doesn’t get more creative than this.

Start your travels modestly, in the snug home of Shai Agnon, hidden away on a hilly side street in Jerusalem’s Talpiot neighborhood. Agnon’s house has been turned into a museum. In truth, it’s really only his dining room and his library upstairs that have been preserved, but the audio tour included in the low NIS 20 price is comprehensive, telling the Nobel Prize winning author’s history in loving detail. There is a gallery of historical photographs of Agnon with various dignitaries, and you can still see the Dead Sea from the one corner in the garden that isn’t blocked by new building construction. Plan on spending about an hour.

An hour is also what you’ll need at the Holon Design Museum, where the featured exhibit until May 4 is on Lea Gottlieb whose firm Gottex created stunning, ethnically influenced swimware that, with its Middle Eastern motifs and wrap around shirts and skirts, would be just at home at a dinner party as on the beach. Indeed, some of Gottlieb’s creations were so elaborate they never made it off the runway.

The exhibit, which takes over the entire museum except for one small room dedicated to industrial design, the museum’s usual fare, presents Gottlieb’s bathing suits on models in a single, darkened space. Signage in English and Hebrew explains Gottlieb’s influences, which ranged from Arabia to Monet. An interesting note I hadn’t known previously: Gottlieb and her husband originally set out to make raincoats when the immigrated to Israel from Hungary after World War II.  Gottlieb died last year, while the exhibition was in the making. It’s NIS 35 to get in.

As famous as Agnon and Gottlieb were in their day, Herod the Great was even more so 2,000 years ago when he ruled over Israel on behalf of the Romans. The colossal new exhibition at the Israel Museum – its largest ever undertaken – transports much of Herod’s recently excavated tomb and burial site from Herodian, south of Jerusalem, to Israel’s capital.

The story of the tomb’s discovery is as compelling as Herod’s well-known building projects. Archaeologist Professor Ehud Netzer spent much of his career searching for Herod’s tomb – mostly in the wrong place – until he finally unearthed it in 2007. Netzer was deep in the process of preparing the exhibit when he tragically fell from a construction wall at Herodian and died in 2010.

The exhibit includes what is presumed to be Herod’s tomb (it was painstakingly pieced together after being smashed to bits by Jewish zealots during the Great Revolt, less than 70 years after Herod’s death) and digital recreations of what his palace and eventual burial complex would have looked like when they were complete. It is breathtaking.

The Herod exhibit (included in the regular admission price to the Israel Museum) continues until October and makes a fitting cap to a tour of Israel’s greatest hits.

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Obama said, “Now, I know that in Israel’s vibrant democracy, every word, every gesture is carefully scrutinized. (Laughter.) But I want to clear something up just so you know — any drama between me and my friend, Bibi, over the years was just a plot to create material for Eretz Nehederet. (Applause.) That’s the only thing that was going on. We just wanted to make sure the writers had good material. (Laughter.)”

Whether because of Obama or just because, Eretz Nehederet has decided to celebrate the 65th anniversary of Israeli independence — and its own 10 years of existence — with an unusual photo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Unusual because the images by photographer Eldad Raphael provide a behind the scenes look at the art, artistry and hard work that goes into making comedy look easy.

So, here is resident wild man, Yaron Berlad, in a pensive moment…

Alma Zack ready to risk her life for an underwater gag…

Mariano Edelman getting in touch with his inner Bibi…

And the cast lining up onstage.

To get an idea of Eretz Nehederet’s brand of comedic satire, here’s a clip that went viral around the world. In it, a UN mediator tries to neogiate a peace treaty between Angry Birds, pigs and well… you’ll see…

The photo exhibition, We Have A Wonderful Country runs from April 10 through April 24 at the Tel Aviv Museum. Visit the official Eretz Nehederet page or join their Facebook fan page.

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A dining room at Racha in Jerusalem

I’m not sure if the oddly wafting odor of mold, or was that mildew, emanating from the walls of Racha, a funky restaurant in the center of Jerusalem specializing in Georgian food (the country, not the U.S. state), was intended to be part of the experience.

Perhaps the smell was meant to evoke memories of the kind of small town inn one finds nestled in the foothills of the country’s Caucasus Mountain Range. More likely, it’s a remnant of the building in which Racha has settled, a mash-up of two former storerooms dating from the British Mandate period. Which is OK if the owners’ lack of scrubbing bubbles is intentional; a means of enhancing the establishment’s authenticity in contrast to casual carelessness, which would suggest a very different calculus.

No matter – the mold was entirely secondary to the food, which my wife and I ordered during a lunch visit to the restaurant this week – food which was both familiar and inventive, to at least this non-Georgian carnivore.

And carnivore you’d better be: the main courses, except for a skewered spring chicken, which my non-red meat eating partner chose, consist of beef and more beef. There are beef patties and beef stew; a couple of lamb entrees round out the cholesterol-busting menu.

The only place meat was banished: the opening salads. There the choices were eggplant, beets, and more eggplant. We started – what we choice did we have, really? – with an eggplant dish called adzhachili which was surprising both in that the promised eggplant strips were actually outnumbered by grilled onions and in the strong spice – perhaps this was the “chili” in the adzaha? We were compelled to order some crusty shutespuri, the Georgian house bread (worth the money in any case), to counter the sting.

Our second starter, beets mixed with nuts and herbs, was if anything even stronger; it would have done a fine job impersonating Yeminite schug in a falafel. If it seems like I’m complaining, you’ve read me wrong: I like my food strong and the insertion of a little heat into these dishes kept them from straying too close to the standard Israeli starter selection.

The business lunch menu is divided into options by price: NIS 79, NIS 89 and NIS 118; each includes different dishes but always with an appetizer, main course, juice, tea and Georgian cookies at the end. For an extra NIS 15, you can get one of the fried meat pastries. On recommendation of both the waiter and David Brinn, who reviewed Racha recently for The Jerusalem Post, we ordered one portion of chibureki – David described it as “fried crescents filled with spicy ground beef.” The dish is reminiscent of the pastilles you can find at Darna, a Moroccan restaurant, nearby in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound neighborhood. The combination of sugary fried dough and more red meat was my favorite part of the meal, in fact.

For main courses, my wife went with the above-mentioned spring chicken, while I chose something called shechamadi which was akin to a beef stew, with fairly fatty cholent-style beef chunks mixed with a casserole of vegetables in a sour, tomato sauce. I added my side of rice into the bowl and came away with a dish that could have come from my mother’s table but had enough ethnic twists to be something else entirely. Ditto on the chicken: shipudim are standard Israeli fare, but the spices in the Racha version were just unusual enough to keep us interested.

Which brings me back to the mold. Racha doesn’t blast your taste buds with an utterly un-Israeli dining experience, as you might have if you went out for, say, Ethiopian food. The spices were subtle but hold your attention, which was important in pushing the building’s ever-present odor aside…at least until the final tea, which our waiter said sheepishly was somehow Georgian but, if I’d demanded entry to the kitchen, would probably have found a box of ordinary Wissotsky black tea hidden in a cupboard.

Still, the combination of olfactory stimulation and a playful turn with the interior design – a medley of antique furniture, old world carpets, chandeliers and, improbably, a collection of shofars – make Racha a place to be visited during an extended trip to Jerusalem.

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My personal connection to the Warsaw Ghetto is twofold. First is my Israeli mother, who came from Polish family stock, including cousin Estherka who was one of those children that survived by hiding in the sewage tunnels and came to the pre-State Land of Israel after the war.

Second is my own work as the translator of Itamar Levin’s book Walls Around: The Plunder of Warsaw Jewry during World War II and Its Aftermath. The author’s argument is that the plunder of Jews in the Holocaust was not only a product of murder, but also a tool of murder.

What was striking about this plunder was the methodical way in which Jews were initially forced into the Ghetto, (a walled off area that did not exist prior to the Nazi occupation), and then systematically stripped of their possessions, from large items (real estate, cash holdings) to medium-sized (furniture, furs, etc.), and then — once the ghetto inhabitants had been transported to Treblinka and other extermination camps and killed — the small: clothes, shoes, glasses, teeth and hair.

Yad Vashem – The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority has prepared a new online exhibition, Voices from the Inferno. This exhibition presents video testimonies given by the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and former combatants in the uprising. This unique oral documentation sheds new light on the fate of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, with a special focus on the uprising in which 13,000 Jews were killed (some 6,000 among them were burnt alive or died from smoke inhalation). Of the remaining 50,000 residents, most were captured and shipped to concentration and extermination camps.

In the new Yad Vashem video series, the speakers describe the atmosphere in the Warsaw Ghetto following the Great Deportation of the summer of 1942: continuing aktions, certainty of death, preparing bunkers for the rebellion and storing food. Below is the first video in the series and more videos can be viewed here.

The official Opening Ceremony for Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day will take place on Sunday, April 7, 2013 at 20:00, in Warsaw Ghetto Square, Yad Vashem, Mount of Remembrance, Jerusalem.

The ceremony will be broadcast live on television on Channels 1, 2, 10 and 33, and channel 9 in Russian, and for the first time on JLTV in the United States, and by radio on Kol Israel and Galei Zahal. It will last about one hour and a quarter.

There will also be a national gathering at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum at Kibbutz Lohamei Haghetaot.

Yad Vashem calls on the public to fill in Pages of Testimony to commemorate the names of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Volunteers are available to help Holocaust survivors fill out Pages of Testimony (Call: +972 2 644 3111).

At the same time, Yad Vashem is continuing the Gathering the Fragments campaign in an effort to rescue Holocaust-related documents, artifacts, photographs and art. To donate material: collect@yadvashem.org.il or call (from outside Israel) +972-2-6443888 or (in Israel) 1-800-25-7777).

The oral history department continues to film survivor testimonies. Yad Vashem personnel travel to interview and film survivors in their own homes; the testimonies are housed in the Yad Vashem Archives. To coordinate a visit: testimonies@yadvashem.org.il or call (in Israel) +972 2 644 3752/3.

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British-born Terry will be presenting the latest in his ongoing photographic depiction of Mata in a new exhibition, “Rani Terry”, that opens today in south Tel Aviv’s Red House gallery. Terry — who studied photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem — uses a technique called orotone.

Gold pigment gives his photographs incredible detail and a red-brown hue that perhaps best represents our local climate, where the punishing summer heat causes everything, living or dead, to twist, wilt and wither in the bright sunlight…

Rocks and stones…

Thorns and brush…

Man-made iron objects rusting in the sun…

The exhibition “Rani Terry” opens tomorrow and runs through May 11 at the Red House gallery in Tel Aviv. Click here or on the small image above to download an invitation to today’s opening and for more gallery information.

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One of the holiday specialties is mofletta (also spelled mufleta, mofleta, moufleta, etc.), a thin crepe made of water, flour and oil, and eaten warm with honey or jam.

Wikipedia describes Mimouna in Israel as “[having] become a popular annual happening featuring outdoor parties, picnics and BBQs” while politely omitting the locations of said picnics, which can take place on any open patch of grass, be it a park, nature preserve or highway median strip.

In 1966, Mimouna was introduced as a national holiday and — in an extension of an already overly-long spring break — yet another day off from school. It has been adopted by other ethnic groups, mainly in the Mizrahi sector.

And therefore, Mimouna also marks the traditional photo opportunity for Israeli politicians to cozy up to the Maghreb communities in towns like Sderot that are known for their large concentrations of North African Jews.

Tradition also requires that the photos be characterized by uncomfortable “East meets West” encounters between suited Asheknazi pols trying to fit in by wearing a red tarbush, sitting on floor cushions, dancing awkwardly and, of course, eating mofletta as if they’d never tasted a pancake before.

But over the generations, this divide has become less pronounced, the photo opp has become a well-oiled machine and Mimouna has been mainstreamed to the point where it’s everyone’s holiday. At least for schoolchildren, if not for their parents who must go back to work.

The Israel Revealed to the Eye family album project, spearheaded by Yad Ben Zvi, has some wonderful photos from Mimouna in Sderot.

And for an excellent slide show of Israeli politicians getting their mofletta on, visit this post on Maariv NRG.

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