Tel Aviv celebrates 'White Night'

Article on Ynetnews May 28, 2009
By Josh Lichtenstein

Third annual festival honoring city's status as World Heritage Site marked with night of partying. Restaurants, bars, cafés remain open all night, with free concerts and cultural activities across city.

On Wednesday night Tel Aviv celebrated its third annual “White Night” festival with parties and special events throughout the city. Bars, restaurants, and cultural institutions kept their doors open late into the night creating a vibrant atmosphere across the city.

The city has been holding the event for the past three years to celebrate its UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) status as a World Heritage Site.
Tel Aviv has been recognized around the world for its beautiful Bauhaus style architecture and rich cultural heritage. Lining Rothschild Boulevard and Bialik Street, buildings were illuminated with special lighting. The city offered guided tours of the architecture along Bialik street. The streets were filled with people, many dressed in white, all joining together to party in beautiful Tel Aviv.

So much to see

Throughout Tel Aviv cultural events took place late into the night. Most of the events were free to the public , which allowed more people to take part. In the station complex of the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, the Gesher Theatre company performed selected acts from William Shakespeare's “The Twelfth Night”. In the Sharon Garden of Hahashmal Park, Israeli Opera soloists performed a special concert of Israeli songs accompanied by piano. Elsewhere, the Tel Aviv Opera House presented a midnight showing of a selection of popular operas.

The flea market in Jaffa stayed open late allowing shoppers to wonder through art galleries, restaurants, and cafes. The biggest parties took place along the beach where people danced and partied to the sound of live music and deejays. Mante Ray beach held a huge free party sponsored by Club Med with free music and dancing. Bars and cafes near the water were packed with people. There was an amazing amount of energy in the air with the all the activities going on throughout the city.

Incredible nightlife

Gabriel Rosenberg, a Tel Aviv resident who recently moved to the city, described his first “White Night” experience to Ynet saying, “White night is an unbelievable event where people from all around Tel Aviv can get together and enjoy incredible nightlife and an atmosphere that compares to no other place on earth. Where else can you find so many beautiful people and live music in one place, together with such amazing weather?“

The city of Tel Aviv invested NIS 350,000 (roughly $90,000) in this year's events. Surprisingly, the Florentine neighborhood, which is a major party hub during Purim and Independence Day celebrations, did not hold any events.

Elbit Systems wins €25m order from Austrian Army

Article on GLOBES [online] May 18, 2009
By Globes' correspondent

The company will supply 12.7mm remote controlled weapon stations for jeeps.

Elbit Systems Ltd. has won a €25 million contract from the Austrian Army for the company's new 12.7mm unmanned electrically remote controlled weapon stations. Deliveries will be made over the next four years.

This is Elbit Systems' third international contract within a week.

Elbit Systems Ltd. logo

Elbit Systems signed the contract with Fiat Group SpA (Milan: F) subsidiary Iveco SpA, the prime contractor for the program. The weapon stations will be integrated into Iveco Defense Vehicles' 4x4 Light Multi-role Vehicles jeeps.

The weapon stations include day and night detection systems and a multi-threat detection system that can detect, categorize and pinpoint laser, radar, and radio-frequency sources of threats. The weapon stations are designed for light combat vehicles, adding sensors and firepower, without greatly increasing the vehicle's weight.

Elbit Systems Land and C4I Tadiran general manager Bezhalel (Butzi) Machlis said, "We are proud to have been selected to take part in this important project for the Austrian Armed Forces. Elbit Systems' co-operation with Iveco Defence Vehicles reflects the level of recognition we have achieved with our customers and international partners. The selection of our systems constitutes a breakthrough in an emerging international market emanating from a shift in the modern battlefield."

Arad takes a personal approach to promote itself as 'recycling city'

Article on The Jerusalem Post May 16, 2009
By Ehud Zion Waldoks

Arad has launched a project to rebrand itself as the "recycling city." The Negev town has begun to encourage all forms of recycling, from paper and plastic to old clothes.

Yet what is unique about the project are not the technical aspects. Their tools are the same as in other Israeli cities: cages for plastic bottles, containers for batteries and cylinders for paper. There are no advanced technological elements.

Instead, the focus of the project is on the people: on cooperation and collaboration.

Arad Municipality building

The project began as an unusual collaboration among a foreign donor, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the Environmental Protection Ministry, the local environmental unit, the municipality and the Or Movement, which seeks to encourage settlement in the Negev.

The idea was first raised by Jay Ruderman, president of the Ruderman Family Charitable Foundation out of Boston. Ruderman runs all of his family foundation's day-to-day activities from Israel, having made aliya three-and-a-half years ago.

"Where I lived [in Boston] we were recycling everything. So I tried to think of a way to improve recycling in Israel," he told The Jerusalem Post recently. "We approached the JNF because they have a project to develop the Negev. We shopped the idea around and Arad was the most interested."

This is the foundation's first foray into an environmental education endeavor, but Ruderman hopes it will become a model which can be replicated across the Negev and throughout Israel.

The foundation has been active in other types of educational activities both here and in the Boston area.

For Ruderman, the partnership aspects were critical.

"Partnerships maximize what you can do," he said.

JNF CEO Russell Robinson sees a similar potential in the program.

"The Negev is the new frontier for the 21st century. The Negev is languishing. Arad went from a middle-class city to a depressed one. Beersheba was losing its population until two years ago.

"You need to bring 500,000 people in the next 10 to 15 years. People need to take pride in their community and their city and this kind of project could do that.

"Recycling is very tangible - the visual of all the plastic bottles collected brings better understanding. And of course, if it works in Arad, it can be replicated elsewhere," he told the Post.

All across the South, Robinson pointed out, environmental projects are beginning to sprout up in the scattered communities. The JNF has invested significant sums in various projects and plans to continue to invest in the upcoming years.

"There's the Timna National Park which brings in 250,000-300,000 visitors. Kibbutz Lotan is an environmental showcase. There's a farmers market in Yahel and our idea is to create a bike path from Yahel to Eilat with kiosks at every stop," he said.

The JNF plans to invest $2m.-$3m. in that project.

Nitzana has also moved to adopt ecological principles with a recycling teaching center and other aspects.

In addition to the collaborative nature of its conception and inception, the Arad recycling program focuses on tailoring recycling to the needs of the city's individual communities. Instead of just placing cages and containers around the city and running a PR campaign, the planners have involved the public from the very first.

"We started off by holding a public hearing about the project. There were 750 seats and every one of them was filled," Ayala Guber-Avrahamy of the Eastern Negev Environmental Unit recalled. The unit services Arad, Tamar, and Yeroham.

Since the hearing, the public has been involved with every aspect of planning and execution. It's a bottom-up model, rather than top down, Guber-Avrahamy said.

"Our success is measured by our ability to involve the community, to get them to understand the value added," she said. A community-based process is considered more sustainable in the long run, according to community organizing professionals.

Moreover, since recycling is largely based on citizens' willingness to participate and separate their garbage at home, it's particularly amenable to the planners' strategy.

"We met with every community in order to understand what their needs were," said Svivotichnun's Hagit Naalei Yosef, whose firm was brought in to plan the program.

"Sometimes the community doesn't connect to the collection receptacles, and sometimes they are in the wrong place," she noted.

"When we talked to the community of people with disabilities, for example, they mentioned that the holes in the cages for plastic bottles were too high for them," Guber-Avrahamy said.

"They also suggested that pupils who have to fulfill their community service obligations could come by their houses on a regular basis to pick up all sorts of plastic to recycle," Naalei Yosef said.

The local haredi community is also involved.

"In the Gur Hassidic community, they recycle pregnancy clothes. At one of the local schools, we've started a uniform-shirt recycling program, where pupils bring the shirts they've outgrown for the younger ones," Guber-Avrahamy added.

To the best of her knowledge, Guber-Avrahamy said, a community involvement model like this hasn't been tried anywhere else in Israel to encourage recycling.

Looking to the future, Guber-Avrahamy said they were in talks with a plastic recycling company about recycling types of plastic other than plastic bottles.

"They work with a lot of factories, but they've never worked with a municipality before," she said, "We're thinking about having the sorting done by people with special needs."

Stolen 2,000-Year-Old Hebrew Papyrus Recovered

Article on Arutz Sheva May 6, 2009
By Hillel Fendel

A 2,000-year-old Hebrew document has been recovered by police and antiquities authorities, shedding light on post-Temple Jewish life in the Land of Israel.

The 15x15 cm (6x6 inch) papyrus is 15 lines long, and is clearly dated, “Year 4 to the destruction of Israel.” Archaeologists say this refers to either 74 CE, four years after the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans, or the year 139 CE, after the destruction of rural settlement in Judah following the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

Amir Ganor, director of the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery in the Israel Antiquities Authority, told Israel National News, “We heard about this papyrus several months ago, and after investigation by the police and the other units involved, we finally reached the right people this past week." Asked when it was found and removed from the ground, he said, "It still has pieces of earth on it, and since it was offered for sale in recent months, it is likely that it was found in the very recent past.”

Asked if he knew where it was found, Ganor said, “The best climatic conditions for preserving documents of this nature for so many centuries are in the Judean Desert, and so that is our assumption.” The investigation as to where and how the papyrus was found continues.

The recovery of the document was the culmination of an operation led by the Intelligence Office of the Zion [central Jerusalem] Region and the Undercover Unit of the Jerusalem Border Police, in cooperation with the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery and the Archaeological Staff Officer in the Civil Administration.

“It appears that we are dealing with rare historic evidence regarding the Jewish people in their country from more than 2,000 years ago,” Ganor summed up.

The document is written in ancient Hebrew script characteristic of the Second Temple period. This style of the writing is primarily known from the Dead Sea scrolls and various inscriptions that occur on ossuaries and coffins. The papyrus is incomplete and was in all likelihood rolled up; pieces of it crumbled, mainly along its bottom and left sides. The name of a woman, “Miriam barat [Aramaic for ‘daughter of’] Yaakov” is also legible in the document, followed by a name that is likely to be that of the village in which she lived: Misalev, believed to be Salabim and possibly the present-day Kibbutz Shaalvim in the Ayalon Valley.

Also mentioned in the document are the names of other people and families, the names of a number of other villages from the Second Temple period, and legal wording dealing with the property of a widow and her relinquishment of it.

Ganor says that the document is "95%" believed to be authentic and ancient, “based on the epigraphic style, the material the document is written on, the state of preservation and the text, which includes a historic date that can be deciphered.” However, “since this object was not discovered in a proper archaeological excavation, it still must undergo laboratory analyses in order to negate the possibility it is a modern forgery.”

“The document is very important from the standpoint of historical and national research,” Ganor stated. “Until now, almost no historic scrolls or documents from this period have been discovered in proper archaeological excavations… The deciphering of the entire document by expert epigraphers and historians may shed light on how the people of the period managed their affairs and supplement our knowledge about their way of life. What we have here is rare historic evidence about the Jewish people in their country from more than 2,000 years ago, during the days following the destruction which sent the people of Israel into exile for a very long time – until the creation of the State of Israel.”