How our eyes deceive us

(Sorry. I couldn’t ge this image to load) Eran Reshef: Gates 2003–2007, oil on panel (courtesy of the Israel Museum)

All art is illusion. But many artists use illusion to undermine the idea that there is a single Truth. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem,  has kicked off its summer season with an exhibition in the Ruth Youth Wing called ArTricks.

Despite the location of the exhibition and the fact that it can be appreciated by children (probably from age five or six), “there is nothing childish about it,” said curator Daniella Shalev.  In all the works shown, “the illusion is a means, not an end.”

The 80 works predictably include an abundance of familiar pieces by Escher: birds that turn into fish, two hands sketching each other, impossible sets of stairs. But there is much more. Many of the works are by Israeli artists, including a painting of a dilapidated bathroom that is so realistic it seems one could walk right in (Eran Reshef); a gigantic cauliflower made of polystyrene foam (Michael Sperer); an English landscape made of wool on plywood (Gal Weinstein); and a tire swing in which a link is missing in each of the chains (Orly Hummel).

One room contains a work by Israeli artist Buky Schwartz consisting of an upright black chair and a red chair and a yellow chair painted on the floor. When this combination is projected on the wall, it looks as though all three chairs are standing. Children sit on or “jump off” the painted chairs, and in the projection it all appears to be happening in three dimensions.

In the courtyard of the youth wing, children can choose from among a variety of activities, including cutting Moebius strips, seeing multiple reflections of themselves in paired mirrors, and peeking into an Ames room in which the tilted floor distorts the apparent size of people inside it.

My young companions enjoyed the show. So did I.

Through February 15, 2014.

Text copyright 2013 by Esther Hecht. No part of the text may be used without written permission of the author, or, in the case of the image, written permission of the IsraelMuseum.

The Turkish elephant and the Jewish question

Every world event, it seems, has its Jewish angle. So while Taksim Square is roiling with opponents of Recep Erdogan’s Islamist government in Turkey, Israeli journalists have seen fit to pull out the plum story of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s Jewish roots.

Ataturk (1881–1938) is credited with being the founder of the Turkish Republic and was its first president. He was also the initiator of reforms in every sphere of life aimed at making Turkey a modern nation-state.

It was a time of “firsts” in the Ottoman Empire. In Palestine, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) was busy making Hebrew the living language of Jews in the Land of Israel, inventing words by the bushel for things and concepts that did not exist in biblical and talmudic times, and he was the author of the first modern Hebrew dictionary. As part of his project, he spoke only Hebrew to his wife and children.

Ben-Yehuda’s first child, Itamar Ben-Avi (1882–1943), was the first native speaker of Hebrew in a millennium. He became a journalist, writing for his father’s newspaper, HaZvi (“the gazelle”), and then editing another paper, Doar Hayom (“the daily mail”).

In his autobiography, according to Yaron London, a veteran Israeli journalist, Ben-Avi describes meeting Mustafa Kemal (he had not yet taken the name Ataturk) twice in 1911 in the Kamenitz Hotel in Jerusalem while Ben-Avi was writing for HaZvi. Just as Ben-Yehuda was passionate about reviving Hebrew as the language of daily life, so his son was passionate about transcribing that language in Latin characters. One of the topics he discussed with Kemal was making Latin characters the alphabet for all the languages in the Ottoman Empire. Ben-Avi published two Hebrew weeklies in Latin characters, but they met an early death and his idea never caught on. But Kemal, clearly a more powerful figure, did succeed, and Ben-Avi took credit for planting the idea in the Turkish leader’s mind.

According to Ben-Avi, after drinking to their shared loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, Kemal revealed that he was descended from Sabbetai Zevi (1626–1676), who claimed to be the Jewish Messiah. Following Zevi’s conversion to Islam, many of his followers also converted but continued to practice Judaism in secret.

Kemal said that at home he had a Bible printed in Venice, and that when he was a child his father had engaged someone to teach him to read it. He then proceeded to recite, “Shema Yisrael, Adonai elohenu, Adonai ehad” (Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.)

The story appeared in the United States in The Forward in 1994 and has since been picked up by hate-mongers bent on proving that all of Turkey’s troubles stem from the “Zionist dictator” Ataturk.

This reminds me of a book, Efendi (“Sir”), by Soner Yalcin, claiming that many influential Turks are Doenmeh.  When it appeared in 2004, it sent a shiver of discomfort through the Jewish community. It was too reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Text copyright 2013 by Esther Hecht. No part of the text may be used without written permission of the author.  

 

 

The good life, in Jerusalem and Bayonne

 

Visitors inspect the crafts for sale at the old-new train station in Jerusalem.

A boy reads about the history of the Jaffa-Jerusalem rail line at the old Jerusalem station.

JERUSALEM’S OLD TRAIN STATION COMES BACK TO LIFE

Jerusalem has finally found a use for its old train station, in the heart of the city. The gabled stone building with arched doorways and the surrounding compound are the capital’s newest entertainment spot, offering cafes, restaurants, shops, crafts and food fairs, a small history museum, and free entertainment for children. A variety of tours, including a self-guided hybrid-bicycle tour, set out from the souvenir shop.

Blessedly, everything there is open on Saturday. 

Although I was afraid that the city would not have the good sense to preserve the memory of its first train (completed in 1892), I was pleasantly surprised. True, the old train station lay abandoned and neglected for many years, but even before the new entertainment area opened this month a very pleasant park was built alongside the old tracks, running west from the train station for several kilometers. It has become very popular with bike riders and walkers.

 

CHOCOLATE: IT’S IN THE GENES

I thought there had to be a reason for my chocolate addiction, and now I’ve discovered it. According to a recent Times of Israel article, Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and fleeing the Inquisition in Portugal starting in 1536 brought the knowledge of chocolate processing to France, settling on the outskirts of Bayonne, in southwestern France.

After they taught the secrets of the trade to local workers, the chocolatiers guild barred Jews from producing the sweet stuff.

This month, 500 years later, Bayonne has paid homage at its Chocolate Days festival to the Sephardic Jewish chocolate pioneers.

Michèle Kahn, the author of the novel Cacao, told the Times that little is known about how Jews got into the chocolate trade in the New World, but surmises that some must have sailed across the Atlantic with Cortes. I would look at the Jewish involvement in the sugar trade as a possible connection.

So what are my chocolate genes? There’s a family legend (on my mother’s side) that places an ancestor in Amsterdam, where many of the Jews were Sephardic. It’s as good an explanation as any.

 

CHURCH TREASURES TO DEBUT IN JERUSALEM

For centuries, European aristocrats sent tributes to Catholic churches in Jerusalem but these precious gifts were hidden away for safekeeping by the Franciscan Order in the city. Now, according to the daily Ha’aretz, these treasures—ritual objects and works of art—are to be displayed in three museums in the Old City starting in 2015. Among the items are a 13^th century Mongolian bell, an inscribed golden goblet from the Spanish king Philip III, and a ceremonial silver scepter from the Italian king Victor Emmanuel II.

 

Text and photos copyright 2013 by Esther Hecht. No part of the text or photos may be used without written permission of the author.      

 

 

 

 

Stones and water in the Holy Land

A dove pecks at grapes in a mosaic recently discovered in southern Israel. (Yael Yolovitch)

THE BEAUTY BENEATH OUR FEET

When Jacques Neguer, the Israel Antiquities Authority’s head of art conservation, told me that the Holy Land has 7,000 sites that contain mosaics, the number seemed hard to believe. He went on to say that the total area of these mosaics is more than 50,000 square meters (more than 12 acres). Beit She’an alone has 10,000 sq. m and Caesarea has 4,000 sq. m. Some of these mosaics are very basic, but some rival in quality the finest such works found in Italy, Greece and other countries.

And more mosaics, some of them spectacular, keep being uncovered here. The most recent is in Kibbutz Beit Kama, about 90 minutes’ drive southwest of Jerusalem. A Byzantine settlement (from the fourth to the sixth centuries CE) covering about 1.5 acres was found there in the course of construction of an interchange.

The mosaic was the floor of the 1,100 sq. ft. main building. It has rich geometric patterns and its corners have amphorae (jars for transporting wine), a pair of peacocks, and a pair of doves pecking at grapes on a tendril. The designs are not unusual, but the combination of a large number of them in a single mosaic is very rare.

Archaeologists are still puzzled by the presence of pools and a system of channels and pipes connecting them in front of the building, in what they believe was a Christian settlement. The excavation was directed by the IAA’s Dr. Rina Avner.

 

AND A CHILD FLOWED INTO THE WORLD

Yarden didn’t just flow into the world, she gushed in. First she knocked politely on the sluice gates, and then she just surged in. Her mother, Liat, didn’t even make it to the front door of her house to leave for the hospital.

If an online etymology is to be believed, Yarden (the Hebrew name for the Jordan River) is derived from the Hebrew root yarad, which means “descend,” or in the case of the river, “flow down.”

So, welcome, Yarden. We hope the world welcomes you with the same eagerness with which you flowed into it on the morning of May 11. We certainly do.

 

Text copyright 2013 by Esther Hecht. Photograph copyright 2013 by Yael Yolovitch. No part of the text may be used without written permission of the author.

FOUR IN JERUSALEM

MYSTERIOUS WRITING

One day, a family in the United States received a friendly but unsigned letter. For twenty years after that, a letter arrived every day.

Then, one day, the letters stopped, as mysteriously as they had started. The family never found out who the secret writer was or what the motivation was.

I recall this story from Ripley’s Believe It or Not, one of my favorite books when I was a child. I liked this story almost as much as the one about the Chinese, marching four abreast, who would never cease passing a given point (of course, long before the one-child-per-family policy). And then there was the man who could swallow his nose, the girl who gave birth at the age of eight, and the poor man who prepared his own epitaph: “I have nothing, I owe much, the rest I leave to the poor.”

A SIGN OF BETTER TIMES, PERHAPS

Today’s headline “Street signs in the city are being changed” hardly moved me. But the subhead made me laugh so hard I nearly fell off my chair: “A special municipal committee found that many signs in English contain errors.”

They needed a committee for that? And not just any committee, but a special one? Any English-speaker in town could have told you that. One doesn’t have to look far in a city in which the sign that points to the Jerusalem Magistrates Court says, in English, “Court of Peace.”

I’m not a betting woman, but I’m willing to wager that even after the “special” committee concludes its deliberations and new signs go up, any English-speaker in town will still find plenty of errors.

 

ANOTHER SIGN OF BETTER TIMES

Israel’s attorney-general, Yehuda Weinstein, has ordered all relevant government ministries to take action to end the exclusion of women from the public sphere, the Ha’aretz daily reported this week. Weinstein’s order includes an end to sex discrimination on public buses, in cemeteries, and elsewhere. No longer will it be legal to post signs saying that women must dress modestly or that they can’t walk down a particular street (and yes, this isn’t Tehran). Weinstein also called for legislation that would make the exclusion of women a criminal violation.

 

BUT AT THE WESTERN WALL, IT WAS BOTH GOOD TIMES AND BAD TIMES

After a recent precedent-setting ruling by the Jerusalem District Court that allowed women to pray at the Western Wall while wearing prayer shawls, the Women of the Wall conducted their monthly worship service ushering in the new month this morning without being harassed by the police or arrested. Instead, the police, who were out in force, formed a human chain to protect the women from a mob of ultra-Orthodox protesters, who reportedly threw water, water bottles, and other objects at the women.

The stones of the Western Wall, having seen their share of baseless hatred and human folly, merely smirked. God, as usual, was silent.

 

Text copyright 2013 by Esther Hecht. No part of the text may be used without written permission of the author.  

 

 

Strudel: A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

@

Hebrew is a wonderful language. Just think of @, which English-speakers call, rather unimaginatively, the “at sign” or “at symbol.” The only reason those names are appropriate is that the symbol was used (and perhaps still is) in commercial contexts as shorthand for “at,” as in “3 pairs of socks @ $1 each.” (Lordy, I was going to write 25 cents, but then couldn’t find a cent sign on my keyboard. What’s the world coming to?)

Hebrew, like its second cousin once removed Yiddish, is so much more expressive. In common parlance in Israel, the “at sign” is referred to as “strudel,” pronounced “shtrudel.” When I dictate my e-mail address over the phone, the second half is “strudel gmail nekuda [dot] com.” But “strudel,” fitting to a “t” the symbol it names, isn’t really Hebrew, of course. The proper Hebrew name, which you can hear used on the radio more frequently these days, is “cruchit,” which comes from the Hebrew root caf resh caf—originating in Akkadian—that signifies wrapping and binding (and also the actions involved in creating a book, so that the word for “volume” in the sense of a book is derived from it).

Many Jews are familiar with the root from the Haggadah, read at the Passover seder, which mentions how rabbis in ancient times ate the symbolic foods of the festival. One of these symbolic foods is corech: the bitter herb between two pieces of matzah—a Passover sandwich, if you wish—symbolizing the bitterness of exile and slavery (and also, paradoxically, the beginning of redemption, according to the commentary of Adin Steinsaltz). The Haggadah explains that “this is what Hillel [one of the greatest scholars in the time of Herod] did.”

“Cruchit” is simply Hebrew for strudel, which, as you know, does not contain any matzah but is made by wrapping a tasty filling—apples, sugar, cinnamon, and raisins—in a fine dough (the secrets of which, alas, my mother, who was a master baker, did not pass on to me). So, at year’s end, I’m left with a cent-less keyboard and a strudel I can’t eat. But among the year’s blessings is that ever-renewable source of psychic energy: joy in the versatility and expressiveness of Hebrew.

Text copyright 2012 by Esther Hecht. No part of the text may be used without written permission of the author.

A city for all seasons and all people

The Baha’i shrine and gardens are said to be the most-visited site in Israel.

Haifa is not just Israel’s prettiest city. It also has a major human asset: inhabitants of diverse faiths living side by side. The city’s month-long Holiday of Holidays in December celebrates this diversity through art, theater, dance, music, and food, in a grand mix of both high and low culture.

The festival began nineteen years ago, a year in which Christmas, Chanukah, and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan were said to have coincided.  (In fact, if several on-line calendars are to be believed, Ramadan fell in March that year).It is a joint venture of the municipality and Beit Hagefen, the Arab Jewish Culture Center.

Beit Hagefen uses the arts to bridge the differences between the city’s diverse populations.

Concerts, art exhibitions, street theater, and an outdoor market with jewelry, crafts, and ethnic food take place mainly in two adjacent neighborhoods—Wadi Nisnas (Mongoose Gully) and the German Colony—where the population is mostly Arab (Christian and Muslim). An enormous plastic Christmas tree, flanked by large Chanukah menorahs, stands at the foot of Hacarmel Street, the broad main thoroughfare of the German Colony. Oddly missing are Muslim symbols; a lone representative—a crescent—can be found on the walls of Beit Hagefen, in a work of art representing the houses of worship of the three religions.

Each year, some artistic installations remain, so that visitors and residents can continue to enjoy them in subsequent years. Among the most striking works are those by Haya Touma, a Kishinev-born Jewish ceramicist whose art reflects the agony of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The artist was married to the historian Emil Touma, a Christian Arab who was among the proponents of coexistence between Arabs and Jews. One of her works, on an abandoned house, consists of a sculpted door topped by a photograph of a bride and groom, perhaps from the 1930s; to the side of the door is a plaque with the hand-written inscription: “Somebody lived here until 1948.” This is a reference to events in Israel’s War of Independence.

Haya Touma’s installation in Wadi Nisnas: “Somebody Lived Here until 1948″

On the eve of the war, the city had 130,000 residents, half of them Jews and half Arabs. When the British left suddenly, on the night of April 21-22, 1948, fierce fighting ensued. The Haganah captured the Arab quarters and took over the city; all but 3,000 of the terrified Arab residents fled. That summer, by order of the then prime minister David Ben-Gurion, Haifa’s Ottoman-era walled Old City, where many of the Arabs had lived, was razed. Today, 30,000 of Haifa’s 300,000 residents are Arabs.

Oddly, the city’s biggest attractions for tourists were built by neither Arabs nor Jews. The German Colony was a settlement of Templers, Christian visionaries who first came to Palestine in the 1860s and whose Haifa village was to be one of seven in the country.

The German Colony was built by Christian visionaries.

Throughout Palestine, the Templers (not to be confused with the Knights Templar) built roads, founded modern industries, and introduced new farming methods, which made them a welcome presence. Until World War II, that is, when some became Nazi sympathizers, giving the British an excuse to deport many of them; some were exchanged for Jews held in Nazi Germany.

The Templers built houses of smoothly finished stone, with thick walls to keep out the heat and humidity of this port city. Today their buildings house restaurants, cafes, boutiques, a museum, and the offices of Arab lawyers, accountants, and physiotherapists.

One building, originally the Templers’ Appinger Hotel, is today the 40-room boutique Colony Hotel, which has retained the colorfully patterned floor tiles and furnishings reminiscent of the period.

Just above the German Colony rise the magnificent Baha’i gardens and shrine, which city representatives say is the most-visited site in Israel. The golden-domed shrine is one of the two holiest sites for the five million members of the faith. It contains the remains of the Bab, the forerunner of the founder, Baha’ullah. It is this shrine, of a faith that preaches the unity of all humanity, that is a beacon to visitors approaching Haifa by sea.

And to add to the mix, Haifa has some 2,000 Ahmedis, members of an Islamic reformist movement that originated in India in 1889 and today has several million members in 200 countries. Ahmedis say they aim to purify the term jihad, claiming that in the Quran it never appears in a context suggesting war. They believe in disseminating their religion by peaceful means and have translated the Quran into 120 languages, including Yiddish. In Haifa they live in Kababir, a neighborhood that community head Muhammad Sharif says is “truly mixed.”

Of course, not all is idyllic in Haifa. It is still recovering from tensions and unrest that accompanied the second intifada, that began in September 2000. But it is a place where it seems that serious attempts are being made to heal the rift.

And Haifa is not just a place to experience multiculturalism. It is a gateway to the north of the country, where visitors can easily spend several nights and take day tours to Tiberias, Nazareth,  Acco, Rosh Hanikra, and Caesarea. New hotels of all kinds are going up, and plans are afoot to move the port to the north, freeing the old port to be developed for tourism and entertainment, as something similar to the Tel Aviv and Jaffa port areas.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Esther Hecht. No part of the text or photos may be used without written permission of the author.

It’s not a cry of joy; it’s a scream of pain

Expressions numbered 1,4,6 show tennis player’s face on losing a point; expressions numbered 2,3,5 show a player after winning a point).
(Credit: Reuters: used with permission)

We’re not as good at interpreting facial expressions as we think we are. In a series of studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, researchers presented test groups with photos of highly intense facial expressions in a variety of real-life emotional situations. In one study, subjects saw photos of professional tennis players who had just lost or won a point.

The subjects could easily tell whether a player had won or lost the point when they saw photos of the player’s face and body, or even just the body (with the face removed). But when they were shown the face alone, their ratings were no better than chance. Nevertheless, the subjects who rated photos of the face and body were certain that it was the face and not the body that held the emotional clues.

In another study using photos of faces in intense positive and negative situations (for example orgasm or victory as opposed to grief or pain), subjects were unable to correctly identify the situation after viewing only the face. When the faces were “planted” on bodies expressing either positive or negative emotion, the subjects identified the emotions correctly, on the basis of the body.

Haifa-Acco cruise line to start operations in March 2013

Haifa, with the Baha’i Gardens and golden-domed temple in its center, is Israel’s prettiest city. Just 16 miles to the north, Acco, which has fascinating archaeological finds from the Crusader and other periods, is a gem that is often left out of crowded tourist itineraries. Now the two cities are to become more accessible to visitors thanks to a new cruise line, scheduled to begin operations on March 15, 2013.

The current plan is for two sailings a day in each direction. The ship can carry up to 220 passengers on the 30-minute trip. Both cities plan to offer combination tickets for the cruise and attractions.

Wake up and smell the … white?

There’s white light and there’s white noise. But white smells?
Weizmann Institute researchers have discovered that there really is such a thing as a white smell—that is, a combination of scents that is “neutral.” That is, it is neither pleasant nor unpleasant and is indistinguishable from another, totally different, combination of scents.

Researchers in the institute’s neurobiology department experimented with 86 scents to create a map of our range of perception and then blended the scents in various combinations. For the combinations to be indistinguishable, the components of each had to span the range of human perception and be of exactly the same intensity.

The researchers presented two scent combinations at a time to subjects and asked them to rate the similarity between them. When more scents were included in the blends, subjects tended to rate different blends as identical, even when the blends had no components in common.

The findings contravene the accepted wisdom about smell, and especially the view that our sense of smell is like a machine that detects odor molecules. The findings suggest that we perceive odors as a whole, rather than as the individual scents they comprise.

Text copyright 2012 by Esther Hecht. No part of the text may be used without written permission of the author.

Bringing Venice to Jerusalem

“My dear Ninette, I know you have a garden and I would love to delve in it,” the gondolier sang to his beloved. Making delicate circles with his fingers in imitation of historical Venetian singers, countertenor Doron Schleifer poured forth his desire to the accompaniment of a harpsichord and a Venetian mandolin (like a soprano lute, but played with a pick).

The song opened a program of secular Venetian music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, performed in costume yesterday afternoon at the Henry Crown Symphony Hall (part of the Jerusalem Theater complex). The concert was part of the Etnachta chamber music series that features outstanding musicians, most of them young Israelis.

“Cara La mia Ninetta” opened the first act of this staged concert, in which the music and lyrics expressed the excitement and comic side of falling in love, as Etnachta producer and announcer Hayuta Devir explained.

In Act Two, which reflected the conflicts and surprises of love, Schleifer appeared again alongside soprano Ye’ela Avital in the Monteverdi duet “Bel pastor.” The shepherdess coyly pestered the shepherd with her repeated questions: “Do you love me?” “How do you love me?” “But how much?” “How much?” The scene was particularly amusing because the shepherdess, decked out in long blond curls but with a stubbly beard, was none other than Schleifer; Avital played the shepherd.

Avital has a lovely, clear soprano voice, and Schleifer showed that he, like Avital, was fully capable of producing the difficult trills and flourishes of Baroque music.

The group’s musical director, Yizhar Karshon, who played the harpsichord; Amit Tiefenbrunn, who played the viola da gamba; and Avi Avital, who played the mandolin (and who has the distinction of being the first mandolin player every nominated for a classical-music Grammy), were all decked out in knee breeches and white stockings. They put me in mind of the married men of Toldos Aharon, a strict hassidic sect headquartered in Jerusalem, who wear striped gray coats, black knee breeches, and white stockings, though I doubt these Hassidim would ever be caught warbling about the pangs of earthly love.

The Etnachta series is immensely popular—yesterday’s concert filled the 750-seat hall—but it is an endangered species that producer Devir has fought vigorously to keep alive. The programs, Mondays at 5, often include works by Israeli composers, sometimes even premieres. This free series is one of Jerusalem’s best bargains.

Text copyright 2012 by Esther Hecht. No part of the text may be used without written permission of the author.

What the cranes said

Squawking and jabbering, cranes gather at the Agamon Hula pub before settling down for the night.

The cranes that glided to a landing in the bird pub in northern Israel last Wednesday squawked up a rumpus. Were they screaming “Ahmad Jabari is dead”? Absolutely not, although Jabari—the commander of Hamas’s military forces in Gaza—had just been “eliminated” (in the newspeak of Israeli media). Blissfully aware for the moment of events in Gaza, I was in the north of the country with a group of foreign journalists to learn about the semiannual bird migration.

Israel is the bridge between Europe, Asia and Africa, and at least half a billion birds cross it as they fly south in the fall and return to their homes in the spring.

On this long trip, birds need “facilities,” said Dan Alon, head of the Israel Ornithological Society. We were watching the cranes at Agamon Hula, a park and artificial wetland created with water from the Jordan River. It is one of the largest bird restaurants and hotels in the world, according to Alon.

So what were the cranes saying as they settled down in the pub? “Check out the peanuts.” “The water here is better than any beer.” “The restaurant down the road is three forks.”

According to Alon this is not a fanciful description, but rather how researchers describe the behavior of cranes before settling down for the night; they’re as sociable as people in a pub.

More than 390 species—waterfowl, birds of prey, and songbirds—pass through the Hula on their migrations. This makes Israel one of the best bird-watching sites in the world and is the reason for the annual International Hula Valley Bird Festival, hosted in mid-November by the Pastoral Hotel in Kibbutz Kfar Blum.

Birders attending the second annual International Hula Bird Festival use their gear to get closeups of the birds.

Although most of the birds continue south to Africa, many stay in Israel for the winter. But as freeloaders in agricultural areas, they are not always welcome. That is why the Jewish National Fund, which built Agamon Hula, sets out meals for the winged visitors.

More than 100,000 cranes come from Russia and Finland, and about one-third of them stay for the winter, according to Inbar Rubin, content manager at the park. They are the first to go south and they return north starting at the end of February. Storks, on the other hand, are the last to go north and can be seen flying over Israel’s skies as late as May. Storks and pelicans migrate by day in big flocks, but small birds migrate at night to avoid being seen by predators.

And whereas the storks are silent, the cranes never stop talking, Rubin said. “The females make three times as many sounds as the males,” she added.

Cranes are monogamous and migrate as a family, arriving at the crane pub in family groups of three or four. At the end of February, they court by dancing. Often one can see a whole family dancing, because courting is one of the life skills the parents must teach their young.

Pelicans whose nesting place is in Romania are an endangered species; only 65,000 of them still exist. They are the largest migrating birds in the world, with a wing span of up to 3 meters, and all of them migrate through Israel to the Blue Nile, the White Nile, and Lake Victoria.

British ecologist Tristan Reid, who had 24 endangered bird species tattooed on his arms, is a walking billboard for bird preservation.

The bird festival attracted 200 birders this fall and included tours, evening lectures, and early-morning outings for photographers. Among the participants was Thomas Krumenacker, 47, a Berlin-based journalist who is writing a book about birds in Israel and regional cooperation.

Krumenacker is fascinated by the thought of meeting a bird from Germany in Israel. “I came on a plane,” he said. “He came with his wings.”

Tristan Reid, 37, who was in Israel for the first time said, “Seeing 30,000 cranes leaving the roost in the morning.… it’s emotional.”

An ecologist from Wigton in Cumbria, England, Reid is a walking advertisement for birding and bird preservation. Although he had never had a tattoo, after a visit to Turkey where he learned about its endangered bird species, he decided to have pictures of 24 species tattooed on his arms.

And while the birders continued their idyll in the north, the journalists turned away from the beautiful, jabbering cranes and returned to the center of the country to file reports about lethal objects flying through the skies.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Esther Hecht. No part of the text or photos may be used without written permission of the author.