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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

RIDING THE FREEDOM BUS

I must not have been on a bus for a while, or perhaps the last time I just didn’t notice. But today I got on a bus and was very pleasantly surprised to see a sticker just in front of the first row of seats that said:

“Every passenger has the right to sit anywhere on the bus he chooses (with the exception of seats marked as being for people with disabilities). Harassing a passenger regarding this matter may be a criminal offense.”

The reference, of course, was to extremists in the ultra-Orthodox community who would have women sit in the back of the bus. In an attempt to attract ultra-Orthodox clients, the bus cooperative Egged instituted segregated-seating mehadrin (super-kosher) bus lines, on which women who tried to sit anywhere but the back or whose clothing was not up to ultra-Orthodox standards of modesty were harassed, harangued, and even physically assaulted.

Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled in January 2011 that enforced separation by sex on buses or in any other place of business is a violation of the Basic Law: Human Liberty and Dignity, but allowed a year to test “voluntary separation.”

I would like to think the sticker means that women are no longer being harassed (though signs on public conveyances, like the sticker on the same bus asking politely that passengers not put their feet on the seats, usually indicate that the problem is widespread). And I didn’t see a single ultra-Orthodox (or other) woman voluntarily sit in the back of the bus if a seat was vacant in the front.

C.T. SOON, I HOPE YOU’RE IN JAIL—SOON

Like most of my compatriots, especially in these trying times, I could use a financial boost. That’s why I was interested to see that the Nigerian scam has now gone multilingual. This morning I received a garbled note from Mr. C.T. Soon, purportedly chairman of the comptrolling committee of the Singapore Bank, offering me a 40% share of 100 euro and $5 million.

The novelty in this note was that it was in Hebrew. Clearly, the con artists using the Nigerian scam have cottoned on to Google Translate. It makes me wonder why they didn’t think of it sooner, but still, I have to applaud their gumption (much as I detest their aims). I’m old enough to remember receiving handwritten Nigerian scam letters, and I used to imagine classrooms of Nigerian children practicing their penmanship by copying out these missives.

Of course, Google Translate has its limitations, especially when a person has a surname like Soon. The electronic translator can’t distinguish between that proper noun and the adverb, thus making for some entertaining gibberish.

As a fellow translator commented yesterday when I showed him a particularly hilarious “translation” into English (the Hebrew word for “mirage” rendered as “fatter Morgan”), “I guess we’ll have retired before they come up with a really good machine translator.”

So at least we won’t starve, even if Mr. Soon doesn’t make us millionaires overnight.

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

Magic descends on Jerusalem’s Old City, ‘with walls and towers … girdled ’round / And … gardens bright with sinuous rills.’

A stately pleasure-dome shining with blue, green, red, and white lights has sprung up outside Jaffa Gate, at the entrance to Jerusalem’s Old City. Created for the week-long Jerusalem Light Festival by the Italian Luminarie de Cagna, the installation’s 63,000 bulbs are mounted on a frame that is as high as it is wide, like the Pantheon of ancient Rome.

The three festival routes wind through the Old City, each studded with innovative light displays. The orange route, which I followed last night, goes from Jaffa Gate through the Armenian Quarter to the Jewish Quarter. In the Armenian Quarter, the narrow street was festooned with plastic pipes lit with white and yellow LED bulbs, resembling a cross between pollen and jellyfish, created by the French group Pitaya.

At the eastern edge of the Armenian Quarter, above the remains of a 6th century CE Byzantine church, constantly rapidly patterns of white light appeared on the Old City walls, accompanied by music. This interesting work was the outcome of a collaboration between an Israeli artist, a Turkish musician, and a German light expert.

These are but a few of the very attractive installations in the festival, which include works by artists from Israel and eight European countries. The festival continues through June 14 and is open to the public free of charge. Now in its fourth year, it appears to be immensely popular: I saw thousands upon thousands of visitors, both locals (including Israelis and Palestinians) and tourists, thronging the Old City streets. A friend pointed out this week that Israel is awash with festivals, including the Israel Festival (mainly in Jerusalem) and the Opera at Masada festival, both under way now, and film festivals scheduled later in the summer in several cities, to name but a few. Judging by the crowds, they meet a need.

The Jerusalem Light Festival also includes two performances for which tickets are sold. I saw a light-and-sound show titled Currents, by the Israeli Mayumana (pronounced Mah-YOO-mana) Group. The show combines percussion, dance, acrobatics, original music and video (screened on the Old City walls). The story line (the contest between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla) was lost on me, but I very much enjoyed the show, which is the perfect complement to the light installations. I couldn’t help wondering, however, how the very loud percussion sounds were affecting the Old City residents.

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

Hila Baggio of the Israeli Opera said the singers had to contend with desert sandstorms and being too far from the conductor to see his eyes.

Performing opera in the desert is so taxing, it’s small wonder that both sopranos who were to sing Carmen at Masada were unable to appear in the dress rehearsal last Wednesday. With just a few hours’ notice, understudy Na’ama Goldman, 27, had to take over for Anna Malavesi. And the following night, at the premiere, Goldman had to step in again, this time for the last two acts, after the desert aridity left Nancy Fabiola Herrera unable to continue. It was the first time an understudy had taken over from a lead soloist in a premiere of an Israeli Opera production. But Goldman even took her death by stabbing in stride.

Hila Baggio, who played Carmen’s friend Frasquita, in an interview before the dress rehearsal named some of the difficulties of performing in the desert.

“The atmosphere is amazing, [but] we had a desert storm with sand. It’s very dry. We’re drinking like crazy. That’s the only thing we can do,” she said.

“The acoustics are not good [and] we have to rely on the sound system,” she added. Each singer must be “wired,” with a microphone hidden in the hair.

Moreover, because for this outdoor production the stage is three times the size of an opera-house stage, the singers are too far from the orchestra to be able to see the conductor’s eyes, she said. That particular problem was evident when conductor Daniel Oren stopped the action in the second act, as the robbers were plotting, and called out to an eyepatch-wearing robber, “You with the one eye, you need to watch carefully with your other eye.”

And yet, the performance of Carmen was enjoyable, and Goldman rose to the occasion in the most remarkable way. The flamenco dancers from Spain clapped, tapped, and stamped, providing plenty of color and movement, and the children’s choir was excellent. Maria Agresta sang the role of Micaela with heart-melting sweetness.

And now for the Jewish connection: Georges Bizet’s wife was Genevieve Halévy, at whose popular salon in Paris members of high society could rub shoulders with writers and intellectuals. Later her salon hosted supporters of Dreyfus, including Marcel Proust. Her cousin Ludovic Halévy co-authored the libretto for Carmen.

Opera at Masada, near the Dead Sea, is now in its third year, and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing all the productions, including Aida and Nabucco, so comparisons are inevitable. The very different style of those operas, in which everything is on a grander scale, seemed more suited to the monumental setting than Carmen. And whereas in the previous productions Masada was used as a foil to the stage set, this time the mountain simply melted into the set—a kind of Wild West with rocky hillocks.

And yet it was exciting to be there, along with the audience of 6,500. Opera at Masada is almost like a mirage, appearing suddenly in this UNESCO World Heritage Site in the desert and disappearing after two weeks, with its many tons of lighting and sound equipment, bleachers, dressing rooms, catering services, costumes, stage sets, and horses (there were 10 in this production).

Eitan Campbell, director of the Masada National Park, said it was not easy to decide to have the opera there. But he realized that a 20-acre space that had been primarily a garbage dump and a drilling site, in the buffer zone between the national park and its surroundings, could be transformed into a reception area with all the services needed by the audience and the cast.

“My primary aim was to maintain the landscape heritage,” he said. Proof that this has happened, he said, is that visitors return to Masada and say, “I was at the opera, but where is it?”

If they come back next year, they will find that the mirage has reappeared, this time in the form of Turandot.

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