Opening Today, the New Israel National Library

 

These east windows reflect the landscape in the next photo.
To reach the entrance, walk very far along the lefthand side

Looks like an amphitheater at this end (the east end)

I went walking in the last hours before Shabbat began about a month ago, I wanted to be alone with my camera and I was. The site of the new library is across the valley from my home, just a couple of bus stops.  Not much of it can be seen from my side. Some trees get in the way. As I see it it’s a giant skateboard ramp, one Paul Bunyan would have used had he ever thought of skateboarding.

Eastern end looking up

A peek around back

Landscapers have gone wildly beyond themselves

These are the busses you might need to take

Due to the uncertainties of war, the opening of the new library, once scheduled for October 22, was delayed until today, October 29, 2024. I took these snapshots last month late on a Friday when the whole area was practically free of pedestrians and cars were few. Go there today and I would expect to see many.

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I suggest you go to the new webpage of the National Library, headed by an impressive aerial photo: https://www.nli.org.il/en.  According to this website, on the day I accessed it, the opening date would have been October 22. If you click on the link today, everything has changed. Now I see that this is not a complete opening as most of the services will be either nonexistent or limited, and that includes the opening hours. Most discouraging of all, no more than 300 people will be allowed inside at any one time. I suppose this is due to the situation. The new library, after an unsuccessful coup attempt by politicians last Febuary,* promises to be inclusive and open to everyone. Let it be so.

(*The coup — an attempt to strip the library of its independence from the government — was stopped in its tracks when the university threatened to withdraw all of its books from the new library. Since that means most of the books, that would have been a problem.)

This Times of Israel story is wildly enthusiastic about how great it all is and will be:  Jessica Steinberg, “Long-awaited National Library set to reopen with 11 floors and millions of stories” (Sept. 13, 2023).  

There is also a Ha'aretz story, but it is likely locked up behind a paywall, so why bother?

Here is a more recent story from the Jerusalem Post. 

• My main personal regret about the new library is this: It was long ago decided that books and journals related to Asian Studies* would be exiled to the Hebrew University Library at Mount Scopus on the opposite side of the city, a bus route that often takes more than half an hour plus wait time. That means major inconvenience for some of us. 

(*They do not include the Middle East in their definition of “Asian Studies.”)

The Quiet of War

 

If you knew this place you would know it is hardly possible to squeeze through the crowds, particularly as you approach that low open gateway on the right side of the photo. Go through that gateway, turn right down a few stairs, and in a minute you will be sailing through the Crusader-built entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This place is the main reason the whole world, particularly the Christians who make up over ¼th of the human population, comes here, to the Christian Quarter.

The large open archway on the left of the picture marks the Muristan, or I should say the rebuilt Muristan. The main center of life during the Crusader occupation (1099-1187 CE), it was simply allowed to fall into ruins after they left. Only in the late 19th century was it rebuilt to look more or less as it is today, often incorporating bits and pieces of the earlier ruins.  It is full of shops, especially shops with leather products (seeing this photo makes me smell the leather) along with felafel and shishlik restaurants. It’s likely to cost you 10 shekels a shot, but I still recommend the coffee with hel and loads of sugar, a lifesaver against fatigue. Not today, mind you, but in that future time when people will be around.

To me this photo tells it all. Pilgrimage tours to the holy city have screeched to a standstill. The hotels and shopkeepers are not the only victims of this war, as we know so well. The news is relentlessly invasive, and sometimes we simply must take refuge from it to try and heal the mental wounds inflicted, not on ourselves alone but on everyone. Peace be upon us, upon us all.

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If you need more evidence of the emptiness of al-Quds aka the Old City today, just try watching some recent “Relaxing Walker” videos. Here is one that walks you through first the New and then the Old City.

If you would rather see the commercial areas of Gaza shortly before the latest conflict got started, go to the channel called Arab Ambience. Of course it looks very different these last two weeks. If you watch the news you already know. 

If you never heard the name “Muristan” before, try the Wiki entry.  Read the first parts of it at least and see the photos.

David Grossman, “Who will we be when we rise from the ashes? Are we capable of understanding that what has occurred here is too immense and too terrible to be viewed through stale paradigms?”

Squill Flower Spikes of Jerusalem

 

It’s that time of year when the weather turns cooler and at long last the first light rains come down on Jerusalemites. It’s Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, when many eat and even sleep in palm-leaf covered huts in their back yards or balconies or in some cases on the sidewalks in front of their apartment buildings. One of autumn’s welcoming signs is the Squill Flower, or Khatsav (חצב) in Hebrew. It keeps its huge liquid-filled tubers dormant throughout the heat of summer. That way it can shoot up its dramatic spikes full of white star-like blossoms, often as tall as you are, when the annual drought is just about over. Without doubt it is one of nature’s more beautiful oddities, and that is what it is, both beautiful and odd.

That’s the Monastery of the Holy Cross
you see in the distance

Here is the Hebrew Wikipedia entry on "Khatsav." For fun you can try and put it through Google translate to see what the English looks like.

If you are a real botanist you will love this page, but even if you’re not, it has some fantastically detailed photos of the plant that include all its parts in every season of the year. In case the link just given doesn’t work for you, try searching the web for “Flora of Israel and Adjacent Areas" by Avinoam Danin and Ori Fragman-Sapir. The whole site is worth exploring, and if you are English-reading, start here and give it time to display over 3,000 items.