Yehuda Lave, Spiritual Advisor and Counselor | | | Better Than Duct Tape One person who frequently lost his temper, finally learned to control it with the following method: Whenever he felt angry at someone, he would take a sip of water and hold it in his mouth for five minutes. Only after the five minutes passed would he criticize someone. During this time his anger subsided and he was able to talk calmly. Good advice for all of us. Love Yehuda Lave | | FREE museum day throughout Israel
Lag Ba'Omer, May 3, 2018, is International Museum Day in Israel, and many museums around Israel open to the public for free!
The museums on this list are usually quite pricey for a family to visit, so getting in for free is a great way to learn, experience, and see new things, but I will warn you now - get there early or risk having the doors closed due to overcrowding!
I have tried to list phone numbers and opening hours as accurately as possible. However, I cannot take responsibility for any errors, so please call the museums you plan to visit to verify this information before you go.
I have tried, wherever possible, to link to websites in English. There were some museums/historical sites that only had Hebrew websites, though. My apologies in advance.
The list below represents many hours of work translating and researching, and I request that if you want to share this information, you link to this blog post. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.
Here's the list (the list in Hebrew is available here)
Please note: Generally, free admission will not apply to large groups.
North
Ein-Dor Museum of Archaeology, Kibbutz Ein-Dor, open 10am -3pm 04-6770333
The National Maritime Museum, open 10am - 7pm 04-8536622
The Open Museum in Tefen open 9am - 4pm 04-9109609
MadaTech, open 10am -5pm, 04-8614444
The Underground Prisoners' Museum, Acco, open 8:30am - 4:30pm 04-6941565
Watchman's House Museum - Kfar Giladi 04-6941565 open 8am - 4pm
The Chaim Shturman House - at Kibbutz Ein Harud.open 9am - 3pm 04-6486337 | 04-6486328
Bar David Museum for Jewish Art and Judaica - Kibbutz Baram, 04-6988295 open 10am - 4pm
The Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum in Haifa - 04-8536249, open 10am - 4pm
The Khan Museum, Hadera, 04-6322330, open 10am - 3pm
The Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, 04-8240308 open 10am - 4pm
The Haifa City Museum, 04-9115888 open 10am - 7pm
The Museum of the First Aliyah in Zichron, 04-6294777 open 9am - 4pm
The Herman Struk Museum 04-6359962 open 10am - 9pm
Wilfrid Israel Museum, Kibbutz HaZorea, 04-9899566 open 9am - 2pm
The Haifa Museum of Art 04-9115997 open 10am - 7pm
The Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, 04-8383554 open 10am - 7pm
The Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod 04-9842350 open 10am - 3pm
Mane Katz Museum, Haifa 04-9119372 open 10am - 7pm
Center
Krinitzi House, Ramat Gan, 03-6739050, 9am - 1pm
Diaspora Museum, Tel Aviv, 037457808, 10am - 7pm
Clore Garden of Science, Rechovot 08-9378300 open 10am - 4pm
The Israeli Cartoon Museum, Holon 03-6521849 open 10am - 4pm (note: no strollers allowed)
Museum and Archives of the History of Holon 03-5050425 open 10am - 1pm
Agam Museum, Rishon, 03-555-5900 (times not published)
Ilana Goor Museum, 03-683-7676, ext. 20, 10am - 4pm
Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv 03-6415244 open 10am - 8pm
HaGedudim Museum, Moshav Avichail 09-8822212 open 8:30am - 4pm
The Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv 03-5255961 open 10am - 3pm
Toldot Tzahal Museum, Tel Aviv 03-5172913 open 8am - 4pm (entrance closes at 3:30pm)
Man and the Living World Museum, Ramat Gan 03-6315010 open 9am - 4pm. Reservations required.
Museum of Human Sciences and the Environment, Petach Tikvah, 03-9286900/1, open 9am - 2pm
Etzel Museum, Tel Aviv 03-5284001 open 8am - 4pm
The Etzel 1948 Museum, Tel Aviv 03-5177180 , 03-5172044 open 8am - 4:30pm
The Hagana Museum - 03-560-8624 open 8am - 4pm
Palmach Museum, 03-5459800 By reservation only
Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 09-9551011, 4-8pm
The Hosmasa Museum - Holon - 03-5050425 open 9am - 1pm
Kfar Saba Archaeology Museum, Kfar Saba 09-7640867/8 open 10am - noon
The Lechi Museum 03-6820288 open 8:30am - 4pm
The Netanya City Historical Museum, 09-8840020 open 10am - 2pm
Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies, Kibbutz Tel Yitzchak 09-7497200 open 9am - 3pm
Nahum Gutman Museum of Art, Tel Aviv 03-5161970 open 10am - 4pm
The Petach Tikvah Museum of Art 03-9286300 open 4pm - 8pm
Rishon L'Tzion Museum, 03-9598862, 03-9598890 open 9am - 2pm
The Ramla Museum, Ramla 08-9292650 open 9am - 4pm
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv 03-6077020 open 10am - 9pm
Jerusalem
The Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem 02-5661291/2 open 10am - 7pm
The Underground Prisoners Museum in Jerusalem 02-6233166 ' open 9am - 5pm
The Bible Lands Museum, Jerusalem 02-5611066 open 9:30am - 5:30pm
Hechal Shlomo, Jerusalem 02-5889010 open 10am - 4pm
Bloomfield Science Museum, Jerusalem 02-6544888 open 10am - 6pm
The Old Yishuv Court Museum, 02-6276319, 052-4002478 open 10am - 5pm
Museum of Italian Jewish Art, 02-6241610, noon - 7pm
The Israel Museum 02-6708811 open 10am - 5pm (tours in English 11:00am, 12:30pm, 3:00pm) Children are FREE. Adults 20 shekels
Tower of David Museum 02-6265333 open 9am - 4pm
South
Ashdod Art Museum, 08-8545180, 08-9568285, open 9am - 4pm
The Museum of Philistine Culture 08-6224799 open 9am - 4pm
The Negev Museum of Art, Beer Sheva 08-6993531 open 10am - 4pm
The Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Culture 08-6993535 open 10am - 4pm
| | Israelis Celebrate as IAF Fighter Pilots Soar in 70th Independence Day Air Show (video) Israeli Air Forces staged an aerobatics air show above the beach in Tel Aviv, Thursday, to celebrate Israeli Independence Day, marking the seventieth year since Israel's creation. A number of military jets and aircraft performed in front of hundreds of spectators. The main performance dedicated to the 70th anniversary took place on Wednesday evening. 'Independence Day' in Israel commemorates the declaration of the creation of the State of Israel by David Ben-Gurion on April 18, 1948. | | Stop Going To Poland By Moshe Feiglin - 5 Iyyar 5778 – April 20, 2018 Editor's note: The following are translated excerpts from a recent interview with Moshe Feiglin on Reshet Bet Radio. Poland has been trying to change the narrative in our collective memory, which somewhat blames the Poles for their cooperation under the German conquest. Advertisement I think the Polish Law is our fault. It was legislated through the legs of the Israeli marchers who go on the March of the Living in Poland, through the legs of Israeli visitors in Warsaw, and through the speedy normalization of our diplomatic relations with Poland. The Polish parliament simply signed on to what we had written with our marches. How can Israelis who march in Poland be responsible for a Polish law that attempts to change the way we remember the Holocaust? What is the sub context of these visits? What is the hidden meaning behind our conduct? It's that the Polish nation has no connection to what happened. Visiting the places where the horrors were perpetrated certainly benefits our short-term memory of the Holocaust, but we disconnect from the fact that the people of the country we are visiting slaughtered our parents. Its ground is drenched with the blood of our relatives, which, on a historic timeline, was spilled a very short time ago. As if we were visiting the pyramids… Do you visit Germany? Certainly not. I was never there and never will be there. I am not saying Israel must completely sever its relations with all of Eastern Europe and Germany. I understand that we need to maintain minimal correct relations. But we must reduce those relations to the bare minimum. As someone who travels to Poland quite frequently, I think the Polish law stems from a different place. The Poles feel that while Israel has forgiven Germany, perhaps because of the reparation payments, it has not forgiven the Poles. This despite the fact that six million Poles were murdered during the Holocaust: three million Jews and three million Catholics. There is some justice in their approach. We must remember that the public debate over German reparations tore Israeli society apart. Our generation has raced to the arms of the "different" Germany and the "different" Poland. But memory detached from the implications of that memory is meaningless. Even today, we fast on the 9th of Av and do not suffice with simply learning the history of the destruction of the Temple. If we did not take the memory of the Temple to our individual personal lives, its memory and destruction would have disappeared long ago. Feiglin: We have turned our visits to Poland and tourism in Poland into something that completely detaches us from the memory of the Holocaust. The same holds true in this case. We have turned our visits to Poland and, later, our tourism in Poland into to something that completely detaches us from the memory of the Holocaust. What do you suggest? Israel has to take a step backward. We have to coldly reduce our diplomatic and trade relations to the minimum needed for normal existence. We are currently enabling those nations that slaughtered us to shirk the historic memory. How would Israel cool its relations with Poland? For example, I will not visit Germany, and I do not purchase German products. When I was an MK, there was a veritable air-shuttle service bringing MKs to Poland for the March of the Living, I didn't go. When the president of the European Parliament came to the Knesset and spoke in German, I opposed that and exited the plenum. There are things that every individual can do. Do you oppose the youth visits to Poland? Absolutely. While they contribute to our immediate memory of the Holocaust, in the long term they contradict the implications of the Holocaust and, in a sense, contribute to its denial. The result is the conduct of the Polish, as we have seen. In the future, the Germans will also do the same. No doubt about it. It wasn't the Polish government that slaughtered the Jews. Poland was under occupation. That's why I referred to the Polish nation during the Holocaust and not to its government. But we cannot escape the fact that, although there were Poles and Germans who saved Jews, the Poles are an anti-Semitic nation. As a nation, most of them happily participated in the slaughter and even initiated it. | | Area C is Strategically Vital for Israel Last year, upon the publication of Micah Goodman's book Catch-67, I explained the basic reasons for my disagreement with his analysis and recommendations. That seemed at the time to be the end of the matter. When Goodman chose, a year later, to set forth his views in two almost identical articles – one in the Haaretz supplement (February 16, 2018); the other in Makor Rishon (April 5, 2018) – I felt compelled to warn of the danger his recommendations entail. Opposed to what some Israelis see as a desirable status quo in the West Bank, Goodman recommends a string of pragmatic small steps that would "enable Palestinian autonomy to expand without Israel's security contracting." He explains that "this does not entail major ideological concessions such as evacuating settlements." The essence of the dispute lies in two practical recommendations that to my mind are disastrous: transferring considerable parts of Area C to PA control; and "halting settlement expansion outside the large blocs." These recommendations show that Goodman is stuck in a mechanistic security paradigm, borrowed from senior defense establishment officials whom he met while writing his book – but Israel's control of the West Bank is not solely predicated on security needs. The national-security equation goes well beyond technical security aspects. As stated in the IDF's doctrinal literature: "National security is the domain concerned with ensuring the national ability to contend effectively with any threat to the national existence and to the vital national interests." Indeed, the debate between right and left about Israel's continued control of the West Bank (or parts of it) is rooted in the question of its vital national interests there. Unable to agree on their national vision, Israelis have vested the debate in the hands of the security specialists. As a result, those vital interests have been reduced to little more than an inventory of security requirements, such as monitoring the border crossings in the Jordan Valley and having an early warning station on Mount Hazor. For Goodman, his only interest beyond technical security matters – to which he assigns major importance – is separating from the Palestinians. This goal has been turned by the likes of Ehud Barak, Haim Ramon, and Tzippi Livni into a supreme national interest. Yet in their many statements about the need for separation, they totally ignore the fact that the lion's share of the separation was already implemented at the start of the Oslo process under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In May 1994, Israel's rule over the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip came to an end with the establishment of the PA; and in January 1996, the Israeli civil administration's rule over the Palestinian population of Areas A and B of the West Bank came to an end. Since that time, over 90% of the Palestinians in the territories conquered in the June 1967 war have been living under the Palestinian Authority. To continue demanding that Israel separate from the Palestinians and minimize its rule over them – when that rule was already minimized quite some time ago – is a manipulative way of pushing for a near-total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, something Rabin was adamantly opposed to. (The settlement blocs that are supposed to remain in Israeli hands constitute no more than 4% of the entire territory.) Moreover, from a spatial and ecological standpoint, an Israel that shrinks down to a strip of land along the coastal plain, from Nahariya to Ashkelon, becomes a densely populated urban nightmare. Even today the problem of density has reached the boiling point. For example, the Planning Authority has been ordered to plan the construction of an additional 2.6 million new apartments by 2040, all within the Green Line. Yet the spatial future lies in the open territory of the Jordan Valley from the river to the mountain spine; it is there that millions of Jews can be settled in a swath of land parallel to the coastal strip. The way in which Rabin drew the contours of Area C, paying close personal attention to every road and hill, shows the map of Israel's spatial interests in the West Bank. The territorial aspects of this conception require a settlement endeavor comprising four main tasks: 1) developing Greater Jerusalem, primarily eastward toward the Dead Sea; 2) developing southern Mount Hebron; 3) developing the Jordan Valley; and 4) developing the corridors from the coastal strip to the Jordan Valley. The distribution of Jewish localities in the West Bank, supported by the outposts, hews very closely to this strategic logic. Herein lies the key to understanding the subversive activity the EU and the PA have been conducting in Area C in recent years. With coordinated strategic planning, stepped-up building, and extensive agricultural development, the PA is striving, with overt European support, to prevent Israel from realizing its national interests in the West Bank. This means not only struggling to broaden the Palestinian living space but also to fragment and isolate areas of Jewish settlement. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians now centers on the question of who, at the end of the day, will find himself fragmented and isolated. For Micah Goodman, who lives in Kfar Adumim, the personal significance of his own proposal is that his own village, like the Gush Etzion neighborhoods, will become an enclave in a Palestinian domain. This struggle will also determine the status of Jerusalem: whether Palestinian neighborhoods such as A-Tur and Isawwiya will be Palestinian enclaves in the Israeli space, or Maale Adumim will be an Israeli enclave in the Palestinian space. This explains the stubborn American opposition to the founding of a national park on the eastern slopes of Mount Scopus: the goal is that Maale Adumim will become an Israeli enclave in a Palestinian area. Goodman's recommendations dovetail with EU-led efforts to curtail Israeli control of Area C. What his small-steps paradigm really portends – even if the settlement blocs remain in Israeli hands – is a creeping Israeli withdrawal to the Green Line. This dispute should be presented in its true colors. It involves contrasting understandings of Israel's national mission and the issue of reclaiming the Jewish ancestral homeland, as well as different ways of assessing the security aspects of the situation. The dispute is not between those advocating judicious pragmatism and those caught up in an ideological vision that ignores the constraints of reality. The latter, too, are committed to pragmatic navigation that surmounts obstacles. It appears, though, that not only are the two parties' goals different, but their compasses are differently calibrated. In line with the traditional security concept of the pioneering Zionist movement, my pragmatic navigation regards extensive settlement of Area C as the key to strategic stability. The more Israelis settle in this area, the more others will come to view Israel's presence as an unalterable reality with which it is best to reconcile. That is why the EU chose to get so openly involved in shaping this territory in the Palestinians' favor. Goodman's recommendations run counter not only to the vision of the settlement enterprise in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley, but also to the way in which Rabin viewed Israel's national interests in this territory. "The only way to maintain the existing situation is to change it." With those words Goodman ended his article. I certainly agree. The dispute, however, is over the direction of the change. Contrary to Goodman's recommendations, Israel must increase its settlement activities with the goal in mind of three million Jews living in Area C, notably the Jordan Valley. Given that this area is almost totally bereft of Palestinian population, such a development is bound to strengthen Israel's national security while having a negligible impact on its demographic balance, and none whatsoever on its continued existence as a Jewish and democratic state. | | 300 Drones Light Up the Sky of Jerusalem in Celebration This drone show was part of the amazing national ceremony that took place in Jerusalem to celebrate Israel's 70th birthday. Enjoy some of the other entertainment from this fabulous evening. | | Wedding pictures and videos from our Magical wedding https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ws0z9oif1rvvllt/AADO7GDwDY6LxH3SZrH_jdI8a?dl=0 | | | 360 degrees video from the cockpit of a plane in the Yom Haatzmaut flyover (VIDEO) Dizzying at times, but still mesmerising... | | See you tomorrow Love Yehuda Lave | | | |
