UNESCO and a Judean hilltop known as Betar/Battir

An interesting contest is being waged over a Judean hilltop known as Betar or Battir.

From Diana Muir Appelbaum..
29 June '12..

This hilltop village with a system of stone-walled hillside terraces has been nominated by the Palestinian Authority for recognition as a World Heritage Site, and has won the Melina Mercouri International Prize for the Safeguarding and Management of Cultural Landscapes, awarded by UNESCO.

Is the Mercouri prize political? It is interesting that this is a biennial prize, first awarded in 1999 to Elishia’s Spring, Jericho (Palestine) and that the 2011 award to Battir marks the first time the price has been given twice to a the same country.

The World Heritage site nomination caught the attention of a number of commentators since the village is best known under the older, Hebrew version of the name: Betar. Betar was the military headquarters of the Bar Kochba Revolt, a Jewish revolt against Roman rule in 135 CE, and it was that revolt’s last stronghold. When Betar fell, the defenders and their leader, Shimon Bar Kochba, were killed. The event is commemorated by the villagers who call the ancient defensive tower “Khirbet el-Yahud”, “the Jewish ruin”.

Elijah from the Taiga

The story of Lithuania’s Betar head, who founded the Prisoners of Zion group.


Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
16 April '10

It was a short time before Israel’s 30th birthday. Again I found myself in the small, modest living room of Mr. and Mrs. Pulerevitch on Tel Aviv’s Ben-Yehuda Street. It was an old building and the rented apartment seemed suitably suffused with old-world ambiance. The metropolitan hustle, bustle and brashness were all left outside. Inside everything was genteel and unhurried. Another time, another dimension.

I had become a frequent family guest, was affectionately called Sarah’le and pampered more like a favorite daughter than a news-reporter. Originally I met Yechezkel at his workplace, the Tel Aviv municipality’s paymaster department. He had founded the Prisoners of Zion Association and among my beats was the then-climaxing aliya struggle in the then-extant USSR.

The Pulerevitches are both long gone now. Yechezkel had the kindliest face and eyes that forever twinkled with a smile. His wife Ella filled another tea-glass nestled inside a dainty silver holder and pushed toward me more cookies in a china dish she rested on a crocheted doily. In his impeccably erudite Hebrew, laced with traces of Litvak intonation, Yechezkel inquired where my immediate family was on the very day Israel was born.

Sighing, he remarked that he can’t say for sure what he did on that pivotal 1948 day except that he spent it in forced labor as a logger in a Siberian prison camp in the subarctic taiga forests. But that’s also how he spent the other days of that period and he couldn’t tell them apart.

He had been at one camp or another since 1941. At the time of his arrest for the crime of Zionism he was the de facto head of Betar (the Revisionist youth movement) in Lithuania. That made him equal in status to Menachem Begin, Poland’s Betar head, who was likewise sent by the Soviets to the gulag. Begin, though, was released a year later, while Pulerevitch spent 17 years in camps and exile.

Yechezkel couldn’t specify when he learned of the Jewish state’s birth: “Prison and the taiga know no dates. Days aren’t individually distinguished and labeled. Time is marked only by the seasons of the year. But I did have my own Independence Day. For folks with calendars it was probably another date, but calendars weren’t part of my reality. The inner subjective reality of the inmate is deeper and more powerful than that of the outside world, and for me the day on which I discovered that a Jewish state had come to exist became my Independence Day.”

(Read full story)

Please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

Yosef Trumpeldor

Zionist Freedom Alliance
11 Adar

On the morning of the eleventh of Adar 5680 (March 1st 1920), a mob of several hundred Arab raiders made their first attack on Tel Chai.

"What is a pioneer? Is he a worker only? No! The definition includes much more. The pioneers should be workers but that is not all. We shall need people who will be “everything” – everything that Eretz Yisrael needs. A worker has his labor interests, a soldier his “esprit de corps”, a doctor and an engineer, their special inclinations. A generation of iron-men; iron from which you can forge everything the national machinery needs. You need a wheel? Here I am. A nail, a screw, a block? – here take me. You need a man to till the soil? – I’m ready. A soldier? I am here. Policeman, doctor, lawyer, artist, teacher, water carrier? Here I am. I have no form. I have no psychology. I have no personal feeling, no name. I am a servant of Zion. Ready to do everything, not bound to do anything. I have only one aim – creation."
- Yosef Trumpeldor

Throughout Israel’s history, from the time of Avraham until today, there has been one single phrase that has consistently expressed the willingness to accept responsibility and work towards the collective good. Hineini – “here I am” – has forever been the watchword of readiness to answer a call. Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook writes in Musar Avicha that the words hineini use the language of modesty and hastened enthusiasm. It is an expression that connotes total readiness to carry out the will of the caller. A person who says hineini is not only prepared to complete a task, he approaches it with a zealous enthusiasm. Whether in response to a prophetic calling from G-D or to one deep in a man’s own conscience, hineini forever symbolizes selfless and heroic dedication on behalf of Israel’s collective destiny.

Not every person can truly say hineini. The statement alone is a great sacrifice because it automatically opens one up to a higher calling. A person who feels hineini is one who, deep in his soul, is idealistically charged to complete an essential task. For most it is impractical as it takes people away from their personal aspirations. In today’s cynical world, people often calculate interests rather than answer Divine calls. But there was one man – a symbol of courage – in Israel’s recent history that made hineini his trademark and lived up to its connotation. He always heard the call of Israel’s needs and valiantly rose to the challenge of easing the national burden.

(Read full story)
.