Bloomsday in Dublin

DUBLIN’S IMAGINARY JEW ARIEH O’SULLIVAN visits Dublin for Bloomsday and discovers how literature, history, Guinness and Judaism converge in the mystical Emerald Isle From The Jerusalem Report, issue dated June 4, 2012 The church has יהוה, the holy name of God in Hebrew, painted on the ceiling. But that isn’t what I find incredulous. The fact that the crypt, the final resting-place of generations of priests and notables, has been turned into a dance floor – well now, that was sacrilege to the extreme. This is the moment when I truly fall in love with Dublin. Again. We are on a Guinness diet, my son and I, and we have already lost four days. I have dragged him along to the ancestral homeland in search of Leprechauns and Jewish lore and perhaps the most famous Jewish character in English literature. But arriving to partake in the annual Bloomsday I am reluctant to check my mythical images of the Emerald Isle at the door. And I’m glad I didn’t. Ireland, once the Celtic tiger, is a shadow of its recent self. There is still swank Grafton Street with shops rivaling Paris and London and the country has greatly shed its pious Catholicism. But Ireland today is $135 billion in debt, bailed out mostly by the Germans. Ireland is the only country in the world which celebrates the wanderings of a Jew who never existed “We’re all guilty,” says Peter Graves at the Sinn Fein shop, pushing IRA bumper stickers and t-shirts. “Everyone took advantage of the bubble. Now ‘de whole country’s broke. Berlin’s our new capital.” But that doesn’t put a dent in the annual celebration of Bloomsday, the annual celebration in memory of Leopold Bloom, the Jewish protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which describes his wanderings through the city, thinking like mad. Joyce’s audacious version of the Homeric legend takes place over a single day, on June 16, 1904, making summertime Dublin a Mecca for English literature fans. Every year thousands of Joyce diehards flock to the city to reenact Bloom’s journey. Bloom never existed, except in Joyce’s extraordinary imagination, but in a marketing masterpiece, the Irish have turned Bloomsday, a totally fictional event where Jew and Ireland meet, into something approaching a national holiday. CROSSTALK: Leopold Bloom as imagined by one of Bloomsday's many cross-dressers Ulysses is considered one of the most significant literary works of the 20th Century – though few have attempted to grapple with its dense and cerebral text, and fewer still have made it through to the end. That hasn’t stopped the Irish. They have highlighted the passages about food and booze and sex and set them up as a template for a perfect mid-summer holiday. It’s a hedonists’ paradise where live music seems to burst out of every doorway and liquor consumption keeps the mammoth Guinness brewery struggling to produce two million pints of its trademark black stout a day. Ulysses is an outrageously funny and bawdy book. Peppered with Latin and Hebrew, it pioneered stream-of-consciousness narrative. Joyce crammed everything about life – sex, bodily functions, longing and mourning – into that single June day. Joyce’s masterpiece has been consistently voted as one of English literature’s most influential book of all time. Not bad for a piece of fiction that very few have actually read. On Bloomsday itself, I drag my boy Yarden, just out of high school, onto the streets and join an international crowd armed with tattered, dog-eared copies of Ulysses and maps of Dublin in 1904, as we begin our Odyssey just as Bloom did from his home at 7, Eccles Street. The atmosphere as we retrace Bloom’s mythical steps is literary Via Dolorosa meets licentious, Guinness-fueled Mardi Gras Everyone has entered into the holiday spirit. Straw hats and jaunty bowlers for men, and lacy, bosom-revealing frocks for women are de rigueur. I wear a white linen suit with Panama hat. There are also no small number of cross-gender dressers, which helps transform the atmosphere as we retrace Bloom’s mythical steps from literary Via Dolorosa to licentious, Guinness-fueled Mardi Gras. Most of the landmarks Joyce described in Ulysses are still there and the increasingly inebriated procession flows like a human wave across the city. At stops along the way, enthusiasts who can still read and not yet splayed out across the nearest bar, recite passages from the book. Outside Davy Byrne’s pub at 21, Duke Street, Gorgonzola cheese sandwiches and a glass of Burgundy just like Mr. Bloom tasted are going fast for 10 euros. Across the River Liffey at the Ormond Hotel, there is little oxygen left in the lounge: everyone has sucked it out singing ballads and reciting poetry. In any other country it would seem pretentious. A pack of children dressed in Edwardian-era costumes stroll by in celebration. For a novel banned from American shelves as obscene until 1933, the scene raises the interesting question of just how much of the book can be read to the children. EDWARDIANS: Costumed children join in the fun, though it's unclear whether they have read a book long banned for obscenity In his depiction of sex, as in much else, Joyce was ahead of his time. In the final chapter, Leopold’s unfaithful wife Molly Bloom brings herself to an unfiltered, unforgettable orgasm (“Yes, I said, Yes I will, Yes”) nearly a century before Meg Ryan’s signature restaurant scene in When Harry met Sally. “Oh forget the fugghan text. Ulysses is best exposed by listening to it,” says Irishman James Scully in a pinstripe suit. “Dis is me 25th year!” The diehards continue toward Barney Kiernan’s pub. My prodigal son drops out, but I soldier on, recalling my Irish grandfather who used to say, “I only drink when I’m alone or with somebody.” The pub itself no longer exists, so the pack darkens the doors of  The Green Street Pub to re-enact the famous “Cyclops” scene where a “broadshouldered, deepchested, stronglimbed, frankeyed, redhaired, freely freckled, shaggy bearded, widemouthed, largenosed, longheaded, deepvoiced, barekneed, brawnyhanded, hairlylegged, ruddyfaced, sinewyarmed” bigot confronts our Jewish hero. “What is your nation?” he asks Bloom, threatening later to “brain that bloody jewman.” “I belong to a race too,” says Bloom, “that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment.” Earlier in the novel a Mr. Deasy says Ireland has the honor of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews – “Because she never let them in.” “One of the central reasons for giving Bloom a Jewish identity was because it allowed Bloom to be both within and without Irish society,” says Mark Traynor, manager of the James Joyce Center. “Joyce was extremely attracted to the idea of Bloom the Jew and to Jewishness in general, the idea of a wandering race and of course, he as an Irishman in exile, could identify with that.” The odyssey begins just as Bloom did, from his home at 7 Eccles Street (Arieh O'Sullivan) According to Traynor, Bloomsday 2012 is expected to be an even bigger event since the copyright of the book is due to expire, allowing for a new wave of artistic interpretations of the 800-page novel. Senator David Norris, the on-off Irish presidential candidate and Ireland’s most flamboyant politician, is a leading Joyce scholar and a fair-weather friend of Israel. “This was Joyce striking out for diversity and supporting the underdog,” says Norris. “Both the Irish and the Jews have tragic history. The Jews had the awful unparalleled tragedy of the Holocaust and we also lost half our population during the famine. There’s the Jewish mother and the Irish mammy, the sense of humor and the curiosity about everything that happens in the world and just as the Jewish people have their Diaspora, the Irish people have a diaspora and even President Barack Obama is delighted to trace his Irish roots.” “And you know,” adds Norris with a wink, “the Irish people were the lost tribe of Israel.” The Irish have turned Bloomsday, a totally fictional event where Jew and Ireland meet, into something approaching a national holiday That may explain the plethora of Cohan and Levi families in Ireland. But what about Murphy, the most common family name here? The story goes that many of the ship surgeons from the wrecked Armada that washed up on Irish shores after the defeat by Sir Francis Drake were Jews. They likely went by the name Mar’peh (“healer” in Hebrew), that later became Murphy. Could the common Irish name Hennessey be derived from the Hebrew Hanasi (“president”). Was McCabe originally Maccabi? Was Brennan originally Ben-Nun? Perhaps I should change my own name back to the original O’Solomon. Dublin’s Jewish community today is minuscule, numbering only about 1,000 people. The bulk trace their roots to ancestors arriving at the turn of the 19th century from Eastern Europe, most of them from Lithuania. Some were disembarked by shady ship captains who told them they had already reached New York. Joyce was generally correct that the Irish did not persecute their Jews, notwithstanding bubbles of general folk, Catholic Church type of anti-Semitism that permeated European society. An infamous “pogrom” in Limerick in 1904 was considered a blip in the otherwise cordial relationship with the Jews. The Jewish population peaked shortly after World War II at about 5,500 and has been on the decline ever since, a process hastened by a combination of emigration, intermarriage and a low birthrate. In contrast, Islam is Dublin’s fastest-growing community. Ireland looks like it might be the first Western European country to lose its Jewish community altogether. This year, for the first time, Judaism wasn’t listed in the religion category on the annual census, says Traynor. “I’m proud of the fact that I am an Irish Jew,” says Joe Briscoe, whose father and brother both served as lord mayor of Dublin. “Now that the Jewish population is shrinking, the Irish people suddenly realize that they had a wonderful exotic people among them whom they have totally ignored,” says Briscoe. “I find it ironic that Ireland is the only country in the world which celebrates the wanderings of a Jew who never existed. TRAVELING IN IRELAND The Irish love to drink and sing and seem perpetually happy and want nothing more than for us to be happy too. Ireland loves tourists. Four times the size of Israel with roughly half the population (4.5 million), Ireland is expecting a strong rebound in tourism in 2012 to help it out of a deep recession that has seen its economy shrink by 25 percent in the past four years. Tourism peaked at 8 million in 2007, then slumped to 6 million in 2011. All this means cheaper holidays with luxury hotel rooms at B&B rates. By far the best way to see Ireland is to avoid the awful coach trips and get off the beaten path. Adventure tourism companies are cropping up to answer the growing interest. “Ireland is like a donut, all the sweet bits are around the edge and nothing in the middle,” says Mark Doherty, guide, minstrel and jeep driver for Vagabound Tours Ireland, one of the premier adventure tour groups operating modified Land Rover 4x4 vehicles. Joining the tour for four days, we headed straight for the west coast and kayaked with the seals in Bantry Bay, befriended the local fishermen in far off villages, kissed the Blarney Stone, visited the O’Sullivan castle (of course), spotted whales, climbed mountains, explored abandoned villages and mines and felt privileged to see the real Ireland. WHERE TO STAY Isaac’s Hostel 2 Frenchman’s Lane (353-1-855-6215) A good budget option. Free WiFi, lockers, clean co-ed rooms with bunk beds, (one homeless guy sneaked in to the room across the hall and was found warming someone’s bed) excellent rates, friendly world travelers of all ages. www.isaacs.ie/isaacs_hostel/Home.aspx Luxurious Fitzwilliam Hotel St. Stephens Green (353-1-478-7000) Definitely lives up to its “hottest hotel in the world” reputation. Located right off swank Grafton Street and main green, a 5 star contemporary hotel with best location in town. The concierge has an endless supply of umbrellas for guests. http://www.fitzwilliamhotel.com RECOMMENDED Vagabound Tours Ireland award-winning company running expeditions of a dozen or less international travelers in jeeps, staying in boutique hotels and pups and visiting the real Ireland. www.vagabondtoursofireland.ie/ The James Joyce Center 35 Great North Georges Street, Dublin (353-1-878-8547) Where all things Joyce are concentrated and Bloomsday is celebrated every day. http://www.jamesjoyce.ie Dublin Writers Museum 18 Parnell Sq. N, (353-1872- 2077) Offers a great overview of Ireland’s literary history. www.writersmuseum.com The Old Jameson Distillery Bow Street (353-1807-2235) Great tour culminating with whiskey tasting Dublin Tourism (353-1-605-7700) www.visitdublin.com

A MODEST MILLIONAIRE

From The Jerusalem Report, issue dated June 18, 2012

FROM THE EDITOR / MATTHEW KALMAN

WHEN ISRAELIS SING “IF I WERE A rich man” in Hebrew, they sing “If I were a Rothschild.” It’s not often you get to meet someone whose very name is a legend, so I tagged along when Robert Slater went to interview Lord Jacob Rothschild for our cover story.
It was the first time that Lord Rothschild has spoken publicly in any detail about the work of Yad Hanadiv, the foundation established by his cousin Baron Edmond de Rothschild a century ago, and a rare chance to encounter one of the leading financiers of the age.
It was an extraordinary, wide-ranging conversation in which the fourth baron parried a barrage of queries about his family, his fortune and his philanthropy with patient good humor. He had some candid comments about the shortcomings of the world banking system and spoke with feeling about the future of his storied family.
But what surprised me most about the good lord was his modesty.
In stark contrast to many other super-rich visitors to Jerusalem, he arrived almost incognito, without a retinue of gatekeepers and entirely devoid of the flashing lights, outriders and chase cars that have become de rigueur for many modern millionaires visiting the country. In keeping with a deep commitment to the environment, Lord Rothschild eschews private jets, that symbol of modern success, and flies by scheduled airline.
Nor do the riches simply mount. Lord Rothschild said it had been “hard work” to take the 94 million pounds bequeathed to him by his cousin Dorothy de Rothschild and multiply it as he has done to finance the foundation’s growing activities.
Lord Jacob is joined in this issue by another legend, Philip Roth, whose era-defining Portnoy’s Complaint is the subject of a thorough, and thoroughly entertaining, literary and historical analysis by the Jerusalem-based historian and essayist Bernard Avishai. The Report is proud to bring you this exclusive extract from Avishai’s book Promiscuous, published by Yale University Press.
Elsewhere, Bernard Dichek traveled to Addis Ababa to unravel the mystery of the 3,000 so-called Falash Mura stranded in dreadful conditions awaiting permission to emigrate to Israel. Linda Gradstein visited Save a Child’s Heart, an Israeli charity that provides life-saving operations to infant patients from all over the world. Jeff Moskowitz hung out with the drag queens of Jerusalem, while Ziv Hellman met the scientists helping to digitize modern farming and Shlomo Maital met the Israeli inventor who enabled the paraplegic hero Claire Lomas to complete this year’s London Marathon.
As we continue to develop The Jerusalem Report as Israel’s premier English-language magazine, we welcome your comments and suggestions by post, email, or our new Facebook page.

James ossuary collector sentenced to month in jail

Tel Aviv antiquities collector fined NIS 30,000 for three minor charges of illegal trading in antiquities and handling goods suspected of being stolen.
JERUSALEM POST
May 31, 2012

By MATTHEW KALMAN

The Tel Aviv antiquities collector acquitted in March after a seven-year trial for allegedly faking the burial box of Jesus’s brother, an inscribed tablet that may have adorned the First Temple, and dozens of other valuable antiquities was sentenced on Wednesday to a month in jail and fined NIS 30,000 for three minor charges of illegal trading in antiquities and handling goods suspected of being stolen.

Judge Aharon Farkash, vice president of the Jerusalem District Court, ruled that Oded Golanwill not have to serve a custodial sentence because he was held by police for more than a month after his arrest in 2003.

Farkash, who had earlier threatened to order the destruction of the burial box, or ossuary, inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus,” a black stone tablet supposedly recording repairs to the Temple by King Jehoash in 800 BCE and other items seized from Golan, delayed a decision on the final ownership of the items, which could be worth millions of dollars.

Farkash rejected prosecution arguments that all the items connected to the 41 forgery charges on which Golan was acquitted should be confiscated, but he did not order their immediate return as requested by the defense.

Instead, Farkash ordered the prosecution to present detailed arguments by July 1 justifying the confiscation of each item, including dozens of seals and seal impressions, inscribed pottery, lamps, decanters and other artifacts seized on suspicion of being fakes.

Farkash also revealed that he had been petitioned by two other collectors – Shlomo Moussaieff and George Weill – for the return of items belonging to them.

“Antiquities theft in the Land of Israel has become a national plague,” Farkash said in an eight-page decision that he read out to an almost empty courtroom.

“Antiquities theft damages various sites spread out across the Land of Israel, sites which are an inseparable part of the history and culture of this land and its inhabitants, who lived here from thousands of years ago until the present day. Antiquities theft also damages the ability of experts to document the history of the people of Israel in its land.”

Farkash said the work of the Antiquities Authority in stopping the theft and forgery of historical items was essential in protecting the heritage of the holy land. He said the only way to cut down on illegal excavations and the robbery of historic sites was to discourage the illegal antiquities trade.

The judge also called for a reform of the antiquities laws and suggested that collectors, as well as dealers, should have to periodically provide the authorities with lists of the items in their collection.

Golan said he was studying the ruling and had not yet decided whether to appeal the sentence.

“I respect the decision of the court,” he told The Jerusalem Post.

“However, the decision may be based on a mistaken interpretation of Israeli law. All three minor charges on which I was convicted, and to which I freely confessed in my first interview with the police in 2003, relate to antiquities found outside the borders of the State of Israel. Under Israeli law, the Israel Antiquities Authority has no jurisdiction over them and no authority in matters related to them.

“My interest is to save, keep and document important antiquities found in Israel and the West Bank. Unfortunately, the Israel Antiquities Authority has failed to prevent he loss of some 1.5 million pieces discovered in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, which have left the country,”Golan said.

He added that the remarks by the judge had “implications for any antiquities collector, most of whom save valuable items for posterity and donate them to museums so the wider public can benefit from them.

“The reforms suggested by the judge may even further harm the protection of antiquities found in Israel and encourage people to take them out of the country,” Golan said.

Judge to decide fate of ossuary, Jehoash tablet

Scholars say items should be preserved; J'lem judge could order items destroyed under "ruling of Solomon."

JERUSALEM POST
May 29, 2012

By MATTHEW KALMAN

A Jerusalem judge will announce on Wednesday whether he has decided to order the destruction of a burial box that could have held the bones of the brother of Jesus and an inscribed tablet that could have come from the First Temple.

At a Jerusalem District Court hearing in April, Judge Aharon Farkash said he might exercise “the judgement of Solomon” and order both items to be destroyed.

The stone burial box, or ossuary, dates to the first century CE and has an Aramaic inscription that reads "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus." The black tablet is inscribed with a passage recording repairs by King Jehoash around 800 BCE. Its surface is spattered with sub-microscopic globules of gold that suggest it might have survived a fire in which golden items melted into tiny airborne particles.

If genuine, the items are the only artifacts yet recovered that can be linked directly to the family of Jesus and the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and could be of considerable historical significance.

Last March, at the end of a trial lasting nearly seven years, a Tel Aviv collector was acquitted of faking the two artifacts and other antiquities by Judge Farkash, vice president of the Jerusalem District Court.

But Judge Farkash reserved judgment on whether the ossuary or the stone tablet were authentic because of disagreements between the world’s leading experts.

On Wednesday, Judge Farkash will pass sentence on the defendant, Oded Golan, who was acquitted on 41 charges of forgery, fraud and other serious crimes, but found guilty of three minor misdemeanors of trading in antiquities without a license and handling goods suspected of being stolen.

At a hearing in April, the prosecution demanded a tough sentence including jail time and said that the ossuary, the tablet and many other items should be confiscated by the court, even though Golan had been acquitted of all charges related to them.

“Maybe I’ll order them to be destroyed and neither side will have them,” said Judge Farkash in comments that were not recorded in the official court transcript.

It would be “the judgement of Solomon,” said Judge Farkash.

“Neither of you will have the ossuary or the Jehoash tablet. They broke once already, they can be broken again. Just destroy them,” he said.

The ossuary cracked into two pieces 2002 while it was being shipped to an exhibition in Canada and was repaired by restorers at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The Jehoash tablet broke along an existing crack in 2003 while it was being handled by investigators at the Israel Police forensic laboratory.

The judge also suggested that the items might be put on display for the public.

“Maybe they should be exhibited at the Israel Museum as items from this trial suspected of being fakes,” he said.

Experts who gave evidence for both sides last night urged Judge Farkash not to destroy the items.

Andre Lemaire, the Sorbonne scholar who published the first analysis of the ossuary in 2002 and has stood by its authenticity, said its destruction would be “scandalous” and “a manipulation of historical evidence.”

“It would be necessary from a scientific point of view to start a new suit, on a real basis this time, for voluntary destruction of historical evidence and tentative manipulation of history,” Professor Lemaire told The Jerusalem Post.

Christopher Rollston, professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Emmanuel Christian Seminary who appeared as a prosecution witness, said “it is never prudent to destroy antiquities, regardless of the controversy surrounding them.”

“I would certainly not wish to see the Ya'akov ("James") Ossuary destroyed. Indeed, to destroy the ossuary would only fuel the controversy, effectively turning this ossuary into an archaeological martyr of sorts. I wish to see it returned to its legal owner,” he said.

Prosecution witness Israel Finkelstein, professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, agreed that the ossuary should not be destroyed, but said it should not be returned to Golan. “The Israel Antiquities Authority has a place for alleged forgeries in their storehouses – why not put this item there too for posterity?” Finkelstein suggested.

Defence counsel Lior Bringer said the items should be returned immediately to Golan, who said he has not yet decided what to do with them.

“The prosecution is asking the court to punish the defendant for crimes for which he was acquitted,” said Bringer. “Golan admitted to the three minor charges he was convicted of in the first police interview. On these charges there was no need for a trial at all.”

“He spent more than two years under house arrest and was in prison twice. He has suffered enough,” said Bringer.

Israeli protestors call for controls to stop migrants

Tensions are rising in Israel

SUNDAY EXPRESS
Sunday May 27,2012

By Matthew Kalman

ISRAELI leaders are under pressure to stem the flow of illegal immigrants from Africa after tensions between migrants and poor neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv erupted in violence.

One demonstration against the wave of immigration deteriorated into attacks on Africans in cars and on the street, with police arresting 17 Israelis.

Yair Lapid, a prominent commentator, labelled it a “pogrom”.

But Right-wing politicians called on the government to seal the border with Egypt and to start deporting those without refugee status.

Likud MP Miri Regev told protesters: “The infiltrators are a cancer in our society. We will not let them thwart our attempt to protect ourselves, our children, our women and our work places.

“We’ll protest every day until the last of the Sudanese infiltrators returns to his country.”

But Yael Weisbach, who volunteers in a south Tel Aviv soup kitchen for refugees, denounced the speeches as “incitement”. She added: “People are fed misinformation about the refugees. They are lovely people. I’ve never encountered an act of violence or sexual harassment on their part.

“The violent protest could have been taken out of a Holocaust movie. Hatred based on the colour of one’s skin. We are losing our values.”

The protests followed two high-profile incidents in the past month in which illegal migrants were arrested on suspicion of the rapes of young Israeli women. Even before the attacks, a kindergarten and an apartment which was used by migrants were firebombed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has sanctioned a multi-million-pound boundary fence with Egypt to slow the illegal traffic, said: “The problem of the infiltrators must be solved and we will solve it. If we don’t, 60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000 and cause the negation of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

“However, there is no place for either the expressions or the actions that we witnessed.”

President Shimon Peres said “hatred of foreigners contradicts the foundations of Judaism”.

More than 60,000 migrants have entered Israel from Egypt in recent years.

Many have settled in a run-down neighbourhood of south Tel Aviv, which locals say has transformed the area.

Court says 'not guilty,' Antiquities Authority demands punishment

Antiquities Authority determined not to return dozens of items to Israeli collector accused of faking burial box of Jesus's brother.

By MATTHEW KALMAN

JERUSALEM POST
May 12, 2012

 
(Reuters)
The Antiquities Authority, backed by State Attorney Moshe Lador, has launched a desperate rearguard action to reverse its humiliating defeat in a seven-year trial that ended with the acquittal of an Israeli collector accused of faking the burial box of the brother of Jesus and an inscribed stone tablet that may have hung on the wall of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.

The latest twist came during a routine sentencing hearing at the Jerusalem District Court last Tuesday, two months after the stunning collapse of the high-profile prosecution.

Prosecutor Dan Bahat revealed that the Antiquities Authority was determined not to return dozens of items, including the burial box and the stone tablet to their owner, despite his acquittal on all the relevant charges.

Bahat compared it to returning drugs to a dealer acquitted on a technicality.

Oded Golan, 60, was cleared in March on 41 counts of forgery, fraud and other serious crimes related to what antiquities officials and police had described as a worldwide, multi-million-dollar network designed to falsify history and dupe museums and collectors into buying worthless fakes. Golan was convicted on three minor counts of handling goods suspected of being stolen and dealing in antiquities without a license.

The case attracted worldwide attention because of a stone burial box, or ossuary, inscribed with the Aramaic legend “James son of Joseph brother of Jesus.”

The prosecution was unable to prove its assertion that the words “brother of Jesus” were a modern addition and Golan was cleared of faking them.

If genuine, the ossuary is the only known artifact that could be directly connected to the family of the historical Jesus.

Golan was also acquitted on all charges relating to a black stone tablet inscribed in ancient Hebrew recording repairs to the Temple carried out by King Jehoash around 800 BCE. If genuine, it is the only item yet discovered that may have adorned the First Temple.

In December 2007, Amir Ganor, head of the antiquities authority anti-theft unit and the architect of the fraud trial, said the Antiquities Authority would return return more than 200 artifacts seized from Golan.

“I am holding the exhibits under a court order,” Ganor told the court. “When the trial is over, I imagine I will be happy to get rid of everything I have in the storeroom and return it to Oded Golan, including the ossuary.”

The trial has now ended, but even though Golan was acquitted on all charges related to the most important artifacts in the case, the prosecutor demanded the permanent confiscation of all the items. He also urged the judge to impose a maximum sentence for the three minor misdemeanors even though it was Golan’s first offense.

“I do not agree that there is an absence of a criminal history. There were illegal activities,” Bahat charged, prompting a sharp rebuke from Judge Aharon Farkash.

“You are trying to mount a new trial,” said the judge, who even referred to a “witchhunt” against Golan.

The Antiquities Authority has shown no sign that it accepts the not guilty verdict. Its spokesmen continue to describe the items in the trial as fakes and the authority appears to be determined to punish Golan despite losing the case.

Bahat said the decision to seek confiscation of the property and a harsh sentence had been taken personally by the state attorney.

GOLAN, WHO was imprisoned twice by police for short periods during the investigation and then held under house arrest for more than 700 days, as well as losing untold income over the 10-year investigation and trial, said he had expected the court to order the immediate return of the hundreds of items and documents taken by the police and hoped the judge would not impose further punishment.

Bahat presented two apparently contradictory arguments to the court. First, he said that since the judge had ruled the items were not fakes as charged in the indictment, they were in fact real antiquities and Golan was therefore not a collector but a dealer and so had an obligation to maintain a full inventory of his stock.

Judge Farkash pointedly reminded him that this accusation had not even been hinted at in any of the 44 crimes listed in the indictment.

“I don’t recall that in any of the charges you accused him of this crime of being an unlicensed dealer. How can you now ask me to consider this when deciding on the sentence?” asked the judge. “You are now asking me to take into consideration that he didn’t maintain an inventory. I don’t recall that was included in any of the 18 counts, either as a specific charge or within any of the charges on the indictment.”

Bahat then performed an abrupt about-turn, arguing that, despite Golan’s acquittal, the “likelihood” is that the items were fakes.

“In my opinion, it is inconceivable that the items should be returned to the accused,” said Bahat. “I say there is no choice.”

Bahat said it would be unacceptable for Golan to benefit from the ossuary or other artifacts.

“He can sell it, exhibit it. I cannot countenance that if the item is fake that he should get it back,” said Bahat, suggesting the items be given to the Israel Police forensics laboratory for educational purposes.

But Judge Farkash seemed unimpressed, particularly as he had singled out the forensics laboratory in his verdict for severe criticism for contaminating the ossuary inscription during testing, rendering it scientifically worthless.

“If the ossuary is a fake, it’s not an antiquity. How can I not return it to the accused?” he asked.

The judge suggested, only half-joking, that the items be put on display at the Israel Museum in special exhibition of artifacts from the trial. Golan himself says he has not yet decided what to do with them.

But Golan’s attorney Lior Bringer was scathing about the prosecution tactics.

“The prosecution is asking the court to punish the defendant for crimes for which he was acquitted,” said Bringer. “Golan admitted to the three minor charges he was convicted of in the first police interview. On these charges there was no need for a trial at all.”

“He spent more than two years under house arrest and was in prison twice. He has suffered enough,” said Bringer.

But the Antiquities Authority seems determined to enforce its will through the courts rather than academic discussion – and to pursue legal action against anyone who dares to challenge its diktat. The authority ordered the unprecedented prosecution of the late Prof. Hanan Eshel of Bar-Ilan University for buying important artifacts and studying them before handing them over to the state. Last week, the authority was back in court in Nazareth, prosecuting a resident of Zipori for “damaging” an ancient tomb that he discovered and was trying to preserve.

The writer is editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Report. His dispatches from the trial are atwww.jamesossuarytrial.blogspot.com/

WHY I BELIEVE THIS BOX CONTAINS JESUS'S BROTHER

SUNDAY EXPRESS, April 8, 2012

Oded Golan was acquitted of forgery charges

By MATTHEW KALMAN

ODED Golan was just 10 when he stumbled across a small clay tablet inscribed with ancient lettering while walking with his parents near the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. It proved to be the oldest dictionary yet unearthed, seven lines of a phrase book for merchants in two ancient languages, Akkadian and Sumerian, and nearly 4,000 years old.

Within days, Professor Yigael Yadin, the father of modern Israeli archaeology, came knocking at the door of the family home in Tel Aviv, asking to see “Mr Golan”, not realising that the learned scholar who had sent him a postcard describing the find was a schoolboy.

Golan escorted the professor to his bedroom to show him the artefact and agreed to let Yadin take it back to Jerusalem for analysis. His mother served tea and biscuits.

By the age of 50, after a lifetime of collecting antiquities, Golan was renowned among scholars for owning one of the finest archaeological collections in the world. His Tel Aviv apartment, lined with glass-fronted display cases crammed with ancient pots, weapons, cultic vessels and altars became a place of pilgrimage for academics and dealers. Thousands more pieces were stored in warehouses. However, his hobby was about to land him in jail and make him an object of international ridicule.

"It will remain part of my collection. I don’t intend to sell it"
Oded Golan

In 2002, Andre Lemaire, a visiting professor of ancient languages from the Sorbonne, was leafing through the albums of Golan’s collection when he came across a photograph of a Roman-era burial box, or ossuary, made of limestone with the eye-popping inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” in ancient Aramaic.

Lemaire published the sensational find in the Biblical Archaeology Review. It made headlines around the world. Thousands of people flocked to the first public exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Golan was hailed as the owner of the only item ever discovered that might be connected with the family of Jesus Christ. Academic articles, books and documentaries debating the significance of the ossuary, whose value was conservatively placed at £1.2million, followed.

The celebrations were shortlived. The Israel Antiquities Authority seized the ossuary and subjected it to tests by two panels of experts. It also seized a black stone tablet with an inscription from King Jehoash in the 9th century BC that might be the only item recovered from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.

In June 2003 the experts declared both items fake. Golan was arrested and held in jail for a month. Police raided his home, office and warehouses around Tel Aviv, seizing hundreds of items along with tools, computer files and half-finished artefacts that led them to believe Golan was the mastermind behind an antiquities forgery ring that was milking museums and collectors around the world of millions of dollars.

Golan said he had bought the ossuary 25 years earlier from an Arab dealer in the Old City of Jerusalem. “I never faked an antiquity in my life,” he insisted.

In December 2004, he and four others were indicted on 18 counts of forgery, fraud and obtaining money by deception. Golan was placed under house arrest for two years, more than a year of which he had to spend at the home of his elderly parents.

When the trial opened in the Jerusalem District Court in September 2005, Golan faced 44 charges. His reputation was in ruins.

The Israel Antiquities Authority staked its reputation on the trial, recruiting experts from around the world who testified the items were fake. By the time Judge Aharon Farkash retired to consider his verdict in October 2010, he had presided over 120 sessions, examined 200 exhibits (some of them entire books) and heard more than 12,000 pages of testimony from 126 witnesses.

The case revealed furtive encounters with Arab tomb robbers, high finance, skulduggery, smuggling and transactions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars based on a handshake and paid in cash behind the apparently cultured facade of collecting priceless antiquities.

“This was the first time that a court was asked to rule on a question of antiquities forgery,” Judge Farkash said last month, summarising testimony from experts in archaeology, the Bible, chemistry and geochemistry, geology, paleography and more. The list of witnesses read like a who’s who of the world’s leading scholars but as the judge wryly noted in his verdict, even the professors appearing for the same side disagreed with one another and sometimes even with themselves, changing their minds as time passed.

“If you, the world’s leading experts in this field, cannot agree with each other on the authenticity or otherwise of these items, how do you expect me, a mere judge, to reach a conclusion?” he said, before delivering his 475-page verdict on March 14.

Golan was exonerated of forgery, acquitted on 41 of the charges and found guilty on just three minor counts of unlicensed antiquities trading and holding items suspected of being stolen.

Judge Farkash warned that the verdict did not mean the items were necessarily genuine or that the “Jesus” on the ossuary was Jesus Christ but his ruling rescued Golan’s treasures from the dustbin of history. “I was never worried about the ossuary or the Jehoash Tablet,” Golan said after the verdict, “I cannot guarantee that it belonged to the brother of Jesus Christ but it is definitely ancient. I have no doubt about it.”

Born into a wealthy Tel Aviv family, Golan studied engineering and became a serial entrepreneur with successful businesses in travel, architectural seminars, property development and educational software.

Back in his apartment, Golan said he last saw the ossuary two years ago in court. “It will remain part of my collection. I don’t intend to sell it. I will have to consider over the coming months about whether to lend it to a museum or other institution for public exhibition.”

He said he was surprised at the explosion of interest in the ossuary because he knew little about Christian history and had never connected the inscription to Christ. “I purchased it in the mid or late-Seventies in East Jerusalem from one of the dealers in the Old City,” he said. “I didn’t recognise either its importance or its value for a long time. I didn’t even know that Jesus had siblings.

“No one can say for certain it is connected to the family of Jesus but there is a very high likelihood it is. If it really is the burial box of Jesus’s brother, it is a very exciting artefact. It is truly a historic item with a strong emotional importance.”

Antiquities collector acquitted of forgery charges in ‘James ossuary’ case

The media are given a preview of The James Ossuary on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Nov.14.2002 (Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail)

MATTHEW KALMAN

Jerusalem— Special to Globe and Mail Update

Published Wednesday, Mar. 14, 2012

A Roman-era burial box inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus” was reprieved from the scrapheap of history on Wednesday when a Jerusalem judge completely exonerated an Israeli antiquities collector who had been accused of forging it.
The verdict, delivered by Judge Aharon Farkash in a tiny, crowded courtroom in the Jerusalem District Courthouse, ended a seven-year ordeal for the accused, Oded Golan, 60, but it will do little to extinguish the decade-long scientific controversy over the authenticity of the limestone box which has raged since it was first displayed to the public at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2002.
If genuine, the burial box, or ossuary, is the first physical artifact yet discovered that might be connected with the family of the historical Jesus Christ.
Mr. Golan had been accused of adding the second half of the inscription linking it to Jesus, and then fabricating the patina, the bio-organic coating that adheres to ancient objects, to pass it off as genuine.
But Judge Farkash said the prosecution had failed to prove any of the serious charges against Mr. Golan and acquitted him on all but three minor charges of illegal antiquities dealing and possession of stolen antiquities. Robert Deutsch, a co-defendant, was acquitted on all charges.
“The prosecution failed to prove beyond all reasonable doubt what was stated in the indictment: that the ossuary is a forgery and that Mr. Golan or someone acting on his behalf forged it,” Judge Farkash told the court, summarizing his 475-page verdict.
He noted that it was the first time a criminal court had been asked to rule in a case of antiquities forgery.
The spectacular collapse of the trial, nine years after Mr. Golan was arrested and thousands of items were seized from his home, office and warehouses in Tel Aviv, was a severe blow to the Israeli police and Israel Antiquities Authority, who claimed they had exposed “the tip of the iceberg” of an international conspiracy selling fake artifacts to collectors and museums worldwide.
The verdict will be welcomed by those who hope that the ossuary will finally provide a physical connection to the historical Jesus.
But Judge Farkash, who said he had heard from 126 witnesses and sat through 120 sessions that produced more than 12,000 pages of testimony, acknowledged that the collapse of the criminal trial did not signal the end of the scientific debate over the authenticity of the ossuary.
“This is not to say that the inscription on the ossuary is true and authentic and was written 2,000 years ago,” he said. “We can expect this matter to continue to be researched in the archaeological and scientific worlds and only the future will tell. Moreover, it has not been proved in any way that the words ‘brother of Jesus’ definitely refer to the Jesus who appears in Christian writings.’
Judge Farkash was particularly scathing about tests carried out by the Israel police forensics laboratory that he said had probably contaminated the ossuary, making it impossible to carry out further scientific tests on the inscription.
Mr. Golan, who was accompanied to court by his elderly parents, said he was “delighted at the complete and total acquittal I have received here today.”
“We brought experts from all over the world who testified that the inscriptions on the items that were suspected of being fakes are completely authentic, following research work by dozens of experts,” he said.
Prosecutor Dan Bahat said the case had been complicated by the refusal of a key witness, who was suspected of helping to forge many of the items, to come from Egypt to testify.
“What we tried to do here has set an international precedent,” said Mr. Bahat. “This is the first time someone has brought the issue of antiquities forgery before a court. Regarding at least one object, a decanter, the court found it was fake.”

CHANNEL 4 NEWS: JESUS BOX - REAL OR FORGERY?

MK production for Channel 4 News: The 'Jesus' box: clever forgery or genuine article?

Monday, 12 March 2012

Channel 4 News interview: Jesus Tomb claims

BABY YOU CAN DRIVE MY ELECTRIC CAR

Better Place founder Shai Agassi, about to launch the world’s first fleet of all-electric cars in Israel, tells MATTHEW KALMAN he is surprised to find himself alone on the grid

SHAI AGASSI IS OUT FRONT and loving it. Four years after announcing he would launch the world’s first national network for all-electric cars in Israel, his Better Place company is in pole position on the starting-grid in what appears to be a one-car race.
In January, the first consignment of 100 Renault Fluence ZE (“Zero Emissions”) family sedans arrived in Israel. By the end of 2012, hundreds of Israelis will be driving around the country in cars powered only by electric batteries supplied by Better Place. They will be able to trickle-charge their vehicles over several hours at thousands of charge spots at their office, in the streets of major cities, at public parking lots or overnight at their homes. Each full-charged battery will fuel about 100 miles of driving.
For longer distances, drivers will be able to use a national network of swap stations where spent batteries will be replaced by fully-charged batteries in an automated process that takes less time than filling a gasoline tank.
Agassi, a whiz-kid programmer who sold his first company for $400 million in his early thirties, says he is amazed that four years on, with the Israeli network about to go live and more networks under construction in Denmark and Australia – as well as pilot programs in Canada, California and Hawaii – Better Place has no serious competitors.

No competition

“There has never been a technology disruption of this magnitude where one company was left to run with an idea, where no competition showed up in the span of four years,” Agassi tells The Jerusalem Report.
“That to me is astonishing. It’s as if somebody would have left Apple for four years to build an MP3 empire and expected to catch up. In technology, usually one year is enough to create an advantage that is really hard to catch up afterwards.
“We all thought that the car industry would be more pro-active in catching up and what we’re seeing is that the car industry is extremely conservative,” he says.
Agassi, who drove an electric car to commute to his office in Palo Alto before relocating back to Israel, where he was born in 1968, to launch Better Place, is passionate that electric cars are not just a passing trend but a mass-market phenomenon that will sweep the automobile industry. He believes the all-electric Renault Fluence ZE will become a top-selling car in both Israel and in Denmark, where the second Better Place network is planned.
Agassi says the plan he originally announced in 2008 is on track. “By and large we were scarily accurate on most of the predictions that we made,” he says.
“We needed a few less stations than we originally thought, less public charge spots than we thought. Most of the charge spots are actually at people’s homes, not in the public area,” he says.
One surprise is that early applicants are not limited to people driving shorter distances, but include heavy users driving up to 30,000 miles a year. In the past few months, Better Place has signed deals with 400 corporate fleets and three of Israel’s top five leasing companies. They include major corporations like cellphone companies whose fleets are on the road all the time, clocking up high mileage.

Mileage package

The Fluence ZE is being sold to private customers for NIS 122,900 ($33,000), a comparable price to the regular model. Customers then purchase a mileage package from Better Place that includes the battery, recharging and swapping, up to a certain mileage per year – similar to a cellphone package. A basic 20,000 km (12,427 miles) per year costs NIS 1,090 ($295) per month, while 30,000 km (18,641 miles) costs NIS 1,599 ($432) per month. Better Place says customers will save about 15 percent in fuel costs and more in lower maintenance and insurance compared to a gas-fueled vehicle.
A special package costing NIS 157,500 ($42,600) includes the Fluence ZE and all-inclusive service for three years for those driving up to 25,000 km (15,534 miles), giving an estimated saving of 35% over a similar gas-powered car.
“They are actually showing up for financial reasons, less than for altruistic reasons,” says Agassi.
“When you get a car that is actually cheaper than the gasoline equivalent, you open up a much broader market than just the niche early adopters,” he says.
When he launched the project in 2008, Agassi said he was also inspired to rid the world of its dependency on oil and the pollution it creates. He predicted that oil prices would continue to rise, increasing the advantage of electrically powered vehicles.
“Within a decade, the cost of energy for a single year of fuel supply for a combustion car should cost more than the cost of energy for an electric car’s entire life, even when taking the cost of battery into consideration,” Agassi said.

Convinced

Today he is even more convinced of that calculation.
“The odds of the world oil prices actually going down, given everything we’re seeing around us today, I wouldn’t take that bet. If anyone’s betting on a two-digit number in the next three years, they either found a way to create world peace or they found a way to bring oil from places we don’t know yet,” he says.
“Nothing in the macro conditions, short, medium and long-term, indicate oil’s going to go below $100 a barrel.”
He also points to China, where Better Place buys its batteries. The Chinese are looking at the Better Place model very closely and may well launch their own competing network, if the company does well in Israel and Denmark.
“Just in the next five years with growth of seven to eight percent in China, you’re adding almost all the cars in Western Europe in China in the next five years,” Agassi says.
His confidence is shared by some of the savviest investors in the game. Nissan-Renault has poured more than half a billion dollars into developing the new sedans and expects to supply more than 70,000 electric cars for Better Place drivers in Israel over the next three years.
Leading funds have lined up to provide Better Place with more cash than Agassi expected. Last year, the company raised $200 million from investors, bringing the total to around $750 million. Investors include America’s General Electric conglomerate and the Swiss UBS banking group. The company is now valued at approximately $2.25 billion.

Highly attractive

“Of all the clean tech we looked at in the area of transportation, nothing compares to Better Place. The business model is highly attractive,” says Anthony Bernbaum, the global head of direct principal investments at HSBC, Britain’s international banking corporation, which has sunk $150 million into Better Place so far.
Agassi says the new investment will allow Better Place to start expanding into other areas.
“The real next big networks will most likely happen in Western Europe,” he says, but Better Place is already looking further afield with future plans dependent on the success of its first three networks.
“Think of Israel’s network as a single cell organism, integrated and covering the entire country. Denmark is roughly the same. Think of Australia as a three and-a-half cell organism with one network connecting it. Melbourne is a cell roughly the size of Israel, same thing for Sydney, same thing for Brisbane and a half cell for Canberra, connected with a freeway that is roughly the same length as the freeway between San Diego and Seattle,” says Agassi.
“When we prove that we can do a cell, it’s not that hard to expand it to do multi-cell. Once you do multicell, you prove that you can actually do places like the US,” he says.

OSCAR: The friend in your car

Inside every car is a computer called Oscar. It is an advanced entertainment center, GPS navigation system and fuel controller all rolled into one. It also provides a constant wireless interface between the car and the national network, with a direct link to the National Operations Center.
“If I want to drive from here to Jerusalem, all I have to do is put the address inside the car,” says Better Place CTO Barak Hershkovitz. “Once you put the destination inside Oscar, it will not just build a route plan like any GPS system. It will do a very accurate range calculation of what will be the exact state of charge of the battery when we get to our destination.”
Oscar absorbs each driver’s habits and adjusts its calculation of fuel consumption accordingly. It will also take into account various factors including the weather, how many people are in the car, whether there are bicycles on the roof creating extra drag, and whether the journey is uphill or downhill.
“We will know how you drive, how your specific battery behaves, how your specific car behaves and we will have a very accurate statistical model that will predict the range when you arrive. The longer you drive the car, the smarter the system becomes,” says Hershkovitz.
“The car communicates with the Network Operations Center (NOC). The user doesn’t do anything. Oscar does that for you. It has a charge application inside. It knows everything about the car, it knows everything about the battery, it knows what the user wants and sends it automatically to the NOC.
“When you go for a battery switch, Oscar already communicates with the switch station. He senses that you are coming. There is a wireless connection. He knows what car you are, what kind of user. He will tell you at each step where you are in the process.”

The Switch

The driver programs their destination into Oscar, the in-car computer, which maps out a route. If the route is beyond the current fuel charge left in the battery, Oscar will program a route via a battery-switching station so there will be enough electric “fuel” to complete the journey.
A national network of switch stations means that a battery change is never more than 15 miles away. Oscar continuously monitors the car’s battery charge and estimates the remaining charge on reaching the planned destination. If a swap is necessary, Oscar maps out a route to the most convenient switch station and alerts the station as the car approaches.
Screens inside the car and on the wall of the switch station guide the driver through the process. At the entrance to a short tunnel similar to a car wash, the driver switches off his engine while the car is manoeuvered into position by hydraulic clamps. The battery weighs more than 500 pounds, but the removal of the gasoline engine and tank means that overall the vehicle is only about 100 pounds heavier than a regular car.
Inside the station, 16 batteries are cooled and recharged at optimum current to maintain battery longevity. By the time the last battery is swapped, the first is recharged and ready for use. Each battery carries a full charge of 22 kilowatt hours, giving a driving range of approximately 100 miles in normal conditions.
The underside of the car is washed and dried to avoid dirt contaminating the switching station. The car is then lifted on hydraulic jacks and a well opens beneath the car. Through wireless communication with Oscar, the switch station knows the exact car model and chooses the appropriate battery.
A robot releases and removes the spent battery from its enclosure between the rear passenger seat and the trunk, and lowers it into the underground rack where its diagnostics will be checked and it will be recharged. The robot then lifts a replacement battery into the car and fixes it in place. The well closes, the jacks are lowered, the clamps are released and the driver is instructed to restart the engine and drive away on the fully charged battery and complete the journey.
The entire process has taken three minutes and 40 seconds – the same time it would take to refuel at a gas station.

Charge it

Better Place’s blue and gray, sleek, thigh-high charging posts are intended to look and function more like high-tech appliances than passive electric sockets. They have sprouted in parking lots and along pavement-side parking spots around the counrtry, prompting some surprised residents to wonder if they are a new-fangled parking meter.
Access to the actual sockets in the post is possible only by swiping a Better Place smart card over a card-reader on the top, to identify the customer as a subscriber. This prevents unauthorized access and vandalism, and also enables the company to charge automatically for the service. The charge point allows subscribers to refuel their vehicles for regular journeys at home, their place of business or one of thousands of public locations while they are asleep or at work.
Each Better Place charge point is connected to the National Operations Center that continuously monitors the level of charge and other diagnostics. Wireless control allows smart management to avoid overloading the electricity grid while ensuring that each battery is fully charged for the next journey. A modem inside each charge point reports technical problems or power failures that are either solved remotely or passed on to customer service and engineers.
“Eighty-five percent of drivers drive about 35 miles a day,” says Better Place CTO Barak Hershkovitz. “The car is parked for 22 hours. The feeling you get as a consumer, if you have a charge spot at home and a charge spot at work, is that by magic your car is full all the time.
“We have two energy networks: one for charging and one for range extension. I can immediately get an extra battery that will immediately take me the extra range,” he says.
Users sign a service contract similar to a cellphone subscription under which Better Place retains ownership of the battery, lowering the cost of the car and allowing future technological improvements without users having to buy replacement batteries.
“My supreme goal is to get off oil, not just to make Better Place profitable,” says Hershkovitz. “I see a technology that’s really creating a dramatic change in the world. It’s not a small enhancement, it’s a revolution.”

JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR FOOTNOTE

Joseph Cedar, writer/director of the Oscar-nominated “Footnote,” tells MATTHEW KALMAN that Israeli films do not have to focus on the conflict to attract international interest

The Jerusalem Report, issue dated February 27, 2012

Film director Joseph Cedar returns to the Academy Awards this month for the second time in four years. His latest movie “Footnote” – a compelling tragi-comedy of father-son relations set in the obscure world of Talmudic philology – has already won Israel’s top cinema prize and was named best script at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Now it has been nominated for the best foreign film Oscar, just like his last movie “Beaufort,” which in 2008 became Israel’s first Academy Award nomination in nearly three decades.

A flood of awards and nominations has accompanied what the “Los Angeles Times” called “Israel’s film renaissance” in recent years. Since Cedar broke the drought, two more Israeli films – “Waltz with Bashir” and “Ajami” have also been nominated for Oscars, while these and other Israeli films have taken home gold and silver Globes, Bears, Cameras and Lions from film festivals in Berlin, Venice, Los Angeles and Cannes.

Unlike the three previous Israeli Oscar nominations, including Cedar’s own “Beaufort” which dealt with the gut-wrenching tensions surrounding Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, the director’s latest movie marks an abrupt departure from the theme of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

But Cedar, who at 43 is widely considered the leading light of this sparkling new generation of Israeli filmmakers, tells The Jerusalem Report that Israeli cinema has much more to offer than a variation on the political themes thrashed out each day in the newspapers.

JOSEPH CEDAR ON SET (Photo: Ran Mendelson)

“I really think that some of the best films that came out of Israel recently are not necessarily about the conflict or about political angles of things in our region,” says the soft-spoken Cedar, whose distinctive New York tones recall the city where he was born and raised. He emigrated to Israel at age six before returning to New York for film school. He now lives in Tel Aviv with his wife Vered, a journalist, and their three children.

“When you look at those films, the reason they were nominated or received attention outside of Israel didn’t really have to do with their political message or their subject matter. It had to do with the filmmaking,” he says.

“‘Ajami,’ at least for me, was such a miracle in how it was made and how it was able to give an audience this authentic experience that seemed effortless but was actually constructed of really challenging elements of non-actors doing extremely dramatic scenes.

“It’s more of a coincidence that they were films that dealt with kind of political aspects. They are films that were interesting for other reasons,” he says.

Father versus son

Cedar happily admits that the subject of “Footnote” could not be more opaque. The film is all about interpretation, set in a world where scholars labor in dusty basements over fragments of ancient texts. A father and son, both Talmudic scholars but with radically different approaches, are caught in a scholarly rivalry that stretches the bond between them to breaking-point and challenges their own integrity.

“New York Times” film critic A.O.Scott said the film “blends academic satire, classic Jewish humor and an almost Shakespearean sense of the tragic potential of the paternal bond.”

The two lead characters, brilliantly played by Shlomo Bar-Aba and Lior Ashkenazi, inhabit a world where an entire life’s work might win international acclaim or be reduced to a single footnote in a forgotten monograph. When outside society comes calling in the form of an ambitious young reporter, the elderly scholar is forced to confront the painful truth that his whole life has been devoted to the study of a subject that no one but a handful of people care about or can even comprehend. The plot turns on whether public acclaim for son or father will be decided by a simple bureaucratic error.

“I’m still in a battle zone, just not between armies, between family members. It’s about a father and son and a competition between them that just crosses all the boundaries that you’d think would exist between a father and son,” says Cedar. “In ‘Footnote’ the characters cross that red line and do things that are really extreme one to another.”

But Cedar declines to be drawn further on interpreting his own award-winning story, preferring others to seek their own meaning in the movie.

“There is something about this film that my instinct has been telling me not to interpret,” he says. “There are a few things that seem to exist in the storyline. Every time I put my finger on one theme or another it somehow reduces what actually is there for the audience.

“Clearly the main dramatic tension is between a father and a son, but the thing or the issue or the sentiment that they are arguing about is really wide in how it seems relevant to many things in my life – not only in my relationship to my son and to my father.”

Cedar says he chose to set the film in the obscure world of philological research after stumbling across the Talmud department at the Hebrew University, where his own father happens to be a world-renowned professor of science.

“Aside from issues that are extremely relevant to me, I found rivalries that were just really extreme, and characters who are unforgiving and who never compromise about anything. It was clear that I had found a gold mine of dramatic treasure,” he says. “The fact that these great epic rivalries had to do with the tiniest, sometimes esoteric nuances of this text that is probably the most important text in our culture, is an added bonus. It allowed me to touch things that I’m happy I had a chance to deal with.”

Asked to explain how such intense passions are ignited by such tiny matters of scholarly analysis, Cedar likes to quote Henry Kissinger, who said the reason that academics are so vicious “is because the stakes are so small.”

While the movie clearly transcends the very small world in which it is set and has proven its appeal to a broad audience, Cedar likes the fact that it is so Jewish.

“There’s something very unique about the world that this film takes place in. Hopefully there are things that an audience outside that world can appreciate or at least be interested in but these characters are extremely specific,” he says.

“The field of manuscript research and Hebrew philology and Talmudic philology is so challenging in Judaic studies because, unlike the Vatican, we don’t really have archives and libraries that connect us to manuscripts continuously over the decades. There are big holes in our heritage. So the job of a Talmudic philologist is really to put together a puzzle with many, many missing pieces. That in itself is unique for Judaic studies.

“Jewish texts were always in danger. It became a survival tool to pass on our data from generation to generation orally, which is also a great philological challenge to decipher because there’s such a big difference between how you convey something orally and how you would convey it in writing,” he says.

Strictly observant

The interaction between text and meaning, and the layers that evolve as different people communicate, lies at the heart of “Footnote.” It is also a film about the limits of integrity, an issue that is familiar territory for Cedar. Rare among Israeli filmmakers, he is an Orthodox Jew who is strictly observant. To collect his awards at both Berlin and Cannes, where the ceremonies started just as night was falling on Saturday, Cedar and his 100-strong entourage walked a mile or so through the crowded festival streets to arrive on foot and avoid desecrating Shabbat.

Despite his fluency in both Hebrew and English, Cedar says he has no particular desire to make films outside Israel, but language continues to fascinate him.

“It’s something I’m dealing with now. It’s actually in a remote way the subject of my next film. Not whether I can make a film in English, but how far a character can move away from his comfort zone or his roots without feeling that he’s all by himself in the world,” he says, declining to describe the new movie in any more detail.

“I’ve decided not to talk about it until it’s there,” he says. “Too many times I’ve said something about a project that hasn’t happened or turned out to be completely different. It’s hard enough to talk about a film after it’s made. Talking about it before it’s made is impossible.”

He says his filmmaking process is largely “unconscious” – something brought home to him after comparisons were drawn between themes in his last two films. “Beaufort” was set in a military base built on the ruins of a Crusader castle. The word “fortress” turns out to be the key to deciphering the central text in “Footnote.”

“Someone pointed out to me after the film was made the relation between the word ‘fortress’ and the fact that I just made a film that deals with the complexities of a fortress.”

“In retrospect, there’s a direct connection between those two films, how they show two sides of what a fortress is,” Cedar says. “It’s something that someone pointed out to me afterwards. I had not thought of that.”

Better Place Launches Electric Fleet in Israel

Published by MIT

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Business

A network of fast battery-switching stations offers an unusual business model for electric cars.

• By Matthew Kalman

Roll out: A fleet of 100 Renault Fluence electric cars arriving in Israel last week.
Better Place

See the rest of our Business Impact report on The Connected Vehicle.

In four years, the electric-car company Better Place has traveled from startup to starting line. Last week, a fleet of 100 electrically powered Renault Fluence ZE sedans set out in a caravan along Israeli highways, signaling the start of the company's efforts to reach a wide swath of consumers.

The cars are fueled by 225-kilogram lithium-ion batteries with a range of 160 kilometers. The batteries can be recharged at home or swapped for fully charged ones at a network of robotic battery-switching stations that Better Place has built throughout Israel to let owners extend their cars' range.

The switching stations, plus apps that guide a driver to them, are what make Better Place's business unique. In Israel, gas is expensive, and there are also high taxes on gasoline-powered cars, making electric vehicles more attractive.

Agassi predicts that by next year, electric cars will be the best-selling vehicles in both Israel and Denmark. Those, along with Australia, are the nations where the service is being launched this year.

The 100 new cars that took the road last week are all for Better Place employees, although a company spokesman says employees will pay to lease them just "like everyone else." About 70 cars were on the road already.

The Fluence ZE (for zero emissions) is a pleasure to drive. Smooth and silent, the car glides easily past the speed limit on Israel's fastest highways. Its navigation system can provide directions to the nearest battery-switching station at any time.

Better Place has won some important endorsements for its business model, which remains largely unchanged since the company was founded in 2008. Last November, it raised $200 million from investors, bringing the total it has raised to around $750 million. The company is now valued at approximately $2.25 billion.

Quick fix: A Better Place battery-swapping station in Israel, where putting a fresh battery in an electric car takes about as long as filling a gas tank.
Better Place

While some skepticism still surrounds the venture, two car leasing companies in Israel have recently signed on."We think switchable EV is more appealing ... for the consumer because it solves the range issue and makes the cars much more economic," says Anthony Bernbaum, the global head of direct principal investments at HSBC, which has so far sunk $150 million into the company. "We believe switchable EV will be the more enduring business model."

Most automakers are working on hybrid vehicles or electric vehicles using proprietary battery packs that don't pop out. That's left Better Place as the only large commercial venture betting on battery swapping. "The biggest surprise I have in the last four years is that we were left to our own to build a four-year advantage," says Agassi.

Competitors could emerge if Better Place finds commercial success. Agassi says the company plans to use the money it has raised to set up networks in more European countries, possibly France and Germany. That means plans for launches in Hawaii, China, and California will likely be put on the back burner for the time being.

"Everybody is waiting for them to prove the model," says Sam Jaffe, an analyst in renewable and distributed energy strategies at IDC Energy Strategies. "There are a lot of people following what they're doing very closely."

FUCHSBERG JERUSALEM CENTER
8 Agron Street, Jerusalem
MONDAY EVENING FORUM
LECTURES & DISCUSSIONS IN ENGLISH
Monday January 16
THE JAMES OSSUARY “FRAUD” TRIAL IN JERUSALEM:
A REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK
with Matthew Kalman, foreign correspondent and filmmaker

AT 8.00 PM, ADMISSION 20 NIS