Purim sameach!

Happy Purim or Happy Easter? This year, these quite different holidays coincide because the Hebrew calendar has a leap year with an additional month of "Adar". Purim is a happy, colourful holiday involving costumes, sweets and a lot of alcohol.
It celebrates the salvation of the Jewish people from the evil Haman in the ancient Persian empire. The story in the book of Esther tells that king Achashverosh invited citizens from his huge empire to a 6 months long feast of eating and drinking. When his wife Vashti refused to come to the party wearing nothing but her crown, the king sends her away, looks for a new queen and chooses the Jewish young woman Esther. Her uncle Mordechai overhears a conversation of two guards at the palace gate who are planning to kill the king. Preventing their plan, Mordechai gains Achashverosh's appreciation.
However, for religious reasons he refuses to bow to Haman, the king's assistant. Haman finds out that he is Jewish and orders to kill him and all Jews in Persia. Esther starts fasting and praying, after three days she invites Haman for dinner with the king and herself. The king remembers that Mordechai saved his life earlier and asks Haman how a man of great importance to the king should be honoured. Haman assumes this refers to him. Instead, at the end, Mordechai receives the honour to ride the king's horse and Haman, his sons and many others are killed.


Today, Purim is celebrated over several days. Typically, one eats וזני המן (osnei Haman = Haman's ears), sweet triangular pastry filled with poppy seeds, dates, chocolate or nuts - very tasty, I didn't count how many of them I ate in the past week! Although the official holiday was on Thursday and Friday, people started wearing funny costumes already in the beginning of the weak.
On Tuesday, we had a short Purim meeting with our colleagues after lunch and ate - of course - osnei Haman, drank even alcohol and took a picture of the serious physicists in funny costumes. I dressed up as Pipi Longstocking from the famous book by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, but I was not sure if she is also known in Israel. In fact, Israeli colleagues easily recognized the costume as Bilbi (her name in Hebrew)! In the Ulpan (Hebrew course), we read the story in Hebrew. Our teacher had simplified the original version a bit for us, yet it feels great to be able to read already a story in this difficult language.
On Wednesday, there was a joint Purim evening of all Weizmann Ulpans together and on Thursday, the international Weizmann office organised a party for all foreign postdocs and students. My minimalistic Pipi-costume won the "best-costume-award": a free guided day trip for 2 persons somewhere in Israel :-)
When we arrived back in Tel Aviv in the night, we walked along the Rothschild Boulevard which was full of happy persons dressed in amazing costumes.
On Friday afternoon, we enjoyed walking through the city, also on the market in costumes, and finally went to the Kikar HaMedina, a huge round square in the north of the city. So many cheerful persons were presenting their costumes and dancing on the streets - we joined them!

Purim is a joyful experience :-) Now I wish all readers of my blog who celebrate Easter in one or another way: Happy Easter! This year, I did not eat any chocolate eggs, but instead more than enough osnei Haman... Apart from some bunny costumes  I did not even see any symbols of Easter - not so surprisingly!

p.s. Pictures will follow tomorrow, I promise.

Security in the everyday life

Many people (including myself), asked me if it is/feels safe in Israel at the moment. The fact that I am writing this blog post only now, 5 months after moving to Israel, can already tell you that worries about the security do not dominate my daily life.
In general I can say that I felt quite safe in the day-to-day life here, both in Rehovot, from our (former) apartment to the institute (inside the Weizmann Institute without doubts) and to the supermarkets and market. Also now in Tel Aviv, walking around, travelling by bus and train, I am not too worried. People walk on the streets, sit in cafés and restaurants, use busses, trains and sherut and live their lives. This creates a normal atmosphere. However, I cannot compare to the time before the knife stabbing attacks started because we arrived after they had already started. In the beginning around the Jewish New Year (Rosh HaShana), the international newspapers were still reporting about those attacks. Nowadays one needs to check the Israeli online news to read if and where there were more stabbing attacks.
Two recent exceptions were the New Year shooting attack in central Tel Aviv and the stabbing attack on Sunday in Jaffa (which is part of Tel Aviv). On the same Sunday, there were also attacks in Jerusalem and Petah Tikvah about which the international press reported - maybe because of the accumulation of attacks on one day, maybe because attacks are less expected in Tel Aviv than in Jerusalem, maybe because an American was killed in Jaffa.

What I almost got used to are the standard security controls. Whenever you want to enter a supermarket, the market are of Tel Aviv, a shopping center, the airport building or just a train station, sometimes also a café, you have to open your bag or backpack. At the train stations, your luggage will even be scanned and you need to pass a detector.

All in all it is much more likely to become a victim of a traffic accident than of an attack here!

Tel Aviv, Petah Tikvah and Jerusalem, 6.3.2016
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.707689
http://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/israel-angriffe-101.html

Tel Aviv shooting 1.1.2016
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.694926