I had an incredible day yesterday. But that's for my next post. This one will summarize the weekend. On Thursday night I went to a Megilat Ester, performed in a theatrical type format at the Merkaz Shimshon. It's located on King George Street, between the King David and the King David Citadel hotels. It's a mixture of a religious center and drama/performing arts. The Ulpan bought a few dozen tickets for those interested, and I can't turn down anything free. We first showed up at the wrong entrance. I forced my way in past some objecting guards while trying to explain to them I am here to see Megilat Esther. I forgot what a "play" was in Hebrew and I said "metapelet" instead of "megilat". Metapelet means 'caretaker." So I must've sounded like some confused retard looking for his caretaker Esther. Which was actually a good thing. When Israelis think you're mentally challenged, they become very helpful and patient. Apparently, I had just barged into an event with lots of well-dressed, good-looking people eating expensive cheeses. Security showed me the way, and I found myself in a waiting hall with about 30 other people from my ulpan and about a 100 other people there for the play. I whiled away the time discussing the future of world Jewry with a funny looking guy who's a pediatrician in Moscow and whose goal in life is to help needy children in backward Russian villages. What a loser.

Anyhow, we entered the auditorium and walked up to the stage. The seats were arranged on the stage itself, with only about 15 square meters in the middle for the performance itself. It turns out that it was a one-woman show. She basically told the story of Esther by acting out various parts of it. In between scenes, she'd interact with the audience and relate different parts of the story to the Holocaust. If you don't know how Megilat Esther can be compared to the Holocaust, you're WAY behind on basic reading. All in all, it was a good performance, although the woman did kind of scare me with some of her characters.

On Friday I went to spend Shabbat with my relatives in Rehavia. As before, it was a wonderful experience. This time, we went to another synagogue in the neighborhood - Yeshrun. It was less pretentious and a better experience. Then, Shabbat dinner was had, G is a great cook. She's got a few killer dishes that can easily outshine top notch restaurants. The kids were cute, as expected. On Shabbat, a few neighbors dropped in for lunch. Didn't think anything of them right off the bat, but it turns out that the wife was a big time theater actress in St. Petersburg in her day, which is quite a feat.

Her husband was something else though. He came to Israel in 1922 at the age of three. His parents were living in a small town in the Ukraine, his father was a doctor. During the civil war that followed the Revolution, the Reds and the Whites would win and lose territory to each other on sometimes a weekly basis. When they gained control of an area, they would round up "traitors" and shoot them. Brutal times. Of course, Jews were singled out by everyone for mass punishment. Aside from the communists and the tsarists, there were also Ukrainian nationalists, the Greens, who mostly didn't fight anyone during the Civil War. They mainly destroyed Jewish towns and killed the inhabitants thereof. It was their way to gain Ukrainian independence in whatever government was going to win. I am sure it made perfect sense to them. Dr. Ephraim Ha'Levy managed to get out of the bloodshed and followed the early Zionist route - a ship from Odessa to Turkey, some nasty travel in Turkey (which was in the midst of its own revolution), and finally British Mandate Palestine. The latter was a mass of land including current day Israel, the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza and modern day Jordan. The Brits took this area as well as Iraq and other areas in the Middle East as a result of World War I. Jerusalem was the British administrative center and the Ha'Levy's made it their home. This old man was/is an aquaintance of Agnon, Klausner and Amos Oz, all big names in Hebrew literature and all from the original Zionist families. Back then the yeshuv (Jewish settlement) was small. There weren't too many Arabs either, the land was in fact many times emptier than it is now. Jerusalem was completely raw place, it hadn't changed in hundreds of years, forgotten by mankind. The early days of the State were definitely interesting and this guy was as old-school as it gets. In the early 1930's he was in Switzerland studying medicine, but came back to Israel in 1935 and continued on to become a bacteriologist at Hebrew University. He taught and researched there and at Hadassah Hospital. He's also been in every country in the world for at least a month at a time. 87 and going strong, amazing guy.

Spurred on by those interesting discussions, I decided to spend the next day pulling a Felix...