Another season, another reason, for makin’ whoopee…

In the family values corner, we have a hotel ad playing on the fact that it is a leap year.  In Hebrew, they say a “pregnant year” rather than a leap year, so one hotel in Jerusalem decided that that would be the basis of their promotion.  “Make babies in our resort on February 29 and you’ll celebrate your life events at the hotel, on us.” (For the article and whole video ad see here.)

Wedding crashers?

A couple from the US came to Israel to have their wedding and for various reasons many of their guests couldn’t attend.  Nearby another group was celebrating a bat mitzvah.  The guests of the bat mitzvah saw that the wedding lacked guests and so joined in to bring a little life to the party.  Wedding crashers, you say?  Not in Israel.  When a bride and groom are married, the guests are there to perform the mitzvah of simhat chatan v’kallah, rejoicing with the groom and the bride.  Guests provide the joyful spirit, dance with the bride and groom, give their all to make the couple happy on this very special day.  (For this story, go here.)

Hipsters in Zion

I read a blog post written by a woman who suggested that early Zionist leaders could have been hipsters.  They had pretty awesome beards.  The author went with Herzl for looks.  I don’t know what she was thinking with A.D. Gordon.

But when I first saw the headline, I thought she meant these artist renditions.

Hi-tech history

The Dead Sea Scrolls are getting even more digitized.  Just imagine:  Some guy wrote stuff down 2,000 years ago.  Those scrolls were put into pots and kept in caves.  Someone accidentally came across them and – long story, short – they ended up in a museum.  Scholars study them.  People visit them.  They were digitized and visible online to anyone with an internet connection.  This new project is upping the digital ante by making a whole new virtual environment to work in to decipher mysterious elements of the scrolls.

Copyright: Shai Halevi – Source.

And what do you do on school field trips?

Oh, you know, find 3,400-year-old artifacts.  How about you?

Surprisingly, some of the biggest and most important finds in Israel were found by children on school trips or hiking on their own.  The nice part of the story is that the child and his family turned it in to the Israel Antiquities Authority.  He got a certificate for good citizenship and IAA officials visited his school.  Will it inspire him enough to become an archaeologist some day?  I hope so!

Copyright: Clara Amit – Source.

And that was another side of Israel for this week.