Beit Avi Chai lines up rich program of events for Jerusalem Day 2020

The full roster takes in online transmissions of classes, workshops, lectures, discussions and music shows on a range of digital platforms.

MAY 14, 2020 19:47

JERUSALEM DAY will be marked differently this year due to coronavirus restrictions (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST) — JERUSALEM DAY will be marked differently this year due to coronavirus restrictions

(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)

The notion of knowing where you come from, in order to have some idea of where you are headed, is a given for this part of the world. That goes doubly so for Jerusalem, and is particularly poignant as the capital gears up for the 53rd edition of Jerusalem Day, which marks the reunification of the city in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War.

As befitting one of the city’s major dispensers of cultural fare, Beit Avi Chai has lined up a multifarious agenda for the occasion. The Beit Avi Chai In Your Home! Jerusalem Day program kicks off on Sunday and runs through until Saturday evening, with the actual anniversary of the momentous event occurring on Thursday evening and Friday.

The full roster takes in online transmissions of classes, workshops, lectures, discussions and music shows on a range of digital platforms, including the Beit Avi Chai website and Facebook page, and Zoom sessions.

Shaanan Streett, best known as front man for Jerusalem-based hip hop group Hadag Nahash, will share some of his thoughts and feelings about Jerusalem with online chatters, while Talmudic scholar Michelle Cohen Farber will front an English language Pirkei Avot session, intriguingly titled “Torah as the Penultimate Value,” on Monday at 5 p.m.

That will be followed by Yarden Hosts Friends, with multidisciplinary artist Yarden Bar-Kochba presenting a fun and informative series for kids, with her programmatic purview encompassing storytelling, songs and riddles. The coming week’s guest musician is vocalist-actor-comedian Tomer Sharon.

The aforementioned historical toe-dipping opportunity will be provided by Ami Braun, at 5 p.m. on Thursday, with his English-language session called “Jerusalem Between the Wars: A virtual tour of Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967.”

Forty-two-year-old Braun, who was born in Chicago and came here with his family at the age of five, says he forged a strong bond with Jerusalem quite a few years ago. “There’s the guiding side of my life, and the personal side of my life,” he says. “I was in yeshiva in Jerusalem, back in ’99, when I just happened to fall upon becoming a local tour guide in the Western Wall Tunnels. That’s when I started falling in love with guiding, and with guiding in Jerusalem. Later I got involved in various projects around the city.”

Braun decamped for a while, but came back to the capital firing on all cylinders. “I returned to Jerusalem in 2005. Then I decided to turn tour guiding into my career, and my passion. For whatever reason, I always felt that my neshama [soul] was connected to Jerusalem, in one way or another.”

There are numerous literary references to masonry, in the context of Jerusalem. Braun identifies with that. “I listen to the stones [in Jerusalem],” he says. “When I take families with kids on tours I ask the kids if they have ever heard a stone telling a story,” he laughs. “We bring the stones to life and, of course, we look at archeology.”

Besides all the tasty local narrative tidbits – and there are plenty on offer – Braun feels that you can’t appreciate where you are, and where you might be in the future, if you don’t have some sort of handle on your personal and sociocultural backdrop. “I don’t get into politics at all, but I will always say that a person who doesn’t know their past: ‘When a people does not honor its past, it lives in a present of little substance and faces a future clouded in doubt,’” says Braun, citing feted late military commander and politician Yigal Allon.

Participants in the virtual tour will get a pretty comprehensive overview of events that took place during those pivotal 19 years when Jordan ruled the roost in the eastern part of Jerusalem, including the Old City and Western Wall. Braun says he will enlighten his viewers with a weighted mix of serious factual offerings and some more entertaining, smile-inducing goodies. The latter includes a risible, and ultimately happy, incident involving a patient at the St. Louis French Hospital, across the road from the Old City’s New Gate, and the highly personally existential matter of some dentures.

That was one of the results of the Jerusalem municipal border which was drawn up in November 1948, when Moshe Dayan, commander of the forces in Jerusalem, met with his Jordanian counterpart, Abdullah Tal, in a deserted house in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood. “There are ridiculous stories when you have a ridiculous situation with a divided city,” Braun observes.

Most of all Braun would like us to get an almost tangible perception of developments in Jerusalem over the years, and how all of that led up to where we are today. “For me to look at history, past, present and future, is something alive. It’s like a living organism in my eyes. We can take it from ’48 to ’67, those pivotal years and, of course, what happened in 1967 changed the face of Israel and Jerusalem forever. And to understand Jerusalem today you absolutely have to know what went on then, and also before ’48. You have to understand what went on with the geography and demographics at that time, to be able to understand where we are today. For sure. You need context.”

Naturally, there will be visual archival elements to the virtual tour, featuring relevant parts of the Old City and Mandelbaum Gate, where IDF soldiers were allowed to pass to get to the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus. And there will be references to the Six Day War and the taking of the Old City and the Western Wall in June 1967.

Jerusalem Between the Wars tour attendees can expect to be both enlightened and duly regaled.

For more information: www.bac.org.il/Online4U