Grapevine: All the wrong reasons

Movers and shakers in Israeli society.

By GREER FAY CASHMAN
Gymnasia Rehavia school in Jerusalem (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Gymnasia Rehavia school in Jerusalem
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
■ LAST YEAR, the Gymnasia Rehavia celebrated its 110th anniversary, an important milestone that did not get very much media play, even though it was the first modern high school in Jerusalem and the second in the whole country.
Many of its students and alumni went on to become household names in a number of fields, and some of its teaching staff also brought glory to the school’s reputations. Israel’s second president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and his wife Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi were both teachers at the school. Students and alumni included President Reuven Rivlin, as well as Israel’s fourth president Ephraim Katzir, former justice minister Dan Meridor, Yoni Netanyahu, who led the Entebbe Rescue Operation and paid with his life, world renowned authors Amoz Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, former Supreme Court president Miriam Naor, former Labor MK and former IDF spokesman Nachman Shai, Israel’s former ambassador to China Matan Vilnai and many other notables.
This week, however, the Gymnasia Rehavia was very much in the news – but for all the wrong reasons, as it was discovered that the school’s teachers and students accounted for more than a third of the cases in the new outbreak of coronavirus in schools around the country. Schools, colleges and universities are places where free thinking and curiosity are encouraged – but so is responsibility, which appeared to be lacking at the Gymnasia Rehavia, where masks were seldom in use, and where students and teachers alike paid little attention to guidelines on social distancing, covering one’s mouth and nose and refraining from embraces.
It’s bad enough when students and teachers jaywalk from Keren Kayemet Street across King George against a red light. But if they want to play Russian roulette, that’s their business, though there is a possibility that if they get hit by a passing vehicle the driver and passenger(s) may also be hurt if not killed.
However, to go to schools, shops, restaurants and anywhere else where one could infect other people simply by not wearing a mask is not only gross negligence, it is a form of manslaughter if anyone who is thus infected, dies.
There were wonderful examples of volunteerism and caring for others during the lockdown period, but now all that seems to be going out the window. It’s true that Israelis have never taken kindly to discipline, but it’s time for people to give a little thought to the possibility that by adhering to discipline they might be saving not only one life but many, including their own.
■ FORMER ISRAEL Museum director James Snyder, who is currently executive chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation, has added another string to his bow, and during the current academic year began his tenure as a senior fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East initiative, in which capacity he interviewed filmmaker Joseph Cedar on the topic of “Making Art from Agony.”
Their conversation focused on the complexity of making Our Boys, the television series created by Cedar together with Hagai Levi and Tawfik Abu Wael about the summer 2014 kidnapping and murder by Hamas operatives of yeshiva boys Gilad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyel Yifrah, and the subsequent burning to death of Muhammad Abu Khdeir. The series, which essentially deals with the effect of hate crimes on society, served as an important backdrop to today’s Israeli-Palestinian dynamic, but Snyder and Cedar were careful not to confine themselves solely to the political aspects of the conflict, but also the cultural, social and emotional aspects – all in one way or another relating to Jerusalem.
On the Jerusalem Foundation front, Snyder, who is stuck in New York, is itching to return to the Holy City. The fact that he can’t come to Israel at this time, however, has not prevented him from engaging in long-distance and long-range planning.
In coordination with Mayor Moshe Lion and various city organizations, the Jerusalem Foundation has worked to support critical areas of need.
“We were able pretty quickly to assemble and deploy $1.3 m. for the benefit of kids and families with special needs, isolated elderly, etc., and especially in the fringe communities that are the signature of Jerusalem’s diversity and of the Foundation’s mandate,” said Snyder in an email to the writer of this column. “We are expanding our thinking now beyond current needs, which seem to be subsiding, to look at how the cultural landscape will be in peril as we come out of the crisis. In an interesting way, this moment is allowing the Foundation to begin to emerge, as we had hoped, as a planning partner for the city in a way that has not been the case since Teddy Kollek’s time. This can only be for the good going forward.”
Although both Snyder and Cedar were born in America, each has strong connections to Jerusalem. Cedar was a youngster when his parents migrated from New York to Jerusalem, and he was raised in the city. Snyder, as director of the Israel Museum, spent 15 years in Jerusalem. When he returned to New York to be close to his family, he couldn’t get Jerusalem out of his system, and was delighted when offered the opportunity to represent the Jerusalem Foundation in America and to come to Jerusalem for face-to-face discussions and hands-on work every six weeks. He’s missed out on a couple of trips, but fully intends to make up for the lapse.