20th January 2020   Good Shabbes, Shabbat Shalom. I hope you had a good week since we last spoke.   Explosive devices attached to children’s party balloons and relatively sophisticated rockets have been arriving from the Islamic Jihad in Gaza again. Apparently their factions within Gaza are trying to scupper the current talks between Israel…

Friday, 10th January 2020   Shabbat Shalom, Shabbat Shalom to you all.   This week I discovered that life goes on, mostly around me, but it goes on. The sun has a habit of rising no matter how one feels. Today I will collect the girls from school, go up the steep climb atop Samuel’s…

2nd January 2020   Shabbat Shalom dear friends   This week I am not going to talk about politics, anti-semitism or diplomacy. This week I am going to write to you about an exceptional human being; someone who brought light into every life he touched and he touched many.   Two weeks ago my amazing…

13th December, 2019   Gut Shabbes! Good Shabbes, Shabbat Shalom! Proud to be an Ex-Pat Brit! Happy, happy Friday 13th!   O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive Sir Walter Scott   Yesterday’s vote was a landslide victory for British values, so sadly eroded over the last year. I…

6th December 2019   Shabbat Shalom! I hope this missive finds you sane and balanced as election fever takes over so many of our countries, a process to drive us crazy at the best of times and of late to test our brains to the limit. As always George Bernard Shaw puts things into perspective…

29th November, 2019   Shabbat Shalom! How was your Thanksgiving? Did you remember just how many things we have to be thankful for?   November 29th, Kaf Tet b’November, the 333rd day of the Gregorian Calendar, 72 years ago the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab States joined by…

22nd November 2019   Shabbat Shalom dear friends. I wish I could tell you that this has been an easy week but I would be lying and I never lie to you. Yesterday was a very sad day for Israel. Attorney General Avichai Mandelblitt announced to the nation that after exhaustive investigations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…

14th November 2019   Shabbat Shalom   The great Jewish satirist, Ephraim Kishon, wrote: “The State of Israel wasn’t founded so that anti-Semitism would end. It was founded so that we could tell the anti-Semites to shove it.” His best known work “So Sorry We Won” in 1967 was the herald of things to come.…

There is much discussion of the traumatised children of the South of Israel and I remember asking my big sister Eddie about her memories of the heavy bombings of Cardiff during WW2 and asked if she was traumatised. It made me realise that the innate ability to improvise and adapt to all situations of the…

Tuesday, 12th November 2019   Mid-week update    08:30 in the morning and half of Israeli children are not in school because so far over 50 rockets have been launched from Gaza, Red Alerts reaching from the South to the central region. Surprisingly Hamas is not involved.   The head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s (PIJ)…