Day 3 Working with Parents at the Center

---

Day 3 stated with a couple of hours of productive updating of the application. While I worked, Jack went of to take picture of mother’s and their kids at the Center. Our walking tour began when we met Moshe and his wife at 11. We began outside the hotel at the top of the Carmel and we walked down the steps to the water. This is not a 5-minute stroll as the top of the Carmel is over 1,000 feet above the water. As Haifa grew up the mountain, stairs were built to enable people who mostly didn’t have cars, to get from the industrial neighborhoods to the residential neighborhoods. Haifa is an upside down city where the wealthy people live up on the mountainside and the poor people live down by the water. It may have something to do with the fact that Haifa has always been a port city and since the British were in control it has been the site of oil refineries. You can see the unused rail tracks that used to carry people and goods through Israel to Beirut , Damascus and on to Mecca. It took us a good 2 hours to make our way down with lots of little stops for Moshe and his wife to explain the history and architecture. One stop was at a map that showed the battle of Haifa in the ’48 war. The plaque was near a square that was named after the Arab mayor of Haifa at that time. At the time the leaders of other Arab countries were telling the Arab residents of Haifa that they should flee claiming that if they didn’t the Israelis would kill them. The mayor initially stood up to this and encouraged the Arabs to stay, but eventually he couldn’t hold the line and left as well. We had schwarma for lunch and rode the underground cable car back to the top. Moshe’s bank had financed the renovation of the cable car line. It was expected that 1,500 people would ride it each day, but the numbers have been way under that. Fortunately for Moshe’s bank there was a government guarantee.

Moshe and his wife were very candid with what they see as critical problems in Israel including the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the influence of the Orthodox rabbis and the population growth of the Haredi (ultra- Orthodox) and the Arabs. Both groups have extremely high birth rates and both are huge economic drains. We also compared health care systems. he US could learn a lot from Israel. Israelis don’t understand how we can have a system that does not provide all people with a basic level of care.



We were invited to Hilla’s home for dinner Wednesday evening. She lives in a very nice home with a small yard about halfway up the mountain. Her 4 year-old son was a bundle of energy. When we left at 9 he was still going strong. As a gift we had brought him a kit to make little wind cars, you blow on them to make them move. He was beside himself wanting to get started. When Hilla’s husband, Sharon, was putting their daughter to bed her son, went up and told the father that the guests had left so they could get to work on the wind cars. Although it was slightly dishonest, it was clever. The next day he generated a lot of angst at day-care when he told them his rash was chicken pox. When we were discussing the origins of Hilla and Sharon’s families, we learned that Hilla’s mother is Moroccan and her father’s family is originally Kurdish. This makes her a Sephardic rather than Ashkenazi Jew. Historically, the Ashkenazi Jews from Europe ran Israel. As a little girl, the Ashkenazi kid’s in Hilla’s class weren’t allowed to play with her. When my grandparents were growing up in the US, the German Jews didn’t want anything to do with these new immigrants from Eastern Europe. For a small group of people the Jews can be pretty harsh on one anther. Sharon and Hilla were particularly interested in hearing about Scarlett Johansson after they found out I had worked for Oxfam. They are most familiar with the European Oxfams that are vehemently anti-Israel. I explained that at Oxfam America, although there were people who hated Israel, not everyone felt that way. I saw myself as an educational ambassador and nudge to the head of Oxfam America. Ray Offenheiser. Ray was not anti-Israel and spent a lot of time pushing back on the larger European Oxfams, but in the case of Scarlett Johansson he lost. I think it will come back to haunt Oxfam. The manager of any celebrity would be well advised to tell their client to think twice about working with Oxfam since they require people affiliated with them to toe the line on all political issues.

---