Boneh update

Hello friends and families of shnatties from Down Under, my name is Ben and I'm a Boneh rakaz (coordinator/educator). Boneh shnatties have done a lot since the last check-in and I'm sure you're eager to hear about it.

The last week of February was full of anticipation for hiking Har Tavor that Thursday. The trail is quite steep, so we postponed the hike due to threats of rain (and some actual rain), but even so it turned out to be an exciting day. The Boneh shnatties met some of the northern hemisphere shnatties (Americans, Brits, Canadians, Dutch) at a Masa event in Tel Aviv. The Masa event included a workshop with Etgar Keret, a well known Israeli author whose stories you can read here. The vocalist from the band Monica Sex was also a part of the workshop, and you can hear some of the band's music in this youtube video for the song maka afora or this one for the song od pa'am. The culmination of the evening was a live performance by the Israeli hip hop artist Subliminal.


"Maka Afora" by Monica Sex

The following day, boneh shnatties were invited to the official purim party of Kibbutz Ein Dor. Not only did they attend, but a group of them actually performed at the party a dance to Ke$ha's "Tik Tok". I can't say I'm a big fan of the sentiment of the song, but I admit it is catchy. The creativity and effort by the shnatties showed itself in their performance, which was well received.

The first week of March included a gracious appearance on Boneh by Janet and Ezra, two members of Kibbutz Ein Dor who were passengers on the hijacked Air France Flight 139 in July 1976. To prepare for meeting Janet and Ezra, the shnatties watched the movie that dramatized the events surrounding Operation Thunderbolt (a.k.a. Operation Entebbe a.k.a. Mivtza Yonatan). Janet told us the powerful story from her point of view as a passenger and then hostage more than three decades ago.

That Thursday, we hiked to a village near Ein Dor and visited the village museum. The village is called Kfar Tavor, and it was founded in 1901 by immigrants who came as a part of the First Aliya. Kfar Tavor from Ein Dor is about 2 kilometers as the crow flies and about 5 kilometers as the shnattie hikes. The famed palmach commander Yigal Allon was born in Kfar Tavor, as we learned from our captivating museum guide Tali.

The South African, Australian and Kiwi Habos on Machon visited Kibbutz Ein Dor that weekend and met Ea, the fourth of the organic madrichim for Australian/Kiwi Shnat.

This past week Boneh shnatties went on a tiyul in the Judean desert, but I'll leave the description of that for another blog post.

Shavua tov!
Ben