Photos: bonfires at Jaffo beach; Edna, Eli and Linda tending fire; wood haulers--in town, at the beach.
Leaving the house Tuesday morning to drop off the laundry and enjoy a café hafuch gadol (large “mixed up” coffee, a cross between cappuccino and latte) at Café Bavli, I was struck by the noticeable haze and lingering aroma of smoke in the air. My lungs were still recovering from the bonfire bonanza at the beach we had attended the previous evening. My clothes reeked of smoke, as did our apartment. What can this mean? It’s Lag B’Omer! Yes, it’s true, we celebrated another holiday this week!
Here’s my brief explanation but feel free to skip to the next paragraph if it doesn’t interest you. Lag B’omer is a holiday somewhat akin to Chanukkah in that it’s not an official religious holiday. In a nutshell it takes place on the 33rd day of the counting of the omer (sheaths) between Pesach and Shavuot, a period of 7 weeks or 49 days. In biblical times pilgrims brought their measure (omer) of barley to the temple in Jerusalem on the second day of Pesach and 7 weeks later returned with their measure of wheat, the intervening time being the period of the counting of the omer. So, what happened on the 33rd day? Like Chanukah there’s a revolt involved, this time led by Bar Kochva against the Romans. The spiritual leader was Rabbi Akiva, a brilliant man and great teacher who didn’t learn to read until he was 40 (!) when his wife, Rachel, encouraged him to begin to study. Anyhow, presumably 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students died during a plague that occurred at the time of the revolt. But on the 33rd day of the counting of the omer, the deaths stopped. Coincidentally the date also marks the death of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the author of the Zohar, the central work of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. That’s why on Lag B’omer 150,000 religious folk make a pilgrimage to his grave on Mount Meron where they sing and dance all night. At this event young boys traditionally receive their first haircut. The 7 week omer counting period is considered on of semi-mourning during which time one is not supposed to get married, hear music or cut one’s hair. Lag B’omer is a one day exception to these prohibitions between Pesach and Shavuot. And, in fact, Lew and I got married on Lag B’omer!
Now, back to the present:
We were invited to tag along with Edna and nine-year old Eli, fresh from baseball practice, to the Jaffo beach where his schoolmates and their families from The Open Democratic School gathered to enjoy the primary activity marking this holiday----lighting bonfires with all manner of pilfered wood. The wood collecting had been going on for weeks, since right after Passover, with kids scouring the neighborhoods and building sites and loading up their booty in shopping carts. They drag the wood to central locations all over town—playgrounds, vacant lots, the park at Kikar Medina and so on. At the beach, instead of making one central bonfire, each group of friends built their own separate bonfire (of course the nine year olds boys and girls didn’t want anything to do with each other), some quite huge and others relatively small, depending on the advanced planning and strength of the kids. As the setting sun, a magnificent red ball of fire, sank below the horizon of the sea, the fires began were ignited one by one. Out came the hotdogs, potatoes, and marshmallows. The kids ate and ran around while the adults kept an eye on the fires (sort of), chatted and drank beer. The only songs we heard came from the nine-year old girls who swayed back and forth with their arms around each other’s shoulders as they belted out what were probably popular tunes.
When the conflagration reached its peak, we took off for a stroll down the beautiful Jaffa shore to escape the flying embers and intense smoke. Then we learned more about Edna’s amazing family background. She told us that her mother, a microbiologist, had worked in various hospital settings but basically found her career truncated when she lived abroad during her husband’s diplomatic career. Edna’s father worked for the foreign ministry and served at the ambassador rank in South America (Buenos Aires and Uruguay), the U.N. delegations in New York and Geneva, Haiti, and Portugal. He was born in Rome and received one of the last student visas to travel to Israel in 1939. Edna’s grandmother and a daughter hid in an Italian monastery during the war. Hedva’s mother (Edna’s grandmother), a pediatrician, was the first woman and the first Jew to receive a medical degree (graduating at the top of her class) in Riga, Latvia. Her father (Edna’s grandfather, Benzion Katz) was a noted journalist who published an important poem about the pogroms in Eastern Europe by Chaim Nachman Bialik (who later became Israel’s most famous poet) in his Hebrew language newspaper. After fleeing the Russian Revolution they made their way to Germany and France, finally immigrating to Israel in 1929. Unfortunately, Hedva’s mother’s career suffered in Israel but her father became an important figure in journalism and at the university. Last year the family organized a tribute ceremony to acknowledge and honor the contributions he made to building Israeli society.
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