Petach Tikva

The week has flown by very quickly and we have become used to a regular routine. We are still tutoring 4 mornings a week, 2 mornings in a boys boarding school primarily made up of Ethiopian immigrants. Some are new immigrants who have only been in Israel a few months. They are learning both Hebrew and English for the first time and it is difficult for them.  The other school is a regular high school and those students have been learning English for several years. They consider it a very hard subject.


In the afternoons we have Hebrew ulpan. I go to both the beginner and intermediate classes.  Some of the language is coming back and I recognize some words. I consider this a very hard subject!

 Petach Tikva On Tuesday we went to Petach Tikva, another city in Israel. This one started as an agricultural settlement in the 1870’s when some people from Jerusalem bought swampy land from the Arabs who lived there (near the river Yarkon). They had to deal with malaria and other problems.  The city is quite interesting now and no longer farmland. We went to a cultural building for a film about the development, saw an original mud house that had been preserved (you can see these in my photos at this  link ), had wonderful falafel  downtown and went to a zoo and memorial for fallen soldiers. The mud house had an old printing press (no longer working), one of only two in the world from that time. It was used to print the logos for the paper that the oranges were wrapped in. We toured a beautiful old synagogue too.  I am continually impressed with all the wonderful public art in Israel, both statues and murals. I loved the zoo and recognized some of the birds there. Some I had only seen in pictures before. We also took a brief walk through a high tech park there before heading out to the next stop.

We finished the day with a tour of Hadassah Neurim. This is a boarding and day school. Hadassah supplies about 7.5% of its budget.  We enjoyed meeting the students and toured a “family” home there. Each home has about 10 students plus “parents” who live with them. They have very comfortable rooms and are much better than the dormitories I remember from the 60’s when I was at Boston University. We also saw the study center (library) where the students can get tutoring as well as books. It was good to see the positive things that our Hadassah dollars are used for. (I am the treasurer of my local chapter of Hadassah for those who don’t know me.)

We have been trying to walk every day and today went to the local mall. I thought it was a bit boring compared to the interesting shops along the streets.  Even Best Buy is here in Israel.  Today we have the day off to prepare for Shabbat and tomorrow we rest. Sunday is a regular work day again. Last evening we figured out how to hook my new computer up to a large screen TV and I learned how to put on the closed captions. We watched the movie “Sarah’s Key”.  I wasn’t sure I would enjoy the movie since I had read the book and it was a very good book, but the movie was good too.