A letter from Israel

The old Roman aquaduct near Caesarea I sometimes get jealous when I see what cool stuff people from other countries get to do. They can easily visit world famous museums, ski in the snow every winter or climb really high mountains. Or there are these amazing trails such as the Appalachian trail or the Camino de Santiago were you can just lose yourself in nature. (In Israel we lose ourselves on the couches under the air conditioning.) But you know what they do not have?

Wikipedia Public domain Well, actually she has been around for more than a 100 years now. Sarah was born on the fifth of January 1890 and in 1917 died from the gunshot wounds of an attempted suicide. Our common home town, Zichron Yaakov, recently held the 100-year old anniversary of her death. In the suicide note she wrote: “I no longer have the strength to suffer, and it would be better for me to kill myself than to be tortured under their bloodied hands.”

A clerk: Raphael Kohn, and a cop : Joseph Kuperman Not a yet a city  but not a village anymore.. I live in Zichron Yaakov, a small medium-sized town in the northern part of Israel. We have grown from a dusty village on a hill top in the middle of nowhere to a large vibrant nearly city.  Though we still do not have any traffic lights, I am pretty sure that the Romanian founding fathers and mothers would not recognize the place anymore. They bought their land in 1882 but had no luck growing anything in the rocky soil. Also the nearby swamps were totally invested with malaria-carrying mosquitoes causing the death of far too many people, especially children.