9 remarkable Israeli hotels set in ancient buildin

Abigail Klein Leichman

In Israel you don’t have to limit your history lesson to tourist sites. You can book a stay in a renovated ancient building.

Alegra Boutique Hotel in Ein Karem, Jerusalem. Photo: courtesy

Israel is a land with thousands of years of history and myriad archeological sites to explore. Visitors can even find overnight accommodations boasting a long backstory.

It’s not hard to find Israeli hotels or inns housed in renovated 19th century Ottoman buildings, such as the Austrian Hospice (1858) in Jerusalem; the Scots Hotel (1894) in Tiberias or 1885 Suites in Rosh Pina, named for the year it was built.

But there are also older buildings now being used for hotels. Here, ISRAEL21c focuses on hotels built in – or on the ruins of – buildings originally constructed in the 18th century and earlier. If you know of others you want to share with readers, please add them in our comments section.

Hotel Alegra in Jerusalem’s Ein Karem neighborhood encompasses an authentic Crusader inn from about 1,000 years ago as well as a 200-year-old former synagogue across the lane.

Hebrew University political science professor Moshe Amirav, owner of the older building (which used to be a separate hotel but is now leased to Alegra) tells ISRAEL21c that to the best of his knowledge, the Crusader inn is the oldest house in Ein Karem and the oldest hotel still standing in Israel.

The Efendi Hotel in Acre (Akko) opened in 2012 combining two 19th century Ottoman-era mansions reconstructed under the supervision of the Antiquities Authority. Artisans were flown in from Italy to restore the hand-painted ceilings and a fresco of the city of Istanbul created in 1878 in honor of the new Orient Express train station.

The hotel features a painstakingly restored 400-year-old Turkish bath found on site, and a wine bar in a renovated wine cellar dating from the Crusader era 900 years ago.

Efendi Hotel in Acre. Photo: courtesy

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IAF attacks Hamas infrastructures following rocket fire

Elad Benari

Airstrike on Gaza (archive)

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) attacked terrorist infrastructures belonging to Hamas in northern Gaza overnight Wednesday, according to the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit.

“The attack took place in retaliation for high trajectory fire on the Eshkol Regional Council earlier,” the statement said.

“The IDF holds the Hamas terrorist organization solely responsible for Gaza and will continue to act sternly to maintain the calm in southern communities,” it added.

Earlier on Wednesday, a rocket fired by Gaza terrorists exploded in an open area of the Eshkol Regional Council. There were no physical injuries or damages.

The “Red Alert” incoming rocket siren was not sounded since the rocket hit an open region.

While there has been a decrease in rocket fire from Gaza since Israel’s counterterrorism Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Gaza terrorists have on occasion continued to fire rockets onto southern Israel.

In late August, a rocket from Gaza exploded in the southern Israeli city of Sderot. Security forces located the rocket inside the city. There were no injuries.

In retaliation, Israeli Air Force (IAF) aircraft attacked terrorist infrastructures in Gaza, and later followed those up with additional attacks on Hamas targets in Gaza – a possible indication that Israel’s retaliation policy vis-a-vis rocket attacks is changing under Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman.

Sderot was also targeted by rocket fire a month earlier, when a Gaza rocket exploded in an empty kindergarten. There were no injuries, but the building sustained damage.

Gruesome discovery in Germany raises questions about Holocaust-era experiments

JPOST.COM STAFF

Investigation launched into discovery at German research institute of dozens of anatomical remains believe to be from victims of Nazis, according to Army Radio.

Selection of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at the death camp Auschwitz-II (Birkenau) in Poland during German occupation, May/June 1944 Photo By: WIKIMEDIA

Amid recent construction efforts at a branch of a German research institute mical parts were uncovered dating back to the WWII era, Army Radio reported Wednesday.

According to the report, the mostly brain and brain parts found in the building were remains from those murdered in Nazi human experiments, which were inhumanely conducted on prisoners including children, the mentally ill and people with disabilities during the Holocaust.

The remains were found at a branch of Munich’s Max Planck Institute, which was originally founded as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute that was strongly associated with Nazi theories of racial eugenics. The institute regularly received human body parts from Nazi members such as the infamous Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele.

According to the radio report, the Yad Vashem World Center for Holocaust Research, Documentation, Education and Commemoration had not been previously aware of the remains stored at the institute.

An investigative committee established to review the recent findings have been trying to identify the victims. The task of sorting and identifying the remains before burring them in a mass grave – as has been done with similar samples found in previous years – could take months, if not years, according to Army Radio.

At Germany’s Max Planck Institute, where the brain remnants were found, it was reportedly believed that all samples taken from victims of the Nazi regime had been located and buried in the 1990s.

However, the discovery some seven decades after the horrors of the Holocaust appears to disprove this belief.

According to the German institute, the anatomical samples were likely linked to Nazi physician and neuroscientist Julius Hallervorden.

Hallervorden became the head of the Neuropathology Department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in 1938.

Army Radio cited a German statement published on the Max Planck Institute’s website that read: “We are ashamed of these findings, and shocked by the findings in the archive.”

“We will update the public of any additional information to maximize transparency” on the matter, the announcement added.

A swami, a rabbi, a monk walk into a Jerusalem confab…

HERB KEINON

A first of its kind meeting of Israeli and Asian faith leaders will be held in September and will host key religious figures from India, China, Japan, Korea and Myanmar.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang attend the Taiji and Yoga event at the Temple of Heaven park in Beijing, China on May 15 Photo By: REUTERS

Interreligious dialogue among rabbis, priests and imams are commonplace.

But “civilizational dialogues” among rabbis, the dean of Hindu gurus and a Myanmar holy man, though they have taken place in the past, are much less frequent.

They are less frequent still when sponsored by the Israeli government. But that is precisely what will take place in September when about a dozen leading religious figures from the East – India, China, Japan, Korea and Myanmar – come to Jerusalem for a first of- its kind meeting of Israeli and Asian faith leaders.

The conference, organized by the Foreign Ministry together with the American Jewish Committee and the World Council of Religious Leaders, is scheduled to take place September 11-15.

Akiva Tor, the head of the Bureau for World Jewish Affairs and World Religions in the Foreign Ministry, explained that given Israel’s strengthening ties with the countries of East Asia, “it is appropriate that we convene a dialogue of civilizations to undergird these growing strategic, political and economic connections with ties of culture, spirit and deep mutual understanding.”

The abiding philosophy regarding diplomacy inside the Foreign Ministry is that it is a multilayered thing.

“People maybe mistakenly think that foreign ministries and diplomatic relations are all about foreign policy in the very narrow sense, which is UN resolutions and votes, and summit meetings,” said Simona Halperin, a veteran diplomat who is one of the organizers of the parley.

“But actually, diplomacy is much more than that. It goes to soft power of nations that derives from cultural, economic, scientific, spiritual and other spheres of cooperation,” she said. “And that can only happen when you have a basis of mutual knowledge on both sides.”

Israel, she said, is not only “taking the blinders off and looking toward the East,” but there are similar tendencies taking place there as well, with East Asian countries showing a greater and growing interest in Israel and Jewish culture.

Tor said the idea behind the conference is “to take relations with the countries of East Asia to an additional level,” adding that “we want them to get a better understanding of Israel, and to give us a better understanding of them.”

The “them” referred to are some of the most influential leaders in the faith traditions of the East: Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Shinto, Jain and Taoism.

Though the names of the participants are not household names in the West – Avdheshanand Giri, Teranori Terai, Acharya Chandanaji, Hsin Bao, Ashin Nyanissara – to the adherents of the religions they represent they are extremely influential.

In Israeli terms, Giri, know as Swami Giri, is roughly equivalent in India to the head of Shas’s Council of Torah Sages. He is a guru to multitudes, and the head of the thousands of ashrams across India.

The Sikh representative, Giani Gurbachan Singh, has been called the “Sikh pope,” and Chandanaji is the first woman to attain the most senior position in the Jain religion.

From Japan, the representative will be Terai, a very senior Shinto priest.

Though not known as an outwardly religious country, Shinto is a significant part of Japanese culture, and its leaders have influence in the Japanese leadership class.

One of the Chinese representatives, Xue Cheng, is president of the Buddhist Association of China, one of the state-approved religious frameworks there. He also sits on one of the country’s national political advisory boards. Another Chinese representative, Lu Wenrong, is the head of the country’s Taoist Association.

Hsin, from Taiwan, is the influential abbot of a monastery in southern Taiwan that holds one of the relics of Buddha, and Kim Wan Doo from Korea is the head monk at the Seon Sangdo Meditation Center in Seoul, and is basically the supreme patriarch of Korean Buddhism.

Other participants are to include Kobad Zarolia, a Zoroastrian high priest from Canada, a key figure for hundreds of thousands of Zoroastrian followers, mostly in India; and Ashin Nyanissara, one of the most influential and respected Burmese monks.

For many of the participants, this will be their first visit to Israel. One of the challenges in organizing the conference is finding an appropriate vegan caterer, one who also does not use garlic or onions, foods not eaten by many Buddhists.

Among the Israeli participants expected to take part are rabbis representing both Orthodoxy and progressive Judaism – such as Daniel Sperber, Avi Gisser and Yuval Cherlow from the Orthodox camp, and Naamah Kelman representing Reform Judaism.

Plus, there will be academics such as Micah Goodman, Tova Hartman and Menahem Blondheim.

No representatives from the haredi camp are involved. Both President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been invited to address the group. Rivlin has accepted and will host the participants at his official residence, but Netanyahu has not yet given an answer.

Organizers discount the possibility that Netanyahu may decide not to participate so as not to antagonize his haredi coalition partners, who may view non-monotheistic religions as idol worship, with whom there is no reason to hold a dialogue.

Israeli scientist may have proved Hawking’s black hole theory

TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF

40 years after the controversial proposal, Technion researcher’s findings could pave Nobel path for famed physicist

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking. (CC-BY elhombredenegro/Flickr)

In groundbreaking new research published this week in one of the world’s top science journals, an Israeli physicist may have proved one of Stephen Hawking’s most important predictions about black holes, successfully demonstrating that the mysterious celestial bodies are slowly evaporating.

Professor Jeff Steinhauer of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Physics has taken a small step and a giant leap toward verifying the “Hawking Radiation” theory, which challenges the conventional understanding that nothing can escape a black hole, according to the study, published in Nature Physics.

The theory, first proposed by Hawking in 1974, suggests that subatomic light particles are sometimes ejected back out of a black hole, taking with them tiny amounts of energy, resulting in a gradual decrease in its mass over time until it evaporates completely.

But more than 40 years later, no one had been able to prove the theory, mainly because light particles from black holes are too small to be detected from Earth.

A supermassive black hole about 70 million times bigger than the earth’s sun, located at the center of spiral galaxy M81. (NASA/CXC/Wisconsin/D.Pooley & CfA/A.Zezas; Optical: NASA/ESA/CfA/A.Zezas; UV: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA/J.Huchra et al.; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CfA)

Steinhauer and his team of researchers were last year able to recreate conditions similar to those of a black hole in a lab, using sound waves in order to study how subatomic particles behave on its edge, known as an event horizon.

In his new paper Steinhauer explains that he simulated a black hole event horizon by cooling helium to just above absolute zero (-273.15°C or -59.67°F), and then heating it rapidly to create a barrier impenetrable to sound waves, similar to light from a black hole.

During the experiment, Steinhauer found that tiny particles of energy that formed sound waves did escape his simulated black hole, as Hawking predicted.

University of Haifa physicist Dr. Jeff Steinhauer. (courtesy)

“This confirms Hawking’s prediction regarding black hole thermodynamics,” Steinhauer wrote in the introduction to his paper.

The findings were first published in April on the arXiv.org physics site. In order to published in Nature Physics, the research first had to undergo intense peer review, with experts checking if Steinhauer’s observations could be attributed to something else, such as tiny vibrations caused by flaws in the experiment’s design.

According to numerous reports, Steinhauer’s observations on the ground-breaking theory could win Hawking his first Nobel Prize.
Ironically, Hawking supports the academic boycott of Israel, and in 2013 canceled his participation in a Jerusalem conference organized by then-president Shimon Peres.