In between Holidays and Memorial Days

I swear, there's not a week without some festivity, holiday or memorial day in this country. The long Passover vacation has finally ended, whew! We survived! And even managed to have some fun with the kids too. I have quite a bunch of pictures to post too, and will start with that today.

This week we'll be marking the Holocaust Memorial Day, and next week it's the Memorial Day for those killed during their military service, followed right away by our 60th Independence Day. Never a dull moment! I'm going to have a different kind of Independence Day though. There's a joint seminar of Arabs and Jews taking place on that day, where participants will be talking about the events of 1948 from their very different perspectives.

This is about Israeli citizens, not Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, but those Palestinians/Arabs (not sure how they wish to define themselves) who live with us and form 20% of the population of the State of Israel. I realize they have a very different angle on what happened back then, not celebrating the Independence Day, but rather having their own Memorial Day for the Naqba. I am curious about that, actually, and I want to learn more. I have never been to such a seminar before, and I'm both curious and apprehensive. I will write a separate post about it, I hope, before I leave, with my own thoughts and expectations. Should be interesting to compare afterwards.

Ok, I mentioned Passover pictures, so I'll start with the first batch of pictures from the Seder itself -

We celebrated the Seder at my brother-in-law's place in Neta'im. It's just about over an hour away from here, and we were afraid it might take double the time with the Seder traffic, but we got lucky, and it didn't take that long after all. Still, Dan napped on the way, which was a good idea. Grandpa Amos didn't mind being his pillow either -



We actually arrived early, so could enjoy my SIL's table decor for a while.



Can't have a Seder without Matzh -


Wouldn't that be a weird plate to be having as one of the guests? Good thing it's the central Seder plate, with the six elements of the Seder Plate. I found a link explaining it all on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passover_Seder#Seder_Plate


Just because it's kosher and you can't have any dough, doesn't mean you don't get fabulous cakes!