It Was Thanksgiving? (Article #30) 11/30/2006

Sunday morning I went to daven at the Kotel. I try to go to the Kotel at least once a month; I find the experience recharging and also like seeing who is there that I might possibly know. Being that it was the Sunday after Parshat Chayei Sara and also the week of Thanksgiving, I wasn’t disappointed.

Batya had been complaining of a sore throat and not feeling well on Saturday night. When Goldie took Batya to the doctor, he agreed that she was definitely sick but Goldie still had to talk him into prescribing antibiotics, since her strep test results wouldn’t be in for a couple of days.

On Sunday evening we had the big game, Bears vs. Jets. I had originally planned a ten day trip to NY to attend both NY games against the Bears, but the planning didn’t stick, and I ended up in Chicago earlier in the month, so we were stuck watching the games via the internet.

The Giants game the previous week, was a night game that started at 3 in the morning in Israel, so we watched that game via recording the next night. Since the Jets game was live, we invited a bunch of ex-Chicagoans to join us for the game (one NYer joined us but he has lived here since he was a little kid and doesn’t really follow football) and we decided to hook it up to the big screen monitor that we have.

The picture was great, the result even better and a good time was had by all (except my brother in law and father in law who both attended the game).

Monday night was the second of what will be a series of open houses for Aliza’s (grade 6) middle/high school selection. Interestingly, this wasn’t really an open house, it was a fair. An enterprising woman has organized an educational fair (one night for girls, another for boys) for the last couple of years, inviting all the major schools to come present their programs.

This saved us a lot of legwork regarding certain schools that we had heard about but weren’t sure about, as well as getting a face to face meeting with people from some of the schools high on our list. Even though there was a cover charge, having eight schools present under one roof (two out of our three top choices plus two backup options) was a great thing for us.

We also got a chance to reconnect with the folks from GMAX. I have written about GMAX before. This is a program for students who for whatever reason have not been able to succeed in the Israeli school system, and want to go to college. It is a one year program that prepares its students for the GED High School Equivalency Exam and the Israeli psychometric exams (Israeli version of the SAT).

They only accept eleventh or twelfth graders, so we were considering this as a backup option for Chaim for the upcoming year. Since we are having such a hard time with his school and he really wants to learn and prepare for college, we decided to speak with their representatives and see what we needed to do to get him signed up for next year.

In our discussion, they mentioned that they cannot take tenth graders because “of course” they have no governmental certification as a High School and Israeli citizens need to attend high school until the end of tenth grade. This is when the little bell went off in our heads.

Chaim is a tourist here and not subject to the requirements of the educational department of Israel. He might then be eligible for the program and we think it could be a good way for him to overcome the educational difficulties he has been facing.

The only hurdle is the GED minimum age of 17 to take the exam. Chaim will not be 17 until a full year after this year’s GMAX program is finished which (we think) is way too long a gap. We are still working on it.

Mordechai has had a mixed week. Some days he was awesome, others awful. The teachers all realize that the barrier is totally because he doesn’t understand the language and that he is trying. Goldie has been spending a lot of time in the Gan, trying to help him along.

Apparently she has made a positive impression on the teachers there. The assistant teacher’s husband was sitting shiva and she needed an afternoon off (Tuesday), so she asked if Goldie would do it and Goldie readily accepted.

Please remember that everything is different in Israel. Most of the schools are public schools, funded (for the most part) by the city. It cost us about $130 to send Mordechai to this Gan/Pre1a, which happens to be a division of one of the major religious Yeshivot in Beit Shemesh.

Many people send their children to independent public ganim (unaffiliated with a specific Yeshiva) and move their kids to school only for first grade. The ganim are for the most part housed in their own buildings, although sometimes there may be a group of ganim in a central location clustered together (but still in their own buildings).

Since they are stand alone buildings, there is no custodial staff, no office staff, in fact, no staff of any kind. There are only a head teacher and an assistant with any additional support services located off site in the municipal educational department. Therefore, the teachers have to do everything.

They serve the hot lunch (it gets delivered to the Gan by the city’s kosher caterer). They wash the floors. They wash the utensils. They have to wash and cut the vegetables that come with the lunch. Essentially they do all the work that a teacher does, plus maintain the building, which is what Goldie did for the afternoon. She wasn’t really the assistant teacher, she was more like the assistant TO the teacher or really the custodian.

Things picked up at work toward the middle of the week as well. Suddenly, there were droves of parents visiting their sons who are in the Yeshiva as well as parents visiting with their sons who will graduate high school this year and are checking out Yeshivot. The students from the UK, Australia and South Africa were surprised by the amount of visitors until it was explained to them that this was a major holiday week in the US and people were taking advantage of the extra days off.

We hadn’t even been paying attention at home and the fact that it was Thanksgiving week in the US went totally unnoticed in our home.

On Wednesday night we had a really great dinner with Kiki and Gary Shickman who were visiting for the week. They came to the house to see the kids (their son Gaby is Mordechai’s best friend) and then we went to dinner at a local chinese restaurant with them, the Rudoff’s (formerly of Cedarhurst) and the Schneider’s (formerly of Highland Park, NJ and our NBN buddy family) who also happen to be friends of the Shickmans.

As I say here often, there is nothing quite like getting to see old friends and people from our “old life” back in the USA. We only hope we can see more of them and others as time goes on.

On Thursday morning Moshe woke up with a fever and an absolutely dreadful cold. He has been sick with a cold for weeks and cannot seem to shake it, but Goldie took him to the doctor because it felt to her like he was wheezing.

The doctor prescribed the use of a nebulizer breathing treatment and sent her to a local pharmacy to rent a nebulizer machine. This is one of the great things we love about Israel. Not only was the rental charge the equivalent of $1.15 or so per day, not only did the pharmacist tell Goldie that since she picked it up in the late afternoon he would not charge her for that day, but (and this is the best part) THERE WAS NO CHARGE FOR SHABBAT RENTAL OF THE MACHINE even though he advised her how to set it up with a timer for Shabbat use.

Where else will you find a pharmacist who refuses to make passive rental income that may in any way be thought of as making money on Shabbat? In the end, we paid more for the plastic mask that we had to buy separately than we did for renting the machine for 4 days.

On Friday morning, Goldie and I made our weekly trip to Sheffa Shabbos – an appetizing and take out place located a few blocks away in the adjoining Chareidi neighborhood, that is only open on Thursday and Friday.

We love this store. We buy Challot and baked goods there at a much better price than the bakery. They have great salads, kugels and many things we need for Shabbat, including the English version of Mishpacha magazine.

While we were in the store, Goldie realized that we hadn’t bought specific treats for the kids and we decided to stop in the supermarket that is directly next door to Sheffa Shabbos.

I had barely made it four feet into the store when I heard Goldie call me from the entranceway, telling me that we had to leave. Apparently, the cashier (a man) took one look at her as we entered and told her that women are not allowed to shop in that supermarket that day – it was men only.

She was so offended. She could not believe they would make such a segregation – for a supermarket (although – there is one street in the same neighborhood where men and women are required to walk on different sides of the street).

Goldie doesn’t think they have a right to say “no women”. I disagree. I think that as long as it is in their neighborhood and their store, they have the right to make whatever rules they want. I also have a right. It is the right to not shop in that particular store and to encourage others not to do so as well. As long as they stay in their corner of the world and leave mine alone, we will be fine. Unfortunately, they rarely do.

We hosted our sister in law and family from Teaneck for Shabbat who were in Israel visiting their oldest daughter/sister (our niece) who is in Shalavim this year for her second year (or half year actually). It is nice that the family is starting to come to visit (my parents being the first) and combined with Goldie’s trip in a week to America, it is a good way to reconnect, no matter how great our Broadfone VOIP line or SKYPE video calls are.

As we lay in bed Shabbat morning around 7 AM, dreading actually having to get out of bed, we heard Moshe (21.5 months) crying downstairs. A few minutes later Aliza brought him to my bed to tell us that Moshe had fallen off an ottoman, smacked his head and she now realized that he is bleeding.

I took one look and knew my morning was ruined. He had a 1.5 to 2 inch hole in his scalp at the back of his head and it was clear to me that he needed to get stitches. We grabbed our Kupat Cholim (Healthcare Company) book to see where we should go for treatment.

In our neighborhood, the Shabbat clinics are staffed entirely by goyim and are located in the Charedi neighborhoods. Our specific provider rotates the staff among three of their branches in the general Beit Shemesh area.

Worried about infection and the bleeding, we decided not to wait until 1 PM for the office an easy fifteen minute walk away but rather to take him to the office that opened at 9 AM. I loaded Moshe into a stroller and started to walk.

Uphill. Pushing the stroller. For forty minutes. Uphill. A steep uphill.

I got to the office ten minutes before they were supposed to open and twenty five minutes before they actually opened. It was the simplest process. They asked us our names and address and gave us a piece of paper for the doctor. The doctor took one look and decided that the hole could be glued shut.

After shaving a little of the surrounding hair, the doctor applied the glue, held the wound shut and then dressed the cut. The whole process might have taken twenty minutes before we headed downhill for the trip home.

Thankfully, the steep uphill walk was the trip there. I don’t think I could have made an uphill walk after having to hold Moshe down for the shaving, cleaning, gluing and dressing of the injury.

I am constantly amazed by the healthcare system here. Some things are maddeningly stupid, but every once in a while, I come across a great thing, like using goyim as medical staff who are trained in how to keep us from chillul Shabbat.