Support Your Local Library (Article# 99A) 12/4/08

I love the public library system. When we lived in the USA, I took advantage of the library in every city I lived in. I am an avid reader and can (and often do) finish a 300-400 page book in a single Friday night sitting. I even took advantage of the technological advances in Web design, reserving books online and picking them up on my arrival at the library (reducing my average library trip from 40 minutes to 3 minutes).

Since Aliyah I have come to appreciate the USA public library system much more than I had in the past. The library is literally my home away from home when I travel. It is the only place where they offer a place to sit, free internet access (including wireless access so that I can check emails on my laptop) and a ton of peace and quiet – all with zero pressure to buy a coffee or vacate a table for the next patron. You don’t realize what a treat it is to be able to sit and check emails, update yourself with some online news (especially news from home when you are traveling) and get work done until you are traveling and have limited access to the internet.

My favorite library is my home base library, the Hewlett-Woodmere library in Long Island. This was our local library before we made Aliyah and the facility is just awesome. They have a series of private study rooms available for residents and non-residents alike. Whenever I need to check emails, have a skype call chavruta with an alumnus, get information from the Yeshiva’s database or even sit and write my weekly article, I head off to the library, ensconce myself in one of their private rooms for an hour or two and really crank out the work.

It is also a great place to meet people. Almost every time I am there I come across some old friend that I hadn’t seen. It is a great place to reconnect with people and I am quite grateful for the use of it.

Upon our move we discovered that Israel does not have public libraries as such. Libraries may occasionally be funded by a local municipality, but it is the member subscription fees and donations that are the large part of library budgets in Israel. And the budgets aren’t that large.

Our local Bet Shemesh library does not buy books in English, using only books that have been donated to the library to stock its English shelves. The Hebrew language section is definitely larger than the English section, but not by a huge amount. The entire library is housed within one of our community centers and is probably smaller than the school libraries in a couple of your local Yeshivot – but it is what we have and we definitely patronize it (we have 4 memberships for the kids).

Since the resources are limited, there is a limit of how many books (4) each member can have at any time. They also rely a lot upon volunteers (although they have a very professional staff as well who have to be knowledgeable in order to serve their patrons in either of the two main languages they carry books in). On the flipside, without the fully stocked library, our kids have become a lot more computer and internet literate in order to use online resources for school research and other work (their parents have to also be savvy in monitoring internet use as well).

*If you would be interested in donating books to the Bet Shemesh library – feel free to email me and I will forward the offer.*

Throughout my trip, I was asked how the economy of Israel is faring and how badly the US problems have affected us. It is clear to see how difficult things have become in America and it was nice to see the concern for us as well. There is also no doubt that things in Israel will also get worse before they get better.

The dollar’s weakness has hurt all tourist related industries (of which we must include the Yeshiva and Seminary one year programs as a part). The dollar simply buys less and this has hurt budgets. Additionally, at least in the case of charitable organizations, with incomes shrinking or disappearing overseas, we not only get fewer shekels for each dollar donated – we are definitely seeing fewer dollars donated as a whole. There is no question that we are only beginning to see the repercussions from the worldwide recession.

One of the great pleasures of my job is hanging out with our students and alumni. As part of my trips abroad I schedule regular visits to as many college campuses as I can, visiting our alumni in their “natural habitat”. Since each student has his own schedule, I schedule at least 3 hours for each visit to allow for them to come say hi when they do not have a class. So I usually set up shop in the campus kosher cafeteria and let the guys come to me.

By the time Thanksgiving rolled around I was definitely ready to go home. I was amazed at how little traffic I encountered on the way to Newark airport, which was practically empty. I pulled in to the rental car return lot and was trying to figure out what was missing when it hit me, there were no cars there. I think the entire lot had 10 cars in it.

The terminals were also quite deserted. With the exception of the El Al counter, there was almost no one in the airport; getting through security and to the gate was a breeze. Of course, since it was Thanksgiving, most Americans wanting to be in Israel for the week had already flown and the plane was almost totally Israeli.

I was a bit disappointed to be leaving that afternoon. Goldie’s family was having an afternoon get together and it would have been nice to see everyone. Maybe next time. The good part was getting home to the family.

I didn’t end up missing the turkey in the end. Dennis and Rachel Lisbon, our across the street neighbors invited us for a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving. Upon hearing that I would be out of the country, they postponed the invitation one day and we enjoyed a Thanksgiving style seuda on Friday night.

PS Thanks for praying for Friday rain. Little league was rained out – only 7 more months of Fridays left to go.