!חנוכה שמח

Happy Hanuka!

Green Pilgrimage Tours

Last Friday the JGF launched its Green Pilgrimage Tours for the Hanuka Season! The first tour was of the Old City & the Kidron Valley below. The purpose of the GP tours is to take a look at how ancient pilgrims, Jews, Christians and Muslims came to the holy city and what support networks were in place to service hundreds of thousands of visitors seasonally. As you see in the photos, participants also helped clean up these routes while learning about this less discussed but fascinating topic!

Click here to book your next tour & to learn more. Currently, these tours are exclusively run in Hebrew, however in the future there will be English-speaking tours as well. Jerusalem Stakeholders receive a 20% discount!

City Roofs

Both Batel Spivack & Timna Raz, who represent Romema and Kiryat Menachem respectively for the JGF, have been participating in an ongoing program called ‘Roof Pioneers’ initiated by organizations Irgun Gag, Muslala and the municipality. The program has been training individuals, community workers and others on how to utilize rooftops of different kinds with multiple goals. Batel has brought the rooftop of the Romema Community Center into the program, with the goal of generating electricity via PV panels to fund the center’s diverse activities, as well as gaining more space to grow food, conduct scientific experiments, host community events and more. Timna has engaged the rooftop of the Hai Taib Synagouge on Harakefet Street, who also want to grow food and expand communal activity space. If you’d like to join us for a night of presentations of rooftop dreams via Zoom on December 23rd, follow this link to register. 

USA Update

Recently we have had new Stakeholders join the JGF from the USA, who want to share their love of Jerusalem. You too can help us locate and reach out to additional stakeholders! The presentation we have put together tells the story of the JGF in short, and leads contacts all the way through to becoming new Jerusalem Stakeholders. Be in touch with our NY staffer, Yuval Ziv with any questions.

Clean-up Initiative

This past Friday the JGF teamed up with a bunch of organizations; The Home, Parents for Climate Israel, Israel Anti Plastic, Plastic Free Jerusalem & Holy Local Aliens for a Clean-up on Mt. Scopus. Over 25 participants helped pick up litter in the surrounding area to the famous look-out point. The spectacular backdrop of the Old City in front of us further inspired Jerusalem-lovers from all over the world to help keep our city clean and a little sufganiya (jelly doughnut) with a cup of tea helped too!

Kiriyat Menachem

The “Planter for Every Windowsill” project has entered its fourth year. The lessons started on zoom, and quickly moved to the school’s greenhouse (in accordance with the guidelines of the Ministry of Health). The teacher, our staff member Timna Raz, met the students in small groups of up to 6 children and gave them an opportunity to meet face to face, leave the house, the computer and work with soil. This week the students led a schoolwide event and taught their peers how to make a planter from an old used mask!

Sustainable soup kitchen: The preparations for a sustainable garden on the Kiryat Menachem Soup Kitchen premises have begun! We started with a cleanup of the grounds with volunteers, followed by professionals removing the Ailanthus trees, an invasive species and other gardening preparations. We also have been providing the soup kitchen with rescued food on a daily basis from the wholesale market in Givat Shaul. 

Bustania

My name is Eitan, I'm in a pre-army program called HaMechina Hayerushalmit, which is located in Kiryat Yovel. We believe in strengthening community life and improving the leadership skills of our participants.

All our participants take part in different local community projects that need our help, on a weekly basis. This comes from our belief in strengthening our sense of social responsibility, solidarity and being active members of the community specifically and society in general.

My project is Bustania, a gorgeous community garden on the border of Kiryat Yovel & Kiriyat Menachem. This was a natural choice for me. In an early tour of the Mechina, Bustania was presented to us as an ecological and social project of community members that sprang from a need for a green area in the neighborhood which would enable activities of culture and art together with the social elements of community, basic human interaction and partnership.

Driving the powerful vision above, and constantly keeping Bustania moving forward is one of the most special people I have met there, Esther et Jion, who seems to work all day for the project and lives what it represents.

In Bustania, I understood the significance of ecological education in a world of Climate Change and human detachment from the Earth, and decided to continue with this topic in my Mechina as well. In my Mechina there are now food-growing gardens, increased awareness on topics like energy consumption, conservative consumerism, recycling, ecology lessons and more.

It is true that Bustania isn't perfect, but we must have more places like it. Using these places, we could make ecological education easier, increase the feeling of belonging, and create a meaningful way of living. I invite you all to visit this place that I am proud to work in, and take a part in it!

New Feature - Local Blogger

A Kiryat Menachem resident recently reached out to the JGF when she discovered we were the only organization reporting on (and fighting for) the preservation of Reches Lavan in English. After meeting, virtually of course, we discovered that Sandra Yosepha Levin, formerly from the UK, Canada & the USA is a blogger and nature photographer, studied herbal medicine for many years and writes about health, nutrition and wellness. She was the writer for the Baruch Haba Israel Travel Blog and now runs her own blog-magazine called Reaching out from Jerusalem.  We wanted to share with our readers her latest post connecting Olive trees to the Chanukah holiday and to the local Emek Lavan environment.

Phyllis Posy met Naomi Tsur over a year ago through Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor, Fleur Hassan, who holds the international relations and water portfolios. They invited her to join the city’s Water Forum, which they chair jointly. Phyllis is a member of the Israeli delegation to the International Standards Organization (ISO) - Technical Committee 282, which establishes the worldwide standards for water reuse. The ISO Committee was to hold its meeting, with representatives of 15 countries, exclusively in Tel Aviv. Phyllis persuaded the Israel Standards Institute to charter a bus to bring the 60 senior water experts to tour Jerusalem and heard Fleur address them on how Jerusalem turned floodwaters and reclaimed sewage water into the lakes of the Gazelle Park and other water initiatives pioneered by the JGF and the city.

After working for an Israeli high tech water technology company for 18 years, Phyllis has recently opened her own water technology consulting company, Posy Global. She helps companies develop regulatory and market strategies and brings Israeli innovation to European environmental projects. The JGF is working with Phyllis to make the Sorek Watershed a major international biodiversity restoration demonstration site.

Phyllis made aliyah 22 years ago from Silver Spring MD to the Baka neighborhood. At the time, her adolescent daughter’s goal was to change the world and improve the lives of women in society. That is exactly what she does till this day in Jerusalem (which was the real catalyst for Phyllis meeting Fleur in the first place)! Another local daughter is a veterinarian, and two more children live in the USA.

Phyllis absolutely loves flowers; growing, photographing and arranging them in her gorgeous garden.