By J.Zel Lurie
DELRAY BEACH, Florida —This is my first column in my second century. It will be devoted to my daughter Susan, who made aliyah over 40 years ago. She had earned a Ph.D. in Botany at New York University. She spent many decades as a research scientist at the Israeli Agricultural Center.
This year she turned 70 and was forced to retire. Going on pension is what retirement is called in Hebrew and that is when Israelis become busier than ever. They do not receive extra pay above their pension for their “volunteer” work.
She writes us an annual report. Here is her report for 2013 with comments by me in italics and parentheses:
Dear Friends and Family,
It has been a relatively uneventful year in Israel, with incremental steps towards peace, pushed by Kerry. I doubt that he will be successful, although my father thinks he might be. It would be nice if he was proven right. (Secretary of State John Kerry has modified his ambition of achieving Final Status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. He is now working for an agreed Framework for Peace. He does not want to lose whatever small-step agreements are produced in over a score of intensive negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams, which are headed by Tsipi Livni and Saeb Erekat respectively.)
Last year I wrote a lot about the political situation and I can skip all that this year.
Now it is the first week of 2014. Just as last year, the two roses by my front porch are blooming prodigiously (They bloom once a year around New Year’s Day).
It has rained enough so that my water tanks collecting water from the roof are full and I can disconnect myself from Mekorot water supply for days.
Nonetheless, most days are sunny and my photovoltaic cells on the roof collect enough of the sun’s energy and sell it to the Electric Company so that they pay me something each month. One small step for lessening my ecological footprint.
I am still on pension, and still volunteering at my department. This year I moved my office to another room and am sharing it with a scientist who retired this year. The person that we hired to replace her got my old office and lab. It took a while over the spring to throw out a lot of papers and move the remaining ones to the new office. I was unable to part with any of my books, even though the texts are old, some from the 1960s and so not very relevant anymore.
My last student has submitted his thesis and we are currently dealing with the comments of the reviewers. I still have a number of papers to write and have committed myself to three review papers on different subjects. After that, we will see.
One of the items on my ‘to do after retirement’ list was to set up a Web page in Hebrew similar to the site at UC Davis, where farmers and extensions agents and the general public could find facts on how to store all the horticultural crops that we grow in Israel. I have not gotten to that, but my department seems to be making some steps in that direction, and, perhaps, I can help with it.
Natalie (daughter and Hillal husband, both are circus artists) are tied to their farm during Pesach because they open to the public every day and it is an important source of income for them.
Their farm is doing well and they are working very hard at it. It is an agro-tourist farm. They open each weekend and on holidays for the public and the activities are geared to families. They have riddles and puzzles for the children to solve about the crops on the farm. An area where there are animals (ducks, chickens, donkeys), a picnic area and play area, a large seasonal vegetable garden with pick-your-own.
Each day Natalie and Hillal give an acrobalance performance. To be financially viable they need to get a business license from the government, and then they can host groups and have summer camps. You would think this would be simple, but they have been snarled in bureaucracy for 9 months so far, with no end in sight. Natalie says it is because the government hasn’t a category for their kind of business, but since agro-tourism is big in the Gallil, that does not make any sense to me. I can now say, however, that the government doesn’t make it hard just on new immigrants and Arabs, it also makes life a misery for Sabra Jews as well.
Instead of coming for Pesach, my father, Zel, came to Israel for two weeks in May. It coincided with an annual meeting of Friends of Neve Shalom, a village he has supported for many years, which has educational projects on conflict resolution and coexistence. He was 99 years old when he came. They gave him a 100th Birthday Party.
(I will always remember the delegations of Friends of the Neve Shalom from six or seven countries singing “Happy Birthday” in various languages)
Then in December we had the main party, a whole weekend of activities for friends and relatives in Delray Beach, Florida, where he lives. He is still active writing a column for a Jewish weekly, even though his sight and hearing are not good, and he cannot walk very far. All of us should be as healthy and active as my Dad if and when we reach the century mark.
Have a healthy and prosperous 2014.
Love
Susan
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J. Zel Lurie is a freelance writer whose column appears in the Jewish Journal of Southern Florida and is reprinted here with permission. He may be contacted at jzel.lurie@sdjewishworld.com We’re sure many readers will want to join us in extending to our centenarian columnist a big and hearty mazal tov!