Turning Waste into Cooking Gas, Livestreaming Emergencies and More – This Week from the Startup Nati
Tel Aviv Startup Seeks to Turn Pubs into Daytime Work Hubs
A new Tel Aviv-based startup seeks to transform bars usually shuttered during the day into vibrant working spaces. Pub Hub, which began operations Monday, rents out popular Tel Aviv pubs to those seeking a working space. Membership includes free coffee, Wi-Fi and office supplies. Memberships are offered on a monthly or bi-weekly basis and include the right to use any of Pub Hub’s multiple locations.
New App Allows Volunteers to Target Traffic Violators
Israeli drivers can now channel their road rage into revenge – by landing the guy who illegally swerves into their lane with a ticket. In hopes of deterring Israeli drivers from committing traffic violations, the National Road Safety Authority is recruiting volunteers to help enforce traffic laws through a new app that continuously photographs the road from the windshield. The initiative, called Guardians of the Road – Social Change on the Roads, aims to “combat the phenomenon of roadside bullying through an advanced technical means for documenting life-endangering traffic violations, while creating a deterrence among drivers against committing these crimes,” according to the authority.
Israel to Import Tomatoes from Turkey Amidst Shortage
The Ministry of Agriculture announced that Israel will be importing tomatoes without tariffs to mitigate the chances of a tomato shortage during the high holidays as a result of poor harvests. It should be noted that tomatoes from Turkey aren't cheap – between five to seven shekels a kilo. The price at the Israeli wholesale market for tomatoes is between five and a half to six shekels a kilo. The reason for the relatively high price of tomatoes at the wholesale markets is due to the shortage in locally produced tomatoes. This shortage was caused by a virus which cut tomato production in half.
Reporty App Live-Streams Emergency Situations from Your Smartphone To First Responders
During an emergency, it’s not always easy to call 911 and explain the dire situation. Now, Israeli startup Reporty provides rescue teams with the precise location and real-time information from your smartphone, including live video. Reporty is a free app that facilitates the communication between people in emergency situations and public safety agencies, live-streaming video from your smartphone’s camera to the applicable authorities.
Florence Foster Jenkins Film
I recently saw the Florence Foster Jenkins film about the singer who really couldn’t sing, starring Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant. Really a sweet film, they both do an excellent job. Meryl is amazing as always. No one else could pull off this role as effectively as she does. It takes a lot of artistic courage to sing that badly, in front of millions, and in fact is quite difficult to do as convincingly as she does.
The movie was surprisingly sympathetic to a character that could have easily come across as a pathetic loser. Instead Ms. Streep manages to make her seem strong, tough, human, determined, and quite a fascinating character.
Her pianist in the film was none other than the very fine actor and musician Simon Helberg. Mr. Helberg is also on the hit TV series, The Big Bang Theory, but is almost unrecognizable in this role. He actually plays the piano in the film, at a very high, concert-level quality, and overall does a terrific job in the part.
For an admitted non-singer, Ms. Streep certainly loves to tackle films where she is indeed singing for part or a good portion of the role. I’m thinking of Mama Mia! The Movie, Ricky and the Flash, Into the Woods, and this film. They all had her singing, and she does it very well, except for Florence Foster Jenkins where it was deliberately bad.
“People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing,” Florence Foster Jenkins’ once remarked to a friend, and Ms. Streep says as much in the film. The movie is a surprisingly touching one, and says a lot without really trying about ambition, loyalty, relationships, artistic integrity, and life in the arts. It moved me much more than I thought it would.
On another matter, I recently dined at The Society Kitchen, a brand new restaurant in Santa Monica on Ocean Park Blvd. This new restaurant is run by the same folks that own the nearby Crimson restaurant, another health-conscious, delicious restaurant I love. These folks really know how to run a restaurant!
At The Society Kitchen, I ordered the pizza with butternut squash, spinach, and fresh cheese, and it was buttery, hot, delicious, and melted in my mouth. All the ingredients at The Society Kitchen are fresh, organic, and gluten free is available. Yet they do have the diet sodas and cupcake treats mere mortals like my husband and I like to enjoy. The restaurant is not crowded, and there is ample parking at least at night when I visited. Give it a whirl before everyone else discovers it and they get mobbed!
Florence Foster Jenkins Film Read More »
When a Jewish Holocaust survivor ‘pissed’ on Hitler’s henchman
It sounds like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino film.
A Holocaust survivor, whose mother and sister were killed in the genocide, said he locked a powerful Nazi prisoner in a shed for three days, made him strip naked and “pissed” on his face, “This American Life,” the weekly public radio show, reported Sunday.
“I told him, from now on, you sleep naked on this cold floor. You will not move,” Werner Meritz said.
“And with that, I pissed all over him. Terrible thing to tell you. His head and everywhere. … I said, you’re just to lie there to get some sense of what you Nazis did to the Jews.”
The captured Nazi was Julius Streicher, a friend and protégé of Adolf Hitler and the publisher of the notorious anti-Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer. His tormentor was one of a number of Jewish refugees from Europe who were recruited by the American military to interrogate Nazi prisoners during World War II.
Meritz recalled his actions to rangers from Fort Hunt Park in Virginia, who in 2006 discovered that their national park was once the location for the secret military interrogation project, code-named P.O. Box 1142.
“These men were specifically recruited because they spoke German and because they understood the nuances of German culture and psychology, slang, cultural references, small details that an American would miss,” explained radio producer Karen Duffin.
After spending three months at Buchenwald in 1938, Meritz came to the United States and worked on the project,for two years. He then travelled to Europe near the end of the war to track down and interrogate Nazis there.
When he captured Streicher, Meritz “flipped out,” in the words of radio producer Karen Duffin.
Trembling and crying with rage, Werner said he took told his fellow soldiers he was going to exact vengeance.
“I was enraged. I was trembling. There were tears in my eyes that I had captured this guy. I had him to myself,” he said.
“I explained to the MPs, I’m gonna do things, you probably think I’m crazy. And you wanna know something? I am crazy. I’m crazed. I captured a Nazi of unbelievable mischief. … I’m gonna do what I have to do.”
After three days of feeding Streicher only potato skins that he had also urinated on, Mertiz handed his prisoner off to American officers. Streicher was later one of 11 Nazis sentenced to death in the Nuremberg Trials. Meritz went on to start his own textile business. He died in 2010. His daughter described him as a sharp dresser with a well-trimmed mustache and strong opinions.
Duffin said the records of Streicher’s capture are “spotty and contradictory,” and usually someone else is credited with capturing him. But an expert at the National Archives told her he thought Werner could have done what he said he did.
If true, Merlitz’s account would be an exception to the norm at P.O. Box 1142. The military trained the men to use nonviolent and even friendly interrogation tactics, according to Duffin, who reviewed 70 interviews the rangers conducted with former interrogators and interviewed 10 of the interrogators or their families herself. She also obtained over 1,000 pages of previously classified files about the program.
“Try to make the prisoner feel that you’re his friend, the first one he’s met since his capture. All are human underneath. Our interrogator’s job is to play upon those weaknesses to help make up the complete intelligence picture,” a World War II interrogation training film featured in the report instructs.
While many of the Jewish former interrogators were happy to help the U.S. defeat the Nazis, some struggled with the policy of being chummy with the prisoners, who had just help drive them out of their countries and in some cases kill their loved ones.
Having signed a secrecy agreement with the army, most of the former interrogators did not speak about their work for more than 60 years, even to their wives and children. Then, in 2006, army intelligence cleared them to talk to the park rangers.
P.O. Box 1142 was the first strategic American effort at interrogation, and it worked.
“By the end of the war, they’d extracted a ton of really important intelligence about where the allies should bomb, about German weapons still being developed, about the structure of the German army. One of the Enigma machines was captured using intel discovered at P.O. Box 1142,” Duffin said, referring to the
At the end of the war, the program’s mission changed from interrogating Nazis to wining and dining them in an attempt to recruit them to the American side, especially scientists who could also be valuable to the Russians.
Arno Mayer, 88, who escaped the Nazi occupation of Luxembourg and went on to become a history professor at Princeton University, was tasked with charming Wernher von Braun, the famed Nazi rocket scientists who later helped the U.S. get to the moon, appeared on the cover of Time magazine and befriended President John F. Kennedy. Mayer recalled taking Nazis shopping at a Jewish department stores in Washington, D.C. on a lark, but told Duffin he regretted not being more subversive.
“I should have told them to go to hell, but I didn’t do it. I was a coward. I mean I only exploded once. I could have exploded many other times,” he said.
The men who participated in P.O. Box 1142 went on to become lawyers, a CIA agent, an ambassador, head of the Culinary Institute of America, conductor of the Chicago Chamber Orchestra and the richest man in America in the 1980s, John Kluge.
When a Jewish Holocaust survivor ‘pissed’ on Hitler’s henchman Read More »
European Union allocates $1.5 million to expand Lodz train station museum
The European Union allocated $1.5 million for the expansion of the museum at the Radegast train station in Lodz, from which Jews were shipped to death camps during the Holocaust.
The money will be used to modernize the building and construct a multimedia model of the Lodz Ghetto, which existed from April 1940 to August 1944.
During the Holocaust, the Nazis sent Jews from the ghetto to death camps from the Radegast station. After the war the station fell into disrepair and appeared to be forgotten. A museum was opened there 10 years ago.
The multimedia model of the Lodz Ghetto, or Litzmannstadt Ghetto, as it was known in German, will be made on a scale of 1:1400 and will show the ghetto as it appeared in May 1944.
“Through multimedia, visitors will gain an opportunity to meet and listen to the witness of history,” according to Piotr Machlanski, director of the Museum of Independence Traditions in Lodz, which owns and operates the museum at the Radegast station.
The work at the station is expected to be completed in 2019.
European Union allocates $1.5 million to expand Lodz train station museum Read More »
Mark Zuckerberg, Pope Francis talk technology and charitable giving in Vatican audience
Pope Francis talked technology and charitable giving with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, during a private audience at the Vatican.
“It was a meeting we’ll never forget,” Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, posted on his Facebook page following the audience Monday. “You can feel his warmth and kindness, and how deeply he cares about helping people.”
A Vatican statement said Zuckerberg and the pope “spoke about how to use communication technologies to alleviate poverty, encourage a culture of encounter, and help deliver a message of hope, especially to those people who are most disadvantaged.”
On his Facebook page, Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself presenting the pontiff with a model of a Facebook internet drone. He wrote that he and Chan told the pope “how much we admire his message of mercy and tenderness, and how he’s found new ways to communicate with people of every faith around the world.”
Zuckerberg added: “We also discussed the importance of connecting people, especially in parts of the world without internet access. We gave him a model of Aquila, our solar-powered aircraft that will beam internet connectivity to places that don’t have it. And we shared our work with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to help people around the world.”
The pope has Twitter and Instagram accounts, but does not have a personal Facebook page.
The audience was the latest in a series of meetings the pope has held with high-level figures in the tech and IT world in recent months. In January he held separate private audiences with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Eric Schmidt, the executive chair of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Francis met with Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, in February.
Mark Zuckerberg, Pope Francis talk technology and charitable giving in Vatican audience Read More »
Israeli medalist’s Olympic name patch raises over $50,000 for charity
Israeli judoka Yarden Gerbi, a bronze medalist at the Rio Olympics, brought in $52,100 for charity in an auction for her Olympic name patch.
Twenty-two individuals placed 87 bids for the signed and dedicated patch during the weeklong auction on eBay that closed Monday. The buyer was not identified.
The proceeds will be donated to the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center to be used to purchase medical equipment, Gerbi said in her description on the auction website.
Gerbi defeated Miku Tashiro of Japan for Israel’s first Olympic medal since the 2008 games in Beijing. Another Israeli judoka, Ori Sasson, won a bronze medal in the men’s judo competition.
“The medal is for all of Israel, for everyone who supported me and cheered me on,” Gerbi said after her victory. “I’m waiting for someone to wake me up. I gave my soul and it paid off. Whoever said you can’t succeed in Israel is wrong.”
Israeli medalist’s Olympic name patch raises over $50,000 for charity Read More »
Rabbis, refugee agency deny report of Louisville synagogue resettling Syrian Jews
A report of a Conservative synagogue in Louisville resettling Jewish refugees from Syria is false, say a local refugee resettlement agency and the rabbis of the Kentucky city’s two Conservative synagogues.
On Friday, JTA received an anonymous report that an unnamed Conservative synagogue in the city had welcomed three Syrian Jewish families. The report provided the names and some personal details of the families, but did not name the synagogue. Other publications have since published the report.
But the rabbis at the two Conservative synagogues and a representative of a local refugee resettlement agency refuted the report. While the city’s Jewish community of about 8,500 helped a Syrian Muslim family settle in the city, the rabbis said, their synagogues have not brought in any Jewish families.
“It’s a rumor. It’s not true,” Rabbi Robert Slosberg of Congregation Adath Jeshurun. told JTA. “There’s no Syrian refugee family that came to the Jewish community that anyone in the Jewish community that I’ve spoken to of authority knows about.”
Rabbi Michael Wolk of Keneseth Israel Congregation also told JTA the report “is not true at all.”
Rebecca Jordan, Kentucky state refugee coordinator for the Catholic Charities of Louisville, wrote in an email to JTA that the city’s refugee resettlement agencies “have neither resettled these families, [n]or have them as a families [sic] that they expect to arrive.”
Rabbis, refugee agency deny report of Louisville synagogue resettling Syrian Jews Read More »
Demonstration by Polish soccer fans features burning Jews in effigy
Several dozen soccer fans in Poland hung a banner containing anti-Semitic language at a train station in Lodz at a demonstration that featured the burning of Jews in effigy.
Approximately 50 men were photographed on a bridge at the Lodz Kaliska station on Aug. 26 with a banner reading “19.08, today the Jews got a name. Let them burn,” followed by an obscenity, the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper reported.
The message referenced to the ŁKS Łódź team, which was founded in 1908 and many Poles associate with Jews because of the rich Jewish history of Lodz. The city in central Poland had a large Jewish population before the Holocaust, partly because it was a capital of the local textile industry.
The fans, some wearing balaclavas, set fire to at least three puppets hanging from the bridge and are understood to symbolize burning Jews.
Police are looking for the demonstrators, who are suspected of incitement to racial hatred and intimidation, the daily reported.
Demonstration by Polish soccer fans features burning Jews in effigy Read More »
Abbas: Palestinians ready to join peace initiative
The Palestinians are ready to participate in a peace initiative, the office of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said.
“We are ready to participate in any regional or international initiative with the objective of a comprehensive and fair solution,” the president’s spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said in a statement, the French news agency AFP reported Monday.
The statement comes amid unconfirmed reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin is arranging a meeting between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Kremlin could not confirm such a meeting, AFP reported.
The Israeli news website Ynet reported Sunday that an Abbas-Netanyahu meeting under the auspices of Putin would take place around October, citing unnamed Israeli and Palestinian officials.
The Palestinians favor the French peace initiative launched in June at a one-day summit in Paris of foreign ministers from two dozen countries aimed at rebooting peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, who were not invited to the event. The ministers proposed an international conference to further talks between the two sides by the end of the year without setting a date.
Israel has balked at the initiative, saying it enables the Palestinians to continue to avoid the direct talks Israel wants and compromise.
Abbas and Netanyahu last met officially in 2010, but it is believed that since then they have held secret meetings.
Abbas: Palestinians ready to join peace initiative Read More »