In looking for the names of some of those circular Squares in Netanya (names that conjure up both biblical and modern personalities, all men so far), I discovered that Netanya is home to the Sanzer chasidim and the Laniado Hospital, a landmark our driver Nissim had pointed out on the way from the airport.

Most of the older generation of Sanzer chasidim (who I think are the gentle-looking elderly folks I've seen walking, often husband and wife together) are survivors. Here, and most places in the Jewish community, the word "survivor" unaccompanied by any adjective means survivors of the Shoah (["catastrophe, disaster"], what you know in English as the Holocaust).

Laniado hospital was built by the rabbi who founded the Sanzer-Klausenburger chasidim, Rebbe Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam, a survivor whose wife and 11 children were murdered by the Nazis. He built it as a rebuke (my word) to the hospitals in the death camps of the Nazis, where he wouldn't go even to have a superficial flesh wound treated; once you went in, you would not come out alive. In 1980, speaking in Yiddish when the cornerstone was laid for the hospital's second building, he said this:

"Then I promised myself that if, with God's help, I got well and got out of there, away from those resha'im (wicked people), I would build a hospital in Eretz Yisrael [the land of Israel] where every human being would be cared for with dignity. And the basis of that hospital would be that the doctors and nurses would believe that there is a God in this world and that when they treat a patient, they are fulfilling the greatest mitzvah in the Torah.[6]


Laniado hospital was on the front line during a wave of terror attacks in 2002, the most horrific of which was the bombing of a Passover Seder at the Park Hotel, which is right on the ocean. [photo]



Yes. That's the same photograph I posted the first day here. The Park Hotel takes up the largest portion of the skyline from where I sit on my balcony across the street at the David Hotel. It looks shabby and run-down and TripAdvisor confirms that condition. I can only imagine how its fortunes may have declined.

This is the reality of life on this side of the Green Line, the 1949 Armistace Line that will be the basis for any two-state solution netween the Palestinians and the Israelis: People live and love and and go about their business. Children ride their bicycles in Netanya'a tourist square after dark, and sit on a sidewalk bench in the evening, perhaps outside their parents' shop, reading books and watching people pass by. Some of the Russian-Israeli waiters speak no Hebrew, and the native-born may speak no English, and they're all in their teens or 20s--I'm not quite sure if most are pre- or post-army service, but they're all young. In Tel Aviv, Army Camp Yitzchak Rabin, the IDF headquarters, sits across the street from the Art Museum. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HaKirya) Cats are everywhere. (Note the Henry Moore statue in the background.)



And sometimes terrible things happen, by act of human or by act of nature.. And mostly they don't.