Jill Sadowsky regales us with her experience when she saw a snake in her kitchen. Petrified, she called her kids who explained that the snake, Ollie, was harmless. Ollie was a hognose snake that liked to “perform” by playing dead. Later, at a job interview, this information helped her impress the head of the Biology department and got her the job as P.R. assistant. Her amusing account won her honorable mention in ESRA’s literary competition.

How did a documentary film called “Israel in color” come to be made? Read Barbara Abraham’s account of a meeting with documentary film maker Avishai Kfir, and his own discovery of film footage of the early days of the State of Israel made by Fred Monosson. Monosson, with one of the first home movie cameras, filmed the Jewish /Israeli story from 1945 – 1969. These highlights have now been incorporated into Kfir’s own documentary.

While watching the movie “Fiddler on the Roof”, Sara Groundland muses about a time when Jews, living in Eastern Europe, were constantly harassed by Tsarist decrees to leave their shtetls or were driven out by pogroms perpetrated by the local villagers at the behest of the rulers of the time. Today she thanks God that we have our own country and Jews no longer have to worry about being uprooted ever again.

What does it mean to be a Zionist in this day and age? For Adele Rubin the real Zionists are those who came to Israel of their own free will, but she also uses the example of Azarai Alon, now 92, and one of the founders of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and this year’s recipient of the Herzl Prize. This prize is given every year to worthy individuals who have contributed to Israel in some way.

British And American students participate in MASA Givat Haviva Intensive Arabic semester, learning the languages and cultures of Arabs and Jews in Israel. Lydia Aisenberg reports.

This is not your usual tourist guide but an unusually interesting one that takes the armchair traveller on an historical, archaeological, biblical and cultural tour of Israel in a very individual way. Encountering Isael by Stephen Kramer is reviewed by Rolly King Kohansky.

Last Ice Cream describes an outing to the beach, in sweltering heat, on the last day of the summer school holidays, of the writer and her four young children, the hassles and pleasures.

The fourth annual community sponsored walk in aid of the Benji Hillman Foundation took place in Raanana on Friday April 30. Donations are still coming in from the walk, which has so far raised NIS 180,000.