THIS ONE CAME IN THIS MORNING OVER THE 'ETNI' -- THE LIST FOR ENGLISH TEACHERS IN ISRAEL, JUST AS I WAS SADDLING UP MY MOTOBECAINE:


-------- Original Message --------> Subject: help me find my friends> From: "gordon buckley" <thebuckleyclan@tiscali.co.uk>> > I don't know if this is the correct site but i'm trying to find a lady and her family i knew many years ago.Her name was Tovit shlomi.She had a little girl called neta in march 1988. The address at that time was 27 Yehezkel st,Tel-aviv.She had a sister called bela and 2 nieces called imbal and hadar at that time they were 15 and 12. My name was Joanne Rhodes before i married.I helped look after Neta for Tovit and would love to get in touch again.If anyone knows of her or her family please get in touch with me.or the name of another web site that might be better. > > Thank you for your help .> Joanne Buckley > (nee Rhodes)>

The message touched my heart, and also fired off a neuron somewhere that triggered a whole set of memories.

I quickly penned the following response:

While we're on the subject, there was a Flexer family in Winnipeg in the sixties. They had a little girl named Shlomit in grade 3 when I was in grade nine, that would be the year of the '67 war. I heard some of them later relocated to Be'er Sheva or something. At the time, her mother frowned on her talking to a boy six years older than her, but I guess it wouldn't matter now, as she would be 48.

Whoa.

Any takers?


If yes, tell her I was the one with the ears.

In this entry, Barry councils a colleague in distress.
Not long ago, I received the following request:

Dear Barry,

I would like to use some of your collected song lyrics in my class, but I have no way to present the song to the class, unless I use my almost depleted xerox card to photo a copy per student. Our school does not even have an OHP.

(signed) Despondent and transparent

Dear Despond,

What are you whining about? Be thankful you still have a Xerox card. For years, the only time I saw "OHP" was when one of our students tried to write the word "Hope." I'll let you in on a technique I have used many times in low bracket schools: You put up the screen, (an old white bedsheet will do, thought it's advisable to wash it first, and in front of the screen about two meters, you hold or support a piece of poster paper with a 1.5 cm square hole in the middle. Or maybe a 1.5 cm (square hole) in the middle, I forget which. Then you call in the principal who can't even get you a measly OHP and ask him to drop his trousers and bend down, facing the students. As he 'moons' the front of the room, beams of white light strike the poster paper. Enough light goes through the hole to light up the screen and project the transparency onto the wall for the students to see. Don't feel shy about requesting this from your principal, it's something they teach them at administrator's course and they'll be only too glad to oblige.

Sincerely,
` B.S.

JUST SOMETHING I WROTE FOR PUBLICATION ABROAD

One of the lovely things you can still do when writing for a paper abroad is lie your head off. Especially if it's the paper of a remote community, where nobody is going to make the ten thousand mile trip just to check up on you.

Once upon a time in 1970, four American teenagers were blongering around Kiriat Ono, a suburb of Tel Aviv. Two were Bar Ilan students, and the other two had come as tourists after getting this message from the first two: Student life is boring; pack up all your instruments from our rock band, hop on a plane, and lets try to make a go of it on the local music scene.

And so they did. Billed as "Yom Velaila," they sat on benches with performers like young Zvika Pik, waiting for gigs from their managers, Saban and Talit. Yes, this is when entertainment mogul Haim Saban was still in diapers. Yehuda Kesar, who later led the Yemenite 'Oud' group, was just a gawky kid who'd drop in to their apartment and grab their guitar to play, as he didn't have one yet.
Anyway, for their debut, they got a write up in the entertainment section of Ma'Ariv, relating how they had appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, how Sly and the Family Stone did the warm up for them at Woodstock, and other lies. It was pretty funny and nobody was supposed to take it seriously.

I recalled this as I read a recent back issue of a Western Canadian Jewish Newspaper. They were publishing my 'as Katyushas fall' journal, so I was curious to see what else got in there. My curiosity was piqued by a write up about "one of the leading figures in divorce counseling in Northern Israel." Someone who I had never heard mentioned by Simon, a good friend and a local divorce counselor. The other day I asked him about the 'leading figure' . Well, my friend was quite amused to see the promo: This guy, he explained, is a disaster in his job, and he himself had a horribly messy divorce after which he left town. However, the Netanya correspondent for this newspaper is his uncle."
So we see that even in today's age of information highways, if you're writing about people ten thousand miles away, you can get away with almost anything. However, that doesn't apply to the bond of trust between you, dear reader and me. I want to reassure you that I won't use this column for my own gains; I won't tell you that I am Israel's most accomplished educator or that my wife (the shrink) runs three university departments. My son, (the paratrooper) did not disarm ten Hizballoonie nests over the town of Binge'Pale, and my daughter didn't graduate Magna cum Estee Lauder from Hebrew U. My son who collects Katyusha fragments has not assembled his own Merkava tank. Furthermore, my next door neighbour (small time drug pushing) does not grow 15 frond marijuana leaves and our cat did not disarm a terrorist rat cell. You can trust me. Just because I announced the birth of my new cousin in Toronto and got the father's name wrong doesn't mean I'm going to lie to you. But you can still come visit Israel and check up on me

.

Barry Silverberg… Nov 2. 2006