Tikkun Olam

In addition to that of my daughter , San Diego, California has another Israel connection: Israel is helping desalinate San Diego's water supply .  As many of us know, water is a most precious natural resource in the Middle East, and in past years there has been a fairly severe drought, in Israel and other countries in the region, due to lower rainfall.  This winter with its powerful storms of a couple of weeks ago, which brought snow to the higher elevations (I heard from friends who visited me on Shabbat that approximately 6 inches fell in Efrat, where they and my son and his family live) and pounding rain to central Israel, including flooding in Tel Aviv, has gone a long way to ease that drought, and raise the level of the largest body of fresh water in Israel, the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), almost to it's high water mark. The Middle East is not the only region with severe water problems.  I never expected, however,  that one of those areas would be San Diego: ...

Do you know why tourists don't come here much during the rainy season? Because it rains, that's why.  Israel, as well as this entire region, has a chronic water problem .  It is a scarce natural resource, and out of necessity (and I might add, Jewish ingenuity) Israel has become a world leader in the development of water technologies , such as drip irrigation and desalination. Well guess what, folks--it has poured for days since we got here. And to think my husband questioned why I packed our umbrella. Many consecutive days of heavy rain were sometimes interspersed with sunny days, today of which was one of them.  We took the opportunity to drive to Jerusalem, leaving our daughter alone in her apartment to 'sleep it off,' after a prospective tenant came to view the place at 8:30 a.m. this morning.  Ouch.  So after the person left, she went back to sleep, and we left for a mini day-trip and drove from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem  to visit the Kotel. Four weeks i...

(nablopomo day 10) Back in May, the largest reverse-osmosis water desalination plant in existence was opened in Hadera.  It is owned by IDE Technologies and Shikun and Binui , the third of five plants being built in Israel.  They are slated to supply  750 million cubic meters of desalinated water to Israel a year. Israel's main natural sources of water are underground acquifers, and the Kineret, or Sea of Galilee.    -- Just another example of Israeli ingenuity.