Yom Hashoa:Holocaust Remembrance Day, by Baila Litwak

יזכור = remember

I arrived in Beersheba with 36 classmates in mid July and at this point have been living here for nearly 10 months. Yesterday I heard my first siren that was not a drill. Yesterday was Yom Hashoa, Holocaust remembrance day.

According to Jewish law holidays begin at sunset and last until sunset the following day. I realized Yom Hashoa had began when I was studying in my apartment, listening to the radio, and it suddenly dawned on me that they were no longer playing happy, upbeat music. On Yom Hashoa every radio station plays slow, somber music, every TV channels broadcasts either documentaries or discussions relating to the Holocaust. As I was studying for my pathology final I felt too tired to make dinner and too busy to go out to eat so I decided to order pizza. When I went to the dominos website I found that they were closed for Yom Hashoa.

“Dear customers, On the eve of Yom Hashoa Dominos will be closed...”

On Yom Hashoa there are ceremonies throughout the country held at schools, public squares, military bases, etc. I, along with a number of my fellow classmates, attended the Yom Hashoa ceremony at BGU. It was outside in the 90+ degree weather under the scorching sun, yet hundreds of students were there to remember the millions who were “exterminated” during the Holocaust. There were nearly as many students in attendance as there were last month for Purim, which is one of the most fun parties on campus all year. At the ceremony there were speeches, a modern dance piece, a choir that sang two beautiful songs, and six people from the community who told stories of their family members who were killed and those who survived the Holocaust. Each of the six people who shared their family’s story lit a candle in commemoration.

At 10:00 in the morning of Yom Hashoa there is a siren that blares throughout the country, loud enough so that people can hear it where ever they might find themselves at that moment. The siren lasts for two minutes and for those two minutes everything stops.  Every person at every ceremony stands in silence. People stop driving in the middle of the highway, get out of their cars, and bow their head in honor of their brothers and sisters who were killed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeozUSWdoQA

Israel was established to be a place of refuge for Jews being persecuted across the world and a state where Jews could feel independent and safe. Today Israel is still such a place and not only for the Jews. Every year On Yom Hashoa Israel remembers those who were not safe where they lived and were forced to endure persecution, murder, and true hatred. - blogger of the month, Baila Litwak

Nothing I say should be taken too seriously! by Benzi Samueli

(Disclaimer: Nothing I say should be taken too seriously or literally; I take a great deal of poetic license with everything.)

I know I have an upcoming exam in immunology, and if I don’t study harder for microbiology I’m going to fall behind real quickly, but I promised MSIH that I’d write these weekly blogs for a month. Plus I get a nalgene and gift card for this. So I’ll study a little later.

I got an iPad this week, which is very exciting and very useful. A number of students use the Notability app, which lets you import the lecturer’s slides and take notes right on them. Also, all of the textbooks are available in eBook format. All in all, the iPad is a great investment for carrying around all of the lecture slides, notes, and textbooks in a very small device. So when I start studying a little later, it will be on the iPad.

Another personal study tool I use is print-out review sheets taped up on my walls. As I walk around my apartment, I quickly look over amino acid structures and lymphocyte classifications. I took biochemistry in college, and I can’t believe I only just realized this week that phenylalanine is alanine with a phenyl group. The review sheets will be helpful a little later when I start studying.

Most of the professors are very kind in posting a lot of resources online. From Moodle (the university’s official class-resource platform) or their individual websites, you can find relevant articles, notes, assigned reading pages, etc.  I just received a couple of e-mails from biostatistics that some material will be excluded from the final, and also some explanations on the binomial distribution. Unfortunately, these e-mails are going to delay what was once a very timely study session, because I’ll need to look over them before I start studying a little later.

It’s getting late, so I should go to bed. I’ll wake up early to study. Uh-oh, the sirens are going off. One of the directors just sent the class a text message that it’s a false alarm. I discuss with my lovely wife Rakefet how the alarms can go off accidentally. I mean, in high school it was obvious - the building could just detect when we were taking finals and would go off all the time. Anyway, this defeats my early-to-bed-early-to-rise strategy, so I guess I’ll study tomorrow.

Correction from Previous Post: Unbeknownst to me, my lovely wife Rakefet has herself turned into a grammarian (as we say in Hebrew, להתגרמר), and told me that my pronunciation guide to the word octopodes should have included a ə.  - blogger of the month Benzi Samueli