Israel ... From Outer Space to Palestine, Texas

Finding Feinberg's bones

When curators wanted to select items from Israel's State Archive for an exhibit on the country's 60th anniversary of independence, they had over 45 kms. of stuff stacked on shelves to choose from.

Now on display at the Israel Museum --the exhibition is called ”Blue and White Pages: Documenting the History of Israel”-- this final choice of curios and document is marvelously eclectic, and tells a lot about what Israel's founding fathers were pondering at the time of independence (how blue should the blue star of David emblazoned on the Israeli flag be?). It's a Caledon blue, a deep sea blue, the blue of a Chagall stained glass.

But, most intriguingly, it's the small things – a pottery shard, a note from the Jewish rebel leader Shimon Bar Kochba who fought Hadrian's legions—which illuminate the forces of history leading to Israel's creation. Says James Synder, the Israel Museum Director: “We wanted these documents of the last 60 years to resonate with the artifacts of Israel from the ancient times.”

And resonate it does. Part of the secret of the exhibit's impact is its masterful juxtaposition, put together by Chief Curator Yigal Zalmona. As he says, “These are the deeds themselves, not just documentation.”

It may seem a little haphazard at first, like rummaging through your granny's attic, but there's a clever method in all of this; a 16th century pilgrim's map to the “Promised Land” is hung next to the original 1947 map in which Israeli and Jordanian generals bisected the Holy Land with the infamous Green Line. Faith and politics and legions of warriors are forever re-drawing the map of this stony, cloud-raked land.

There's an even more cosmic juxtaposition: in 1967 workers in the Sinai digging up a date palm found that it had grown up through a human skeleton belonging to a Jewish traveler Avshalom Feinberg killed in 1917 by Bedouins. The date seed was in his pocket, evidently food for his desert trek, and when he died, it sprouted and grew into a tree.

Photos of workers excavating Feinberg's remains are on the wall next to fragments of a diary belonging to Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon who was killed in the 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. The pages of his diary somehow (miraculously, some might say) survived the mid-air blast and fluttered down in a place called Palestine, Texas.

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem