Sep 1 2014

Modern day miracles

Israel: As the cease-fire began on Tuesday, a record of babies were born at the Soroka hospital in Beer-Sheva.

68 babies in total were born yesterday alone, leaving people amazed and drawing parallels to the number of victims who have died throughout this war, to date – an astounding 68.

One of the mothers said that the babies were just waiting for the cease-fire to start.

source: http://www.tlvfaces.com/as-tuesdays-cease-fire-began-israelis-mourn-loss-of-68-note-birth-of-68-babies-in-soroka-hospital/

The following comes to us from Rabbi Yossi Mizrachi:

birdwire-1560x690_c The Dove that saved our soldiers from death. An incredible true story !!!

Ami Maimon (of Bat-Yam) a radio announcer for “Kol Barama” shared an amazing story that he heard in the synagogue from a soldier:

during an all-night military operation of an elite unit, the unit was told to take shelter in an abandoned building under commander orders. They approached a certain house before dawn to avoid being discovered. As they watched the house through binoculars before entering they noticed a pigeon standing stationary in midair above the door. Thinking this to be a strange sight (how could a white pigeon stand still in the air without having to flap its wings?), they looked more carefully through their binoculars when they noticed that the pigeon was standing on a thin transparent fishing line. They decided to shoot toward the dove when the fishing wire snapped and the entire house (which was wired) exploded and turned to dust. It turned out that the terrorists hung the transparent wire so that when the soldiers enter the home, loaded with explosives, they would rip the fishing line and blow up.

source:- http://israelbeyond.com/bird-on-a-wire-an-idf-miracle/

More claims of divine intervention are being reported in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, with an operator of Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system saying he personally witnessed “the hand of God” diverting an incoming rocket out of harm’s way.

Israel Today translated a report from a Hebrew-language news site, which noted the Iron Dome battery failed three times to intercept an incoming rocket headed toward Tel Aviv last week.

The commander recalled: “A missile was fired from Gaza. Iron Dome precisely calculated [its trajectory]. We know where these missiles are going to land down to a radius of 200 meters. This particular missile was going to hit either the Azrieli Towers, the Kirya (Israel’s equivalent of the Pentagon) or [a central Tel Aviv railway station]. Hundreds could have died.

“We fired the first [interceptor]. It missed. Second [interceptor]. It missed. This is very rare. I was in shock. At this point we had just four seconds until the missile lands. We had already notified emergency services to converge on the target location and had warned of a mass-casualty incident.

Source:- http://www.wnd.com/2014/08/hand-of-god-sent-missile-into-sea/

I’ve seen many examples of miracles myself amongst Jewish and Gentile believers in UK and Israel. Sadly I can’t really talk about it on the internet.

Aug 26 2014

Investigate terrorism from your armchair using NEWOCR.COM

About a year ago, someone showed me a clever cloud based service called NEWOCR.COM

OCR or optical character recognition, is the art of clever software scanning a page of printed writing and convert into text. This is a complex process to turn an image into actual blocks of text that could be edited in a regular word processor later.

This software has been around for 20 years or more, but never accurate to be accepted in a real life work place.

The beauty with NEWOCR is it works with all kinds of languages include non Latin alphabets. You can then feed the results into Google translator.

I think this system could be tweaked further and used for police or anti-terrorism work.

I’ve just seen this news article about a training manual recently found for members of HAMAS, the terrorist group who control the Gaza strip.

Open a new tab in your browser, and go to the site. You can either A) upload a picture saved on your computer or B) use the URL of a specific image you have found on the internet.

Be aware, this will work in languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Russian, Chinese etc. I’ve even made it work with text at 45 degrees. The text needs to ideally be large, and text with different images or patterns behind it might cause problems. Click the blue Upload button.

Now use the corners of the boxes show to adjust which parts of the image you want to scan. Then click the blue OCR button

Ok Yalla!! – You can now translate your text.

Please don’t expect brilliant translation quality. Also the NEWOCR site seems to be short of bandwidth and sometimes not always available.

I’d be curious to see how the police and anti terrorism departments could make of this.

Nov 19 2013

A few dozen reasons Christians living in Israel is great

I could of called this list 20… or 101 reasons…… I didn’t want to stick to a particular number, here is many blessings I’ve experienced in the 52 months I spent volunteering in Jerusalem:-

Things I’ve discovered:-

Bus drivers don’t let you sit down before the start driving off
Using rep training means I can better represent this country to those not aware of Israel’s background
The Shuk is the most fun way of shopping
Understanding different types of anti semitism in other ways, some more discreet, not just from the Nazis and Islamic world
Seeing Barry and Batya Segal play Hebrew worship music live at my church
Finding that cooking chicken is dead easy when you have a slow cooker.
Sitting in garden during lunch break observing blackbirds, green parrots, woodpeckers and jays, and also an elderly bad tempered black Persian cat known as Mr Fluffy
Going on a Zealous young adults group around different parts of the country
Visiting Nazareth and Capernaum and imagining Jesus spent 17 years of his life in mostly secular work and bible study before doing ministry at 30
Going hiking in the Galilee, Golan, Mount Hermon or the desert.
Fixing an iPhone with a smashed screen with $15 worth of parts from ebay and watching instructions on Youtube from some else who did it
Hebrew worship music
Praying at the Kotel, aka the Western Wall
Watching how firemen use special tools on opening the doors of a rental car in the Galilee when someone locked the keys inside
Having my elbow healed from a tibular break after falling over onto snow in the UK
Floating in the Dead Sea
Seeing local Israeli live bands, then they recognise you as you have been to 3 of their gigs
Teaching friends how not to get ripped off by crooked taxi drivers
Sitting by the edge of the Kinneret
Learning Hebrew, mostly only enough to know how to buy stuff in shops, and read the signs in the bus station
Hanging out with friends drinking wine on my balcony
Sitting on Ben Yehuda with an Arab believer friend who loves Jewish people
Cycling to work past famous places
Watching Jerusalem’s first formula F1 race
Independence day parties
Got to know an Iranian believer who loves Israel on Facebook, and now praying him for to be released from prison, his crime is being a believer
Learning how to build a whole email infrastructure from scratch with a free certification from Google
Spying on Google, yep I saw the outside of their offices in Haifa from a train
Seeing flowers in the ponds and waterfalls of the Golan
Listening to street musicians
Sliding down the snow at Mount Hermon
Falafel, nuff said
Giving away an old laptop computer refurbished out of bits of two broken ones, to an Ethiopian community centre
Playing chess in coffee shops with friends
Visiting a friend in Switzerland who I met at my church here in Jerusalem
Watching the view from the Tayelet of most of Jerusalem
Then also watching the view from the Mount of Olives
Observing Yom Kippur and then getting something to eat to break the fast
Crossing over into Jordan and visiting Petra with the Indiana Jones music on my ipod
Inviting a American Messianic Jewish friend to sleep on my couch who I only knew from his writings in the internet
Seeing exotic coloured fish through a glass window into the Red Sea
Humous, the chilli or lemon stuff is the best
And of course, Shabbat, hosting or being hosted by others.

Nov 9 2013

Cycle art in Jerusalem

I spent sometime with my very dear friends Peter and Deanna from Canada the other week, on the way home were these strange bicycles recently added as a mechanical art thing.

These contraptions don’t go anywhere, they are bolted to the grown, and pedaling provides kinetic power does one of several tricks, either make a big electric fan, plays music or, make a bunch of plastic flowers pop out on a spring.

Its a sort of cartoon type exhibit made by mechanical design, folks will think is rather clever or a may seem a waste of money to some people.

I’m sad this lovely couple have left now, I have worked with for 3 years, but I got to spend as much time as I could at the last few weeks here.

Now I have an excuse to visit Canada, a nation I have not visited yet, and I also hope to show them round Portsmouth and popular and less well known historical parts of southern England.

Nov 8 2013

Jerusalem Knights event 2013

I was really pleased to go to this popular event in Jerusalem’s old city:-

This big crane was by the Jaffa Gate, this was holding two cage like structures, as you can see these three women doing this gymnastics on wires event, looks very difficult!! On top of this, the top cage, contains a man playing the drums!!

A short walk on, and we are entering the Armenian quarter of the old city, I am not sure if these men were Jews, Arabs, Armenians or foreigners. These people were playing a small ukelelle, a regular guitar and bag pipes!!

This man is playing a horn – in reverse!! not sure what this is, it makes a flute type noise.

These are my new (ish) friends from work. I’ve seen some of my other really close friends who have been here for sometime have now left, but these guys are great fun to explore with from Canada, South Africa and Japan. This was an arm extended self-shot which I didn’t get myself in, oh well.

These people are funny, looks more like Elvis on stilts!!

This event was maybe a little bit smaller than last years event, but still really enjoyable. Theres about three events like this a year, which turn the old city into a vibrant out-door theatre.

here’s a post I did about 2 years ago:- https://britinjerusalem.com/2010/10/22/jerusalem-knights-outdoor-holy-land-theatre/

Apr 7 2013

Computer hackers Anonymous are no match against Israel

So much for the world famous computer hacking syndicate ‘Anonymous’ who wants to pick on the only democratic country in the middle east. The country with the largest number of technology patents in the world proportional to the population.

The web site they produced to show their plans to hurt Israel’s infrastructure:

Erm, it got hacked by Israel!!!

Nice touch showing proper history of this part of the world to those not in the know.

Today seems to be no actual damage to Israeli sites, some propaganda is reusing previous successful attacks on Israel and pretend its 2013 material.

Apr 6 2013

Jerusalem’s Old City music event

Actually those lights I mentioned wasn’t that unusual. Its my camera which is a bit rubbish, its some coloured lights glowing from this:-

There was a musical festival in Jerusalem’s old city walls, consisting of artists who were both Jew and Arab, a nice evening for me and some friends to take a stroll around the evening. In fact, pretty much forgot about the whole Obama visit thing.

Outside Christ Church.

Jordanian bikers come for the day. Take a close look at this guy’s jacket. Its extremely unusual to Jordanian plated vehicles here. Not sure if these chaps were part of the entertainers.

The Cardo, behind the stone pillars were these guys. One of them looks like a kind of Robert Smith of the Cure. I had visions of the Cardo becoming a sort of biblical style mosh pit. 🙂

Beautiful music and beautiful instruments from Jewish, Arab and Armenian Christian residents of the Old City.

Mar 22 2013

Bats in Jerusalem

After a day of cycling past workman set up decorations and security arrangements for the US President visit, go to work, read in a coffee shop (normally do this from 5pm to 7pm on certain days) then go to a bible study, then head to a bar and have a beer with some friends afterwards, I grab my bike and head back past David HaMelech Street, I see a bat fly in the street in big circle, quite different from a bird.

I then saw it disappear into a small tree, thinking to myself there was no way I can ever spot this creature in the branches, I walk my bike underneath it, I quickly grab my camera and shoot directly up above me, as I am right under the tree, thinking it would probably get spooked by the flash.

Can you see him?

There is plenty of old buildings they can roost in as well as a trees. I have seen them hover around palm trees, not sure if they are attracted to palm dates or insects there.

Feb 6 2013

Take out coffee and Transfiguration

These don’t seem like related subjects do they?

I didn’t think so, until the beverage I got from Aroma had this interesting message on top of it:-

It’s made in a factory in Tavor (Mount Tabor, V and B are often interchangeable in Hebrew) funny as this is also the mountain considered to be the most likely place of Jesus’s transfiguration.

It’s also an exciting sounding place I’d like to go. I am waiting for two new PCs to arrive at work, then I need to visit Karmiel to install these are some other maintenance then I will visit some of these places.

I think the town at the foot of Mt Tavor is Arab. I’m now curious if the little hole is to let the heat out slowly, of it could be a symbol of something implied over Tavor? 🙂

Actually now you can see it on Google Street Map View!! I’m not sure if this ‘spoils’ visiting biblical places or not, you could see it like a spoiler in a movie or trailer to get an idea what to expect – in this case Mount Tabor on your computer is more of the latter as you can’t see much pass the car park when you get to the top.

Matthew 17 (I have added some colours for emphasis)

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. ²There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. ³Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.

⁴Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”

⁵While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

⁶When the disciples heard this, they fell facedown to the ground, terrified. ⁷But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” ⁸When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.

⁹As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, “Don’t tell anyone what you have seen, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

¹⁰The disciples asked him, “Why then do the teachers of the law say that Elijah must come first?”

¹¹Jesus replied, “To be sure, Elijah comes and will restore all things. ¹²But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.” ¹³Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist.

The climb up the hill goes in a zigzag fashion which looks not too difficult to do, or you can go up in a car or bus. Interesting enough, although three shelters were erected on here, there are two churches (Catholic and Orthodox) at the top today. Its not guaranteed if Tabor is the exact place of the transfiguration, but seems the most likely place by biblical historians. The other mountain in the north, Mount Hermon is covered in snow a lot of the time, I think Jesus would of mentioned this if it was there. 🙂 This part of the world has had earthquakes so maybe the shape of the landscape could of been different then, which Jesus mentioned in Matthew 17 : 20 that mountains aren’t necessarily a permanent fixture.

Dec 10 2012

Hannukah in Jerusalem 2012

Its the third day of Hannukah today.

Have to admit I have not paid a great deal of attention to this particular festival right now,

After church on sunday a friend surprised me with a gift of a candle set. I forgot about it until this evening, so I got it out of my rucksack and set it up. I think we are on the third day, so I have lit it as far as I am aware close to the same sequence as the electric ones I have seen erected in the street – hope I have got this right…. 🙂

This set is interesting for several reasons, this set is made to be extremely low cost. Its true I have some extremely elaborate ones, like the gold one my friend Judah got a photo with close to the Western Wall which I think cost several million dollars, and there’s the ones cleverly fabricated from spent Hamas rockets I wrote a while back. Its admirable there are some truly outstanding craftsman in the Jewish world, and many implements used in Jewish practices are extremely precision made to a very high standard.

But this one has its only unique charm as its built to a price. Its a one-piece section of sheet aluminum pressed in half to shape in a similar fashion to a mass produced beverage can, including the circular holders. As poverty is a big issue (1 in 4) in this country this is good, so everyone can afford to celebrate this holiday.

Yeshua said himself that he appreciated the poor giving what they could, just like parable of poor woman who gave some small value copper coins as a tithe.

Right now, I’m frantically finishing up some projects at work, getting Christmas presents, host a party for some friends at my flat this friday, then preparing to fly back for a month to see family and friends and get some recuperation.

Brit In Jerusalem

A Christian discovering the roots in the holy land….

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