Nazi plate update
You will remember that a few weeks ago, my husband and I made a disturbing discovery: one of our serving platters used to be in the possession of the German Luftwaffe. It has a swastika on the bottom and everything. Thank you so much for all of your ideas and suggestions in response.I contacted Yad Vashem to see what they suggested and received this in response:באוסף החפצים של מוזיאון יד ושם נאספים פריטים ומוצגים ששימשו את הנאצים ואחר כך נלקחו על ידי הניצולים לשי

My first Israeli recipe ever: Ketzitzot!
This week, I plan to subject my husband's Israeli family to a full Thanksgiving dinner. I ordered a full turkey from a butcher shop-- they thought I was crazy, and I'm not sure the turkey will fit in my oven, but it's on its way! I found kosher frozen cranberries in Tiv Taam. I bought fresh sage (which is for some reason readily available, while dried sage isn't), and I am planning to boil down the chunks of pumpkin sold in every veggie shop into pumpkin pie.The last one is almost guaranteed to disgust my guests, because Israelis see pumpkins as a purely savory food-- I guess they see pumpkin dessert the way I see those Asian bean curd pastries. Is it bad that I am highly

Are Israelis rude?
I was actually just going to post a link to today's Haveil Havelim blog carnival, hosted by A Mother in Israel, but as I was browsing her wonderful blog, a post about Israeli "rudeness" struck a nerve with me, and I had to add my own thoughts. (I agree with A Mother in Israel's response to this question... I'm not ranting against what she said, but rather at the attitude she addressed!)We've all heard that Israelis are rude, and to some extent this is true. More often, though, Americans coming to Israel are ruder than they realize. What is polite in Ame

Hebrew words that sound like English but mean something else
One of the more confusing things about learning Hebrew is that some words sound like English but don't have the same meaning as their English counterparts. Or rather, their meaning has taken a life of its own in Hebrew, such as the way "super" means "grocery store" here. (In many cases, these words came to Hebrew from a different language, like French.) We all know of הוא (sounds like "who," means "he"), היא (sounds like "he," means "she"), and דג (sounds like "dog," means "fish"). Here are a few examples you might not learn in Hebrew school:Hebrew word: cuckoo (קוקו)Sounds like:

Grocery shopping like an Israeli
There are a lot of differences between Israeli and American grocery stores, as I learned on my very first day in Israel. I was strolling down the street, feeling all cool and Israeli, and I decided to look around the inside of our local Machsane-Lahav.By the way, basically half of the big stores in Israel these days is calls Machsan-something. Machsan means "warehouse" (or storage room, as in the machsans on the ground floor of most apartment buildings) and I guess it indicates "cheap" and "big" to the Israeli consumer. I bought our fridge in Machsane-Chashmal (Electrical Warehouse), I passed a lamp store called Machsan-Teorah (Lighting Warehouse) last night, a but