Day of Conferences

Dr. Tsafra from the National library

Temperature has been dropping steadily. Yesterday night it fell to 9 degrees. Winter is in ... but we still lack rain. The skies are quite cloudy but the wind blows the clouds into the east ... into Jordan where it rains. Here we still receive not one drop. There missy be some way to stop the clouds above us and let it rain in our very parched land.

Yesterday was crazy. Running parallel to the exhibition which we organized, we also had a conference from 2pm to 5pm on ancient books and digital libraries. We had 2 guests from Athens who flew in for the colloquium, as well as a director from the Israel National Library, the director of the Ecole Biblique library and the administrator of the digital library from the Milan University. The audience was small ... but no wonder as the topic was very specialized. The Greek Consul General came, and the Italian Consulate sent a representative. It was a colloquium and we learned quite a lot. Dr. Tselikes from the Onassis Foundation presented some very rare books in the Greek Patriarchate library never seen before by outsiders.

Talk on Coptic manuscripts

Immediately after this conference I had to run 1km down to our university where another conference was organized. It was a talk by Dr. Sheridan who presented the Coptic libraries and manuscripts in Egypt. A bishop from the local Coptic Church also came. By 9.30pm I was utterly exhausted and during dinner ate something I was allergic to. Throat and eyes began to swell so I had to run off to my room to get an ejection. Fell asleep almost immediately till this morning.

After weeks of ultra-orthodox Jews demonstrating ... at times violently ... in the streets disrupting traffic and daily life, the secular Jews are now retaliating by declaring a Day of Rage against the ultra-orthodox. It will be held on Nov. 17th ... and let's hope there'll be no clashes with the ultra-orthodox as it will get very ugly.  http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Liberal-Jerusalem-group-plans-secular-day-of-rage-513182