There are ministries, universities, museums, prizes, street names and institutions with imposing buildings. Children grow up assuming these things have always been there, or at least that their creation followed some orderly national plan.

But countries are rarely built that way.

Someone has to imagine the institution before the institution has an address. Someone has to write in the language before it becomes ordinary in schools, offices and newspapers. Someone has to decide that a memory will matter to people who have not yet been born.

I kept thinking about this while reading two stories from my own work as Elena Gunko at NAnews. One is about a poet. The other is about a man who spent years trying to create a place for the names of people who had been murdered.

They never did the same job. Yet both helped construct parts of Israel before those parts looked inevitable.

That seemed like the right beginning for a recurring idea here on NAnews at Paragraph: two stories, one question.

This time the question is simple.

Who builds a country before the country knows exactly what it will become?

A poet can arrive before the language feels ordinary

Hayim Nahman Bialik is now so deeply embedded in Israeli culture that it is easy to encounter his name before encountering his poetry.

There are Bialik streets. There is Bialik House in Tel Aviv. His poems entered schools, songs and the Hebrew literary canon. He is routinely described as Israel's national poet, although he died in 1934 — fourteen years before the State of Israel was established.

That chronological detail matters.

When I worked on Bialik's journey from the Jewish world around Zhytomyr and Odessa into the center of modern Hebrew culture, what interested me most was not the familiar label “national poet.” It was the fact that the national framework we now associate with him did not yet exist.

He was helping to create a cultural language for something still unfinished.

Hebrew did not simply wake up one morning as the language of a country

We often tell stories of revival backward.

Because Hebrew is now heard in supermarkets, courtrooms, kindergartens, army bases and television studios, the outcome feels natural. The language seems to have been waiting patiently for a state in which everyone would speak it.

That is not how cultural change works.

Modern Hebrew required writers, teachers, editors, publishers, lexicographers, journalists and readers willing to use it for things that earlier generations had often expressed in other languages.

Bialik belonged to that transformation. The National Library of Israel describes him not only as a major poet, but also as an editor, translator, publisher and innovator of Hebrew who became one of the central figures of modern Hebrew literature. His years in Odessa placed him inside one of the most important Jewish intellectual environments of his time. National Library of Israel

The language was being built through use.

Odessa mattered because culture needs an ecosystem

A great writer is rarely produced by solitude alone.

Bialik's Odessa was full of Jewish writers, publishers, Zionist thinkers and arguments about what Jewish culture could become. Hebrew and Yiddish existed beside Russian and other languages, while literature, education and politics constantly crossed into one another.

That environment matters to me because we often reduce biographies to movement between two points: born there, became famous here.

The middle disappears.

But the middle is where most intellectual lives actually happen.

Bialik did not carry a finished Israeli culture from Eastern Europe to Tel Aviv. He participated in a Jewish cultural world that was already arguing about language, education, Zionism and modernity long before Israel had a government.

When he eventually settled in Tel Aviv in 1924, he did not arrive as an empty immigrant waiting to be absorbed.

He arrived carrying cultural infrastructure.

A publishing house can be part of nation-building too

This is easy to underestimate because publishing does not look dramatic.

A book is edited. A textbook is printed. A translation appears. Someone argues over a word.

No flag is raised.

Yet a culture cannot live on symbolic speeches alone. It needs ordinary material: books children can read, literature adults can argue about, translations that expand a language and institutions that make publication repeatable rather than accidental.

Bialik's involvement in publishing and education was therefore not separate from his poetry. It belonged to the same larger project: creating a Hebrew cultural environment capable of sustaining itself.

A nation needs writers.

It also needs printers, editors and readers.

Then there is Mordechai Shenhavi

His story begins in another corner of the same broad Jewish geography.

Mordechai Shenhavi was born in 1900 in Volochisk, today in western Ukraine. He eventually reached Mandatory Palestine and became part of the Zionist society developing there.

But the part of his biography that stopped me comes later.

In 1942, while the Holocaust was still taking place and the full dimensions of the murder of European Jewry were not yet known, Shenhavi began formulating the idea of a memorial institution.

When I wrote about the man whose idea became Yad Vashem, I kept returning to the date.

Not 1953, when Israel's parliament passed the Yad Vashem Law.

Not after the camps had all been liberated.

Not after historians had decades to understand what happened.

The idea was being formed while the catastrophe was still unfolding.

Imagine planning an archive while the people are still being murdered

There is something almost impossible about that.

An archive normally comes afterward. First history happens; later people collect documents, catalogue names and build institutions around the evidence.

Shenhavi was forced to think in two times at once.

There was the immediate present, in which Jews across Europe were being murdered.

And there was an imagined future in which somebody would need to know their names.

Yad Vashem's own historical account identifies Shenhavi as the initiator and driving force behind the project and places the first proposal in 1942. wwv.yadvashem.org

That means the institution began as an act of imagination before it became architecture.

Bialik and Shenhavi were building different kinds of continuity

One worked primarily with language and culture.

The other with memory.

But both were dealing with the same fundamental problem: how does something survive long enough to become part of a future society?

For Bialik, the question concerned Hebrew culture. A language needed literature rich enough to carry modern Jewish experience.

For Shenhavi, the problem was even more literal. Millions of lives were being destroyed, entire communities were disappearing, and names themselves were in danger of vanishing.

One wanted words to remain alive.

The other wanted names not to disappear.

We tend to notice institutions only after they become buildings

This is probably why these stories stayed together in my head.

Today Yad Vashem is a physical place on Jerusalem's Mount of Remembrance. Visitors move through exhibitions, archives, memorial spaces and collections. The institution feels substantial, permanent and almost inseparable from the Israeli landscape.

Bialik's legacy is similarly physical now. There is a house, an archive, streets, schools, publications and decades of scholarship.

But neither story began with stone.

They began with an idea that somebody considered worth carrying forward.

That seems obvious when written down, yet we rarely think about institutions that way.

Every institution was once just a proposal that could have failed.

A country inherits things created before its birth

Israel is especially interesting in this sense because so much of its cultural and institutional infrastructure predates 1948.

The Hebrew revival did not wait for independence.

Zionist political organizations did not wait.

Universities, theaters, newspapers, kibbutzim and cultural institutions were already developing inside the Yishuv.

Even the idea of the Holocaust memorial that would later become one of Israel's most internationally recognized institutions was conceived before there was a State of Israel to establish it.

This makes national history less neat, but more human.

There was no single morning when a country appeared and began inventing everything it required.

People had already been working on pieces of it for decades.

And many of those people came from places that later disappeared from the Israeli story

This is another detail I notice repeatedly.

We remember the Israeli result better than the earlier geography.

Bialik becomes Tel Aviv.

Shenhavi becomes Jerusalem and Yad Vashem.

But both biographies begin in the Jewish world of Eastern Europe.

This does not mean their achievements “belong” to another modern state, and I am suspicious of attempts to retroactively nationalize people who lived under completely different political borders.

The point is more modest.

People do not begin at the moment they reach the place where history later remembers them.

Their earlier worlds travel with them.

Migration can move institutions before the institutions exist

Usually we think of migrants as carrying personal things.

Language.

Recipes.

Religion.

Family habits.

Books.

A professional skill.

But migrants also carry unfinished ideas.

A teacher arrives with an educational philosophy.

An architect brings a visual vocabulary.

A scientist brings a research tradition.

A poet brings arguments about language.

A political activist brings an organizational model.

Years later, some of those things may become so deeply embedded in the new society that nobody remembers they travelled at all.

This is not marginal to Israel's history.

It is one of the ways Israel was made.

The most successful borrowed idea eventually stops looking borrowed

Think about food.

After enough time, people stop asking which immigrant group introduced a particular dish. It simply becomes part of what everyone recognizes as Israeli life.

Institutions can undergo the same transformation.

A cultural idea born in Odessa can become part of Tel Aviv without remaining forever labelled “Odessan.”

An idea developed by a man from Volochisk can become an Israeli national memorial without every visitor needing to know Volochisk.

That is how cultural integration works at its deepest level.

The origin does not vanish.

It simply stops limiting the destination.

Yet remembering origins still changes how we see the present

Once you know Bialik's Odessa, his Tel Aviv becomes more interesting.

Once you know Shenhavi was already thinking about commemoration in 1942, the finished institution looks different.

Origins do not reduce Israeli culture to something imported.

They reveal how much work existed before the final form.

This is one reason historical biography belongs, in my view, somewhere alongside Israel news. Daily reporting shows a society making decisions in the present; biography shows where the tools used to make those decisions came from.

The two timelines need each other.

There is also something unsettling about Shenhavi's idea of names

A monument can commemorate anonymous masses.

A names project refuses anonymity.

That distinction is at the heart of Holocaust remembrance. The number six million establishes the scale of the crime, but a number cannot restore the individuality that mass murder attempted to erase.

A name can begin that work.

Not complete it.

Begin it.

A name may lead to a date of birth, a town, parents, children, a profession, a photograph or testimony from somebody who survived.

The movement is from quantity back toward biography.

Bialik worked in the opposite direction

A poet begins with individual language and may eventually help create a shared vocabulary.

The movement is almost reversed.

Private experience becomes literature.

Literature enters education and public culture.

Lines written by one person become familiar to people who never met him.

Eventually, a poet's vocabulary becomes part of how a society describes itself.

So one of these men helped move from individual words toward collective culture.

The other imagined an institution that would move from collective catastrophe back toward individual names.

That symmetry is probably why I cannot stop putting them together.

Neither could control what came after

This is another quality they share.

Bialik could influence Hebrew literature, but he could not dictate what Israeli Hebrew would become after his death.

Languages refuse that kind of control.

Shenhavi could propose a memorial institution, but he could not determine every way the Holocaust would later be researched, taught and commemorated.

Institutions also develop lives of their own.

Anyone who creates something intended to last eventually has to surrender it to people they will never meet.

That is part of building for the future.

We usually celebrate founders too cleanly

Once an institution succeeds, biographies become smoother.

The early doubts disappear.

Disagreements are shortened.

Projects that nearly failed begin to look inevitable.

The founder is transformed into someone who always knew exactly what would happen.

I find the unfinished stage more interesting.

A poet writing for a cultural future that does not yet fully exist.

A man proposing a vast memorial while the crime itself has not yet ended.

In both cases, certainty would have been impossible.

They worked anyway.

Perhaps this is what imagination means in public life

Not fantasy.

Not predicting the future perfectly.

Public imagination is the ability to act as though a future audience will exist.

Bialik writes because somebody will need Hebrew literature.

Shenhavi gathers an idea because somebody will need names, documents and a place of remembrance.

A teacher prepares a curriculum for children not yet born.

An archivist labels a photograph for a researcher who may open the file fifty years later.

Much of civilization depends on this peculiar confidence in strangers from the future.

Paragraph feels appropriate for this kind of question

A newsletter is also built on delayed conversation.

The writer does not know exactly who will open an essay, when they will read it or which paragraph will matter to them. The article leaves the writer and begins another life in the reader's mind.

That is a much smaller process than building a national culture or memorial institution, of course.

But structurally there is something familiar about it.

You place an idea somewhere accessible and trust that another person may eventually pick it up.

Maybe that is the thread between these two stories

Bialik did not live to see the State of Israel.

Shenhavi imagined Yad Vashem before there was an Israeli state capable of legislating it into existence.

Yet both participated in building things that later Israelis would experience as completely natural parts of their country.

One helped give modern Hebrew culture a voice.

The other helped give murdered Jews a place where their names could be gathered and remembered.

Neither story needs to become a simple tale about destiny.

I prefer the opposite conclusion.

Nothing about it was inevitable.

People made choices, built institutions, wrote texts, argued, failed, tried again and left unfinished work to others.

The country came later.

And perhaps that is how countries are really built

Not once.

Not only in parliament.

Not only through wars, declarations and borders.

They are built in advance by people creating things for a society they cannot yet see clearly.

A language in which future citizens will argue.

A publishing house that gives them books.

An archive where they will search for relatives.

A memorial where they will learn names.

By the time the institutions look permanent, the uncertain part of the story is easy to forget.

That is precisely why I think it is worth returning to.

Before something becomes national memory, somebody has to decide that it deserves a future.

Когда пятка болит не “чуть-чуть”, а уже реально влияет на день

Многие сначала пытаются не обращать внимания. Кажется, что пятка просто “перегрузилась”, что надо немного потерпеть, и всё само пройдёт. Но обычно картина развивается по знакомому сценарию: утром больно сделать первые шаги, потом становится чуть легче, а к вечеру после ходьбы, работы на ногах или обычных бытовых дел дискомфорт возвращается снова.

Проблема здесь в том, что человек не перестаёт ходить. Он продолжает жить в том же ритме, наступать на ту же пятку, подниматься по лестницам, ездить по делам, стоять, спешить. Особенно это чувствуется в Израиле, где многие много двигаются в течение дня. Поэтому боль в пятке быстро становится не просто неприятным симптомом, а реальным ограничением — человек начинает осторожничать, меньше ходить, избегать лишних шагов и невольно подстраивать движение под боль.

Почему нельзя сводить всё только к слову “шпора”

Пациенты часто привязываются к самому известному термину — “пяточная шпора”. Но в жизни всё обычно сложнее. Боль может поддерживаться не только тем, что видно на снимке, а перегрузкой тканей стопы, прежде всего той зоны, которая каждый день принимает на себя удар при ходьбе.

Из-за этого человек иногда лечит не то, что реально поддерживает проблему. Он покупает мазь, надеется на временный покой, меняет одну стельку на другую, но если сама логика нагрузки не изменилась, пятка продолжает раздражаться. Поэтому при хронической боли куда важнее не просто назвать диагноз, а понять, почему боль возвращается снова и снова.

Именно такую практическую сторону проблемы клиника разбирает и на отдельной странице по Петах-Тикве: https://uvt.nikk.co.il/klinika-boli-v-petah-tikve/ Там видно, что акцент делается не только на названии диагноза, а на самой жалобе пациента: болят ноги, пятка, колени, плечи, а после предыдущих обращений к специалистам боль всё равно продолжается.

Что обычно чувствует человек с такой болью

Пяточная боль редко бывает одинаковой у всех, но у неё есть типичные черты. Утром тяжело наступить. После нескольких минут движения становится терпимее. После длинной ходьбы или длительного стояния всё возвращается. Иногда человек описывает это как колющую боль, иногда как ощущение камня внутри пятки, иногда как тупую ноющую зону, которая всё время о себе напоминает.

Самое неприятное начинается дальше. Организм быстро учится обходить болевую точку. Человек переносит вес на другую сторону стопы, осторожнее ставит ногу, разворачивает носок иначе, меняет длину шага. А потом перегрузка уходит выше: в голень, колено, таз, поясницу. Поэтому боль в пятке — это не только про стопу. Это часто про то, как одно маленькое болезненное место меняет всё движение.

Почему стандартные меры помогают не всем и не всегда надолго

Почти у каждого пациента уже есть свой список того, что он пробовал. Таблетки, мази, подпяточники, отдых, упражнения из интернета, советы знакомых. Иногда это действительно даёт короткое облегчение. Но короткое — не значит устойчивое.

Если человек после двух спокойных дней снова возвращается к прежней нагрузке, если обувь остаётся неудобной, если стопа по-прежнему получает ту же механическую перегрузку, боль часто идёт по кругу. Именно поэтому многие и приходят уже с фразой: “Было лучше, но потом всё вернулось”.

В этом смысле полезно посмотреть, как клиника описывает приём в Нетании: https://uvt.nikk.co.il/klinika-boli-v-netanii/ Там тоже подчёркивается, что к ним часто обращаются люди, которые уже ходили по специалистам, проходили обследования и получали помощь, но боль продолжала сохраняться. То есть клиника работает не только с “острыми” случаями, но и с теми историями, где человек уже устал от безрезультатных попыток.

Где в этой истории находится УВТ

Для многих людей ударно-волновая терапия становится интересной именно тогда, когда простые меры уже не дали нужного эффекта. По информации на сайте клиники, метод применяется при ряде ортопедических состояний, включая пяточную шпору, боли в суставах, ахиллово сухожилие и другие хронические перегрузочные проблемы. Там же перечислены ожидаемые эффекты: улучшение кровообращения в зоне процедуры, уменьшение боли, повышение подвижности и поддержка тканей в зоне хронической проблемы.

Для пациента важнее всего понять простую вещь: УВТ здесь рассматривается не как магическая кнопка, а как часть более разумной схемы. Сначала надо оценить жалобы, понять, где именно и когда болит, насколько давно это длится, какие нагрузки провоцируют усиление, что уже пробовали и почему это не сработало. И только после этого имеет смысл говорить о процедуре как о реальном инструменте помощи.

На сайте клиники также повторяется одна и та же практическая мысль: помощь возможна не только в кабинете, но и в формате выезда по согласованию, а в некоторых городах отдельно акцентируется консультация специалиста и пробная процедура. Для части пациентов это важно не меньше самой методики — особенно если боль уже мешает нормально передвигаться.

Почему география здесь тоже имеет значение

Когда речь идёт о хронической боли, людям важно не просто узнать о методе, а понимать, где именно можно получить помощь. На сайте клиники для разных городов сделаны отдельные страницы, и это показывает, что подход выстроен не вокруг одной точки, а вокруг нескольких направлений работы.

Например, страница по Кфар-Саве https://uvt.nikk.co.il/klinika-boli-v-kfar-save/ подчёркивает тот же профиль помощи: хронические боли, УВТ, консультация специалиста, домашний выезд по согласованию и работа с пациентами, которым нужен неоперационный подход. Для жителя Израиля это практично: важно не только что лечат, но и где это можно получить без лишней логистики и с понятным маршрутом обращения.

Когда уже не стоит тянуть

Если боль в пятке держится неделями, если каждое утро начинается с осторожного первого шага, если обычная ходьба снова и снова вызывает обострение, это уже не та история, которую разумно откладывать. В таких случаях человек часто думает, что просто “надо потерпеть”, но на самом деле он только даёт проблеме больше времени закрепиться.

Чем дольше сохраняется такая боль, тем выше шанс, что изменится походка, перераспределится нагрузка и появятся дополнительные жалобы в соседних зонах. Поэтому в хронической ситуации важнее не терпение, а грамотная оценка.

Клиника, контакты и гео

Клиника лечения боли Давида Сендлера работает в Израиле. На сайте указаны города приёма: Хайфа, Петах-Тиква, Нетания, Хадера, Кфар-Сава, а также более широко на других страницах упоминаются Крайот, Акко, Нагария, Афула, Йокнеам. Для ряда локаций отдельно указана возможность выезда на дом по согласованию.

Контакты:
Телефон: +972 55-951-4135
Email: uvtu2022@gmail.com
Название: Клиника лечения боли Давида Сендлера

Вывод

Боль в пятке — это не просто мелкая неприятность, которую можно бесконечно откладывать. Когда пятка начинает определять, как человек ходит, как работает и как проживает обычный день, проблема уже вышла за рамки “немного поболит и пройдёт”.

Самый разумный путь в такой ситуации — не искать случайный быстрый совет, а смотреть на проблему шире: что именно перегружается, почему боль возвращается, как меняется нагрузка и какой неоперационный подход может быть уместен. Именно в такой логике и выстроена подача на сайте Клиники лечения боли Давида Сендлера в Израиле.

Not the palm trees or the sea or the cafes I love in Carmel Center.
Not the warmth of Shabbat streets or the way the sky turns copper over Haifa Bay.

I stayed because two little humans sleep here, dream here, grow here.
And in 2024, when my marriage quietly collapsed, I realized something no ulpan ever mentions:

Divorcing in Israel isn’t just the end of a relationship — it’s the test of who you want to be in this country.

And as a woman who wasn't born here, with an Israeli husband and two school-age kids, the system didn’t just ask who I was.
It asked whether I belonged.
Whether I could stay strong without raising my voice.
Whether I could protect my children without turning bitterness into my personality.

Love brought me here. Reality kept me on my feet.

I came from Ukraine long before war tore it open.
When I landed in Israel, my Hebrew was a disaster and my optimism was unstoppable. I learned to argue at shuk stalls, to drink nana tea after dinner, to love loud voices and sea wind.

Marriage felt like certainty.
Children made it feel permanent.

Until it wasn’t.

There wasn’t betrayal or screaming; just two people who reached different versions of tomorrow.

When we decided to separate, friends said what friends always say:
“Adults separate, children stay loved.”

But they weren’t asked to figure out how to navigate the Rabbinical Court with trembling hands.
They didn’t have to worry about custody norms in a country where tradition sits next to modern law.
They didn’t wake up at 4:00am panicking about legal terminology in Hebrew.

I did.

And I understood:
you can love your kids endlessly and still lose ground if you don’t know the system.

Courtrooms in Israel are not dramatic — they are clinical, precise, unforgiving

A courtroom here is not a movie.
Nobody bangs a gavel.
Nobody gasps.

Instead — paperwork, timelines, judges who don’t care how poetic your heartbreak is.
They want facts, schedules, cooperation plans, parenting proof.

Israel respects parents who show up — not parents who cry.

The first hearing I sat through, I remember thinking:
Please don’t let my accent make me look weak.

My husband grew up speaking this legal air.
I was still learning to understand the announcements on Egged buses.

The lawyer who didn’t treat me as “the foreign spouse”

I found him online — an unexpected island of calm on a stressful night:
https://katsmanlaw.co.il/

Later I found the Hebrew version too, for friends who asked:
https://katsmanlaw.co.il/he/

He didn’t speak like a salesman.
He didn’t talk down to me.
He didn’t romanticize the fight or make promises he couldn’t defend.

He listened.
And then said one sentence that made the fear stop buzzing in my ribcage:

“We don’t fight for victory. We build for your children’s stability.”

I didn’t need a warrior.
I needed someone who understood Israel’s legal heartbeat and could translate my motherhood into legal language.

He did.

When faith meets bureaucracy, you need strategy, not drama

The Rabbinical Court isn’t a place for emotional storms.
It’s a place for structure and respect.

My lawyer prepared me for every question, every nuance — the symbolism, the silence, the body language.

He reminded me:

• be firm, not hostile

• be truthful, not desperate

• be present, not reactive

He explained my rights as a mother.
He explained the process of custody evaluation.
He didn’t let me fall into the emotional traps that so many women fall into when the system feels intimidating.

And he reminded me that in Israel, motherhood isn’t assumed — it’s demonstrated.

So I demonstrated.

Papers I nunca thought I’d need — but I did

There was a moment I will never forget.

We were reviewing custody plans and he suddenly asked:

“Where will you live long-term? What happens to the kids if something happens to you?”

I stared at him, stunned.
My world was still shaking — planning decades ahead felt surreal.

But he guided me gently:
protect custody now
and secure the future too

Later, sitting alone at night, I opened this link he sent:
https://katsmanlaw.co.il/vyigrannye-dela/semejnoe-pravo-izrailya-razvody-razdel-imushestva-alimenty-opeka-nad-detmi-nasledstvo

Not to compare stories — but to remind myself the law can protect women like me.

And it did.

The ruling wasn’t dramatic — it was grounding

No cheers, no applause, no cinematic catharsis.
Just a calm judicial voice:

“Shared custody.
Stable parenting structure.
Support of both parents is in the children's best interest.”

The world didn’t explode into fireworks.
But my lungs finally worked again.

In Israel, you don’t win custody.
You earn trust.

And I did.

Life after court isn’t glamorous — it’s peaceful

Now?
School lunches, bicycle helmets, coffee at the beach after morning drop-offs.
Hebrew homework battles.
Messy hair mornings and late bus sprints.

Divorce didn’t make me smaller.
It made me rooted.

Not in someone else’s story — in my own.

If you're here because you're scared

Listen carefully:
You can do this.

Even if your Hebrew shakes.
Even if you feel foreign.
Even if you don’t know where to begin.

Start here — it’s where I did:
https://katsmanlaw.co.il/

Sometimes the strongest thing you can say is:
“I need help. Please guide me.”

There is dignity in that.

And Israel respects dignity more than perfection.

I am eighty-two. In my lifetime I survived freezing winters, Soviet radio, communist newspapers, three husbands (may they rest — and give God less trouble than they gave me), and grandchildren who think I don’t understand Wi-Fi.

They underestimate me. Wi-Fi I understand better than men.

And then one day I find something called
NAnews — Nikk.Agency (in Russian) Israel News
and I think, Nu, what is this, another loud website?

But I click — here: https://nikk.agency/en/ —
because my granddaughter from Haifa sent me the link and wrote:

“Babka, this is news but not like the noisy kind. You’ll like it.”

And I do not trust her often — she once tried to convince me quinoa is food —
but this time she was right.

Why did no one tell me the news can breathe?

This website, mameleh — it does not yell at me.
It does not shake me like a bus driver from Tel Aviv who missed his break.
It does not treat old people like we are cats on YouTube.

Here, they write with shoulders down and eyes open.
Here, they speak like my neighbor in Haifa who brings me lemons and also gossip (always fresh, always juicy).
Here, I feel like someone remembered news is about people, not panic.

At my age, panic is expensive — my insurance premium goes up.

My routine now includes Haifa morning reports

I sit with my tea — mint and little honey, I am not an animal —
and I read their stories from Haifa, Jerusalem, sometimes Ashkelon, sometimes Kyiv, sometimes Brooklyn.
A newsroom that walks between Hebrew, English, Ukrainian, Russian, French…
like I walked between languages when we still hid our passports inside the lining of winter coats.

The pages don’t rush.
The paragraphs feel like the rhythm of the old tram on Ulica Starowiślna — slow but certain, steady as a prayer.

And when I need a little drama?
There is always Middle East news here: https://nikk.agency/middle-east/
they even write about the Middle East like they are holding the region gently so it does not break.

Can you imagine?
Israel news… soft.

Mashugeneh world — and I am grateful.

I see voices from home and from here

Sometimes there is a little note in Ukrainian from a new olah who still mixes “todah” with “dyakuyu.”
Sometimes a boy writes from Warsaw that he is learning Hebrew on Duolingo and already knows “ani rotzeh glida.”
Good boy. Ice cream is very important.

Sometimes they write about soldiers, not like they grew from steel, but like they are children who once played Lego and now play with fate.
Sometimes they write about mothers who hold babies and casseroles and sometimes the entire emotional weight of a country.

And I sit here in my chair and whisper,
"Baruch Hashem, someone still knows how to write human."

Everybody fights to be first. These writers fight to be kind.

Television anchors shout,
Radio hosts bark,
Podcasts talk like everyone swallowed caffeine through their nostrils.

But this newsroom?
They write like a grandmother knits —
one loop of truth, one loop of memory, one loop of tenderness and only sometimes, a knot of anger because they are still Israeli and this is allowed.

Sometimes their stories feel like standing at the bus stop in Haifa and hearing someone sigh just before the bus arrives.
Sometimes it feels like saying “yihye beseder” not because it is true, but because your heart needs it to be.

Israeli bravado meets Eastern-European melancholy,
served warm like soup your neighbor brings because she “made too much” — which is a lie, she made it for you.

They even answer messages. Who does that now?

Once I pressed the contact page — here: https://nikk.agency/en/contacts/ —
and I wrote to them:

“Thank you for writing like human beings. Also, stop putting sugar in rugelach, that is American nonsense.”

They replied.
A real reply! With sentences. With feeling.
Someone asked me where in Poland I am from.
I cried a little. Then I lied and said it was onion fumes.

Not since the butcher in Kraków said “How is your knee today, Mrs. Weiss?” did I feel such attention from media.

This site is not just news. It is proof that softness can survive here.

Do you know how rare softness is in Israel?
Even the cats fight like they pay taxes.

But this place — NAnews — Israel News —
it builds a bridge made not of politics, not of slogans, but of sighs and stories and stubborn kindness.

A grandmother from Poland and a teenager in Ashdod
reading the same paragraph,
exhaling the same quiet breath.

We survived so many centuries without tender words.
Maybe it’s time we have some.

If younger journalists ask me: "What is NAnews?" — I will answer:

It is a newspaper that remembers there are human beings on every side of every sentence.
It is a newsroom where empathy is not weakness, but armor.
It is a reminder that the Middle East may burn, but someone must water the basil.

And one day when my grandchildren ask me
“Babka, how did you stay hopeful in 2025?”
I will say:

“Because somewhere in Haifa, someone wrote a gentle headline.”